Letras Caseras

(photo from flykavoo.com)

It was a pleasant time and my thoughts were mostly good ones, with little time wasted in regret. For these reasons I found myself searching the walls for a pay phone. I had just arrived in Chicago, en route to Seattle by train, and as scheduling goes, I had a layover. I had not seen my father in five years.

I could’ve called him the night before, but I didn’t want to seem eager; I was curious to see him, but not desperate. “Andrew?” I asked upon his answer, even though I knew it was him. I had abandoned the more endearing term dad years before in favor of his first name, but when I heard his voice, like a sad and forgotten old record, I was drenched by a deluge of pity and I offered it up as a gift: “Dad, it’s Stephen.”

“Stephen?” he asked. “Son, are you okay?”

I didn’t answer his question. To answer would’ve been to forgive, and I preferred to keep him at a remorseless distance. “I’m at the station,” I said instead. I was yet to tell him which station, and I was unsure if I should. I had just referred to a stranger as dad and he replied in form. So peculiar, I was puzzled with the sound, like I had been living in a silent world and these were the first words ever heard. They hung before me in alternating images: first I saw a masterwork, beautiful and intricate; then I saw a noose. I studied the sound and allowed myself to feel what I would, and then continued: “I’m at the train station. I’ve got some time. Why don’t you meet me, we can have lunch.”

“Lunch?”

“Yes, dad, lunch.” Again, I called him dad, likea Rembrandt tacked to the gallows.

“Sure, son.” And he called me son, like a van Gogh in the arms of a hangman. “I’ll take a cab. About ten minutes, okay?”

Ten minutes can be lengthened in many ways, all of which were at work that afternoon. I had dismissed his ten-minute arrival as it was heard and doubled his offering; it would take him ten minutes just to find his hat. These minutes, now standing at twenty, would double again through the course of anxiety. I paced between two ornate columns that seemed to support nothing and was struck with the comparison: my father, nothing more than an ornate column, served no purpose, a non-existent man in Chicago, a city I had never visited, never desired to visit, yet he was on his way to meet me for lunch, a lunch that would take an hour at most, and then he’d be on his away. I had phoned a stranger, no different than if had I picked a number at random. Except that he was my father.

When I caught sight of him, I saw something unexpected: he was nervous. His kerchief wiped his brow and he shifted as he walked, his eyes darted left and right.

The other recollections were what one would expect: he had gained weight, lost hair. The lunch was also what one would expect: little said, less eaten. To recall the details now would serve only to tarnish his memory, and I see no reason for that. He was my dad, and for that hour, we sat as father and son. As I walked away he called out, “I’ll see you at Christmas.” Even still, I’ve no idea why he said that.

Foster Trecost started writing in Italy and he’s still writing, but now from Germany. Sometimes he works paying jobs that involve corporate taxes.

aquamarine eternity
white surf dancing
under the roof of summer

Virginie Colline
Source: Shinshi, 2011

Illustration: The Great Wave by Hokusai

Spy the beguiling eye
Of democracy
Entice us to that blazing cave
of shame

Yes, they’ve done it yet again
The sun’s gone round

Now another earth holds up the veil
of counterfeit voices

Festive generals pinch the dreams
Of widows, squaddies, thieves
and black sooted bandits.

Faces of the mob become
nodding ripe plums at brave Oracles.


Then that fertile dove of death
A drone descends in a whisper
feigned conscience
at a remote distance.

Mutual sighs over bodies become howls
Rotten fruit now scatters the streets.

We are lizards in our long crawl
to nobody

lapped up 
on Libyan shores
to the light of
Sanskrit on the metallic dome
of orbital glitz.

And I lay me down.

Come forward the bitter beauty
of cheap wines and tax collectors

But we shall soon return 
to the ebon shores
the shades of Jordan

Cameras carry justice closer.
Witness the times.

Lucien Quincy Senna is a writer, a graduate of Harvard and Oxford University. Her writing has been published in an anthology “Jazz Poems” by Kevin Young, she has featured online in Fictionaut and Kaffe Kathmandu and she is published by Red Lemonade.

Where I’m from
is hard to love.

It’s business friendly
but not very kind.
There isn’t land
but real estate.
There isn’t work
but productivity.
There’s not a city
but a Standard
Metropolitan
Statistical
Area.
The river’s not
a river but
a FEMA map
of flooding probabilities.
Levies neatly
wall the hidden,
channeled water.
You’ll find little
God but a bunch
of big churches.
You’ll find little
Art but some grand
arts facilities.
I’d leave but I’ve
been taught quite well:
the opportunities away
will never measure
up to home.

Our towers sparkle
with merciless sun.

Work by Gary Hardaway has appeared at Gumball Poetry, Manifold, Silkworms, Ink,
Connotation Press, Divine Dirt Quarterly, Cu.ren.cy, and Blue Fifth Review. He currently lives in Plano, Texas and has earned his living as an urban planner and architect.

(Photo “The Architect” belongs to a. mar. illo and is copied fromhttp://allmightys.com/store/shirts/the_architect/index.htm)

This slope broken loose

cracks the way all ice

rises from a single stone

though below the tree line

just her grave

already has a twin

–two mouths, easy to spot

not yet the mountain range

she would sip if it was water

could leave the hollow

the underbrush, mouthful

over mouthful, talk

sit across from you

while her words no longer move

are in the way and colder.

*

Windswept, this radio

broken open with its stations

one on top each other

though what you hear

is its dust, bleeding

the way this rag, half doll

half straw, half dirt

scraping till a darkness

oozes from your fingertips

bent over, garbled

–she couldn’t tell it’s you

from far away, listening for her.

*

The glare this plate thins out

eats the way each star

tells you it’s still alone

though rim to rim you bring

a rain smelling from a narrow road

holding down the Earth

till everything is dirt and she

is sitting at a table, asks you

to hold her hand, childlike, fill it

lets you swallow the afternoon

even she will remember, your lips

circling down in flames and hunger.

*

As if a rope, half bone

half pulled from your chest

the way this dead branch

tells you everything then closes

though the wood won’t burn

–so many things are made from doorways

and she was left inside

with nothing to sit on or a stone

that will fall by itself, broken off

to die alone, whispering goodbye

for two and this dirt not yet

just another hole that weighs too much.

*

You don’t read how weak it was

though this wind torn composition book

steadies its lettering for afternoons

the way beginners wave their arms

making room for the Honor Roll

mixed with stone, not yet the pages

–these dead are used to it: words

put together by a still warm crayon

and you too no longer move

leave them nothing except an after all

in writing and on these sheets

hillsides to fit inside your name

holding it between your fingers, higher

and from the struggling dirt, over and over

making mountains, clocks, emptiness.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com

I have no children to count
time against, a wheel
that flattens grass
burning its rubber wand
across my cheek, and heat

—summers past are filmy

a road when light is
fresh baked tar in which
you leave your imprint

Susan Tepper is an author, poet and editor. Please visit her website www.susantepper.com and peruse her awesome books. Her latest book is called “From the Umberplatzen”.

When I was miranda and my mother Rose, ours was a skinless intimacy.  miranda in Rose’s womb, captured in an essence of love, anger, frustration, fear, the overwhelming stress of Rose’s life heavy syrup that kept the bond between spirit and body weak and loosened.

First drops of syrup, Rose and Harry, newly wed, life in each cell an expression effortlessly unfurling into a song called miranda.

And then, Rose and Harry, newlyweds, unable to cope, Harry laid off, his panic, his disappearance, and a moment of complete despair.

The despair created a pause, the womb and a nascent miranda wondering together—was life, here and now, a beginning or an end?  The future lensed through the present was oppressive.  Further investment seemed statistically unwise.

As miranda flickered, Harry came home, Rose and life optimistic again in that way life does, of blurring perspectives, near capturing far.  Mired in that flash of optimism, miranda continued to grow, her growth muted, the debate stitched inside her cells:  had life been a good decision?

Often, her consciousness lay on top of her skin.  Tenuous beginnings creating a body with little resilience, little recall, life tearing off bits and pieces until there was just the thinning shadow.  With every breath more and more of her mortal body was lost, fat and muscle starving away so that her framework self, the skeleton, protruded and she was her own anatomy lesson.  It made miranda laugh, how it was now, only when her body was moving askance, that she could finally feel it, finally feel that conscious connection which had been so vivid in the womb.

She was like that infant again, enjoying her body the way infants do, with fascination and awe.  Everything new.  The way the fat at the tip of her nose had melted away, leaving two symmetrical dents on either side—she hadn’t known her nose was like that, so full of lovely laziness and fat.  She regretted having ignored her body for so long, that only loss amounted to appreciation.  There was something so magnificent, so alive in feeling every part of the body, skin, organ, bone, the fluctuations of chemistry as each cell strained for more nourishment.  She couldn’t resist constantly touching herself, her leg and that space which was growing more and more wide between the tibia and its partnering muscle (she loved that space), running her fingers up and down the parting hollow again and again just to feel the triangular geometry of such a large bone—her bone, her triangle.  Her body had seemed solid, and she found it absorbing, feeling spaces, sensing that even the body was air and pieces like her soul.

miranda

Her piano was gone.

miranda

She’s been dead for almost five years.  Not that time has much relevance, except in David and his marriage plans.  Between miranda and David, remarriage had been a threat and a joke:  she’d come and haunt him if she didn’t approve.  Inside his dreams miranda waking:

miranda in effortless expression, reviving again and again everything they’d been together.  Daybreak, he struggles free, the effortless expression soured milk which turns his mood ugly.

miranda, floating on the top layers of memory, first his memory, and then their coalescing memory, strands that twist into a dense, dazzling array of events and thoughts which lead again and again back to their last duet together just days before she’d died—

miranda

—he was so beautiful, the way he’d played that night, his fingers remembering everything though he hadn’t touched the piano in more than a year.  She’d been silent as well, too fragile, too weak, unable to lift the cover of the keyboard.  Even in her dreams she wasn’t playing.  But that evening, her daemon had come and compelled her to play, driving her body into cellular exuberance so that she was simply music.  David, coming home from work, heard and saw and felt all that was miranda in possession.  She was at her piano, he at his, the daemon between.

miranda

The daemon and David had been the great loves of her life.  They’d come to her at the same time; she was twenty and the possessions had been startling and sudden, complete.  For a long time, she hadn’t known the difference between the two, had thought the two had been the same.  It was when the two began to cleave that her body began to bleed.  At first slowly, the bleeding a kind of blanching, her hair and moles visibly seeping color.  Her mother thought even miranda’s eyes were losing color.  And then in streams.  Her nose.  Her gums.  Her fingers as she played.  Her life was gluey and metallic—she smelled rust everywhere, the heat of her body Vulcan’s furnace.

It was in losing herself like this that she discovered her body, like her infant self, laughing, dizzy as her spaces grew more and more apart.

miranda

The daemon was with her as she died.

Lying on the hard kitchen tiles, her body suddenly, deliciously cool, she opened her eyes and saw him, across from her, in symmetry with her body, the daemon looking into her eyes, his eyes full of tenderness and empathy.  He was smiling and he seemed amused and she smiled and her smile was so gratifyingly weightless.

miranda

She gazed at her mother and her father and David and everyone around them.  She no longer saw them as bodies but more as hazy fields of energy that flickered memories.  At times it was as if they were mirrors, her self running in glimpses, clear and then warping as the angles collapsed.  At times it was as if they were time machines, entries into her past selves, selves she recognized, but selves too that she had never known existed.

Her selves were most concentrated in her mother and David, but it was because of David she was summoned.  With her thoughts she caressed him; he flicked her caresses away, hate and discomfort the engines of his actions.  Each time she was shocked.

miranda

Their life together looked like snow flakes.

He’d always been so singular in his concentration.  He could play the piano for seven, eight hours at a time, his eyes closed, thoughts on his lips—nothing could disturb him.  Sometimes she’d join him, her piano next to his, their mated German Steinway concert grands singing, and she’d wonder if he was aware:  her presence, her music, the way his music was now changed, the responsiveness, he to her, she to him, their merging.

Wandering inside his mind, she found what his music was, the way it was alive for him.  It was bluer, clearer, anchored in muscle and momentum; hers hued more towards mist, air inside the lungs.  Ribboned along the music she found his first touch of the keyboard, so cold, the first words he’d spoken, how mashed carrots tasted, the whispers of many voices, congratulatory, warning, enticing, loving, envious, threatening; she found his first girlfriend and his second and his third and his fourth, overlapping in time and physique, so faithful he was to that one type of girl and how much she was apart from everything he’d wanted before.  And how easily he was stepping back away from her.

She also found herself, image after image (so different from what she thought she was, to her, to him), the brightest of which that first moment she’d sparked his mind:  she was in one of the practice rooms, playing Schubert’s unfinished sonata in E—she remembered that moment so clearly, the moment her daemon had come—all day she had felt strange, dizzy, as if a flu was bringing her down; her playing especially rough—and then two measures into the Andante movement she was seized by such an extraordinary possession and every cell was music.  The possession stopped suddenly and she laughed and laughed, the tips of possession tuning her laughter, and outside the door, he was laughing too.

It was so startling to see her young self in his mind, inside that practice room, inside her music.  In his mind, she was so beautiful.  So much more beautiful than she had really been.  So much more beautiful than he had thought so at the time.  All those years of playing together, of laughing and fighting, whispering and dreaming had made her young self so stunningly beautiful.  Their love surged through miranda, waves and waves, overfilling, tumbling, until it was his also.  Out of nowhere he would laugh, mystifying others, himself.

So he’d marry again and divorce and remarry and find bits and pieces of happiness—miranda too had been a piece of happiness.

miranda

It was the blood that had exasperated her.  Blood flowing so quick and persistent, thick and rusty.  Her nose bleeds would last hours.  Fatigued and angry, she’d simply lean over the sink and let the blood flow.  She’d been so angry.  At all the blood, oozing now even from her uterus.  At the slowness of pain.

Weak, her thoughts dizzy, she was peeling an apple when the knife slipped and ripped through her palm.  Blood gushed.

Illuminations come at all angles.  She took the knife and in an explosive fit, slashed her wrists, first the left one, near where the blood was already gushing, and then the right.  The rage disappeared.

She remembered again, lying flat on her stomach on the hard kitchen floor, how cool she’d felt, her right cheek touching the tiles.  She remembered this feeling—that her whole self was radiating out, a halo of heat.  She wasn’t alone.  Across from her, also on the floor, a handsome man was looking at her, his lovely eyes full of liquid empathy.  So that was what her daemon looked like.  He seemed amused.  She remembered that warm feeling of being watched and cared for.  And loved.

Remembering this as she thought inside David’s mind, would he now understand and forgive, feel that her last moments were very different from what he had imagined?

miranda

Sometimes they’d play “Golliwog’s Cakewalk”, in fun, trying to match each other perfectly in tempo, note, nuance:  to be one player, one piano, one voice, one heartbeat, a self complete.

Often, as they played duets together, her voice was the one he’d let sing.  Towards her, in music, he gave without thinking.  She’d been so confused when he’d announced that he was leaving his music behind, that he was enrolling in business school.  That was death too.

She was glad he still had his piano.

miranda

The piano.  A magic cabinet.  Compelling her to touch it.  The magic a spell of powerful bewitchment, a spell of transmutation:  the piano and miranda becoming music.  A piano was a soul she could understand.  A piano was a soul who understood her.  Together there was only love and empathy.

It called to her even now.  Through her, he felt it too.  He was lifting the cover, playing single notes, wishing that he wasn’t.  She was becoming more real to him touching the piano, regret edging through him that hers was gone—he’d sold it soon after her cremation.  Sitting down, not intending to play and yet playing.  He was one of those pianists who could perform without a single rehearsal—his touch memory miraculous.

It took a few seconds to recognize what his fingers were playing.  Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B-Flat Major, the Allemande movement.  Such unfurling joy!  The music flying in the air, two ribboned spirits running, catching, running, catching, spirals of embracing exuberance at the hems of ecstasy.  Tumbling, remembering, the body, how exhilarating it was, the pure physicality of music.  Inside the fingertips, the shoulders, the back, the legs, feet on the piano, body and soul in cellular exuberance, coalescing beauty spiraling and spiraling and spiraling, breathing the joy and rapture of being—

miranda

(photo belongs to www.thaithai3.com)

He was a sushi chef, and he would spend hours in their kitchen practicing his knife skills, and the speed with which he can put that there and this in that and so on; and she would see him on the floor most mornings, still wearing that dirty, tattered bandana so his sweat doesn’t mingle with his creations, having fallen asleep, probably after telling himself that he would only rest his eyes on the floor, sometimes even after she hasn’t cleaned it for days, and there would be bits of things on the tiles and between them that you can’t even recognize anymore.

One morning she tapped him awake using her foot adorned with pink, fluffy slippers; and he snorted himself awake, sitting up suddenly. He reached for his wireframe glasses that were somewhere in the vicinity of his person, wore them, looked up, blushed at the sight of her pussy from up her robe, and said: “Good morning. I’m sorry. I was practicing last night. The boss isn’t impressed with my sashimi. He keeps screaming: thinner! thinner! and I want to say: I’ll cut your corpse thin, you Japanese motherfucker! But that won’t be nice, and we’ll have to lose the house.”

“Sell the bed,” she said. “Get a small one. It’s not like the two of us use it. Get a roomba so you don’t get an infection sleeping on the floor.”

“We always have sushi,” she said. “Let’s have eggs.”

 “We have so much sushi here. What do we do with them?”

 “Put them in the fridge.”

 “They’ll go stale.”

 “Throw them away.”

The scandal washed over his face, and the sides of his mouth considered laughing, but failing reciprocation from the face of his lover aborted before it was too late.

“You’re not joking.”

“No, I’m not joking.”

He looked away, walked toward his creations, placed a hand over them, neglecting hygiene, something he also had to work on, and said: “Please don’t make me choose between you and my craft.”

“It’s uncooked fish,” she said. “How can you choose me over uncooked fish? Are you out of your mind?”

He looked at his sushi; and upon seeing this she pulled at the knot of her robe and exposed herself to him, and she stood there in contrapposto, regretting there was no giant clam out of which she could stand, regretting the lack of a wind machine to toss her hair to one side, placing an arm to her breasts and another to her groin.

She got his attention for a moment. Then, he stared back at his babies, fish and other sea creatures, sliced, with rice, alone, carved, dipped in sauce, rolled, and so on. They were so beautiful, he thought, and they were so because of his hands and his work, because of years of practice and toil.

His girlfriend, on the other hand: She had arrived here on Earth with those genes and those features. He used her body for his pleasure, and many nights, especially when they first met, they would indulge in each other’s body with frightening excess; but these sushi, they used him; they needed him to come into being; and regardless of her desire for him, the sushi needed him. It was his duty as a craftsman to never abandon his craft and pass it on, lest it forever disappear.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re having sushi.”

With these words, she began to heave, and after two or three she ran to the sink and vomited a torrent. He shielded his creations, getting some stray splatter all over him. He looked away in disgust, and when he turned to look again, she was staring at him, her hair in disarray, her mouth still stained with puke, her eyes tearing up, breathing like a tired animal. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “I checked last night. I’m pregnant.”

“You can have sushi,” he reassured her. “It’s a myth pregnant women can’t eat sushi.”

With this she began to sob. She ran naked back to their room. Her looked around at the mess, stared at his work, thanked all the higher powers they were still clean, and began arranging them on a platter in the shape of a flower in bloom.

P. Rafael Mercado is a writer from Manila with a degree in literature. His work can also be read at Fictionaut, an online community for writers.

Read more about ConnotationPress.com | Roberto Carlos Garcia - Poetry by connotationpress.com

(Image is property of www.toutlecine.com)

The only men I know are gamblers, alcoholics, deadbeats. I see women on the “A” train with good men in crisp, white oxford shirts, and hairless faces, I see them on street corners, walking through Central Park, riding their bikes as the sun sets: couples in love.

“I’m a sucker for the bad boys,” I tell Ramona.

“A good man deserves a good woman,” she says under her breath.

I can be good. Even if it kills me, I can be good. Better than a social worker. Better than a pre-school teacher. Better than Mother Teresa; I can be a good woman who deserves a good man.

He will worship me, snip off a lock of my hair and keep it in his shirt pocket. He will enjoy my delusions, laugh at my jokes, waltz with my mother, caress my cat’s neck, sleep on his side of the bed.

He’s out there, somewhere among the gamblers, alcoholics, deadbeats.

Gessy Alvarez received her MFA from Columbia University in 2010. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in Letras Caseras and Pank. New stories are forthcoming in Thrice Fiction, Lost In Thought, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Black Heart Magazine, and Camroc Press Review.

cough, moo, the ticking clock — wrenched

inventions of the real — a rolling pin’s rub,

drifts of pipe smoke, doors open then close.

Neutrality is blind. Either I am Jesus,

or I am not. And the dead woman will,

in fact, have a successful birthing —

the child will nurse her breast, will have

fat hands and shoulders, his feet will be soft,

always, even though the land is hard

and the field’s in need of a certain bruising.

Wind over this field has a simple theology:

grasses move this way or they do not move.

I watch from my window, but I prefer standing

in the middle of the field so the world becomes

a great bird, flying into its perfect bird-life.

Sam Rasnake’s work has appeared in OCHO, Big Muddy, > kill author, BLIP: The New Mississippi Review, Wigleaf, Used Furniture Review, FRiGG, Poets / Artists, fwriction : review, nycBigCityLit, MiPOesias, Otoliths, BluePrint Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Metazen, Corium Magazine, The Dead Mule, Emprise Review, Literal Latté, Naugatuck River Review, Connotation Press, Portland Review, Poem, and The Smoking Poet, as well as in the anthologies The Southern Poetry Anthology, Best of the Web 2009 (Dzanc Books), BOXCAR Poetry Review Anthology 2, Dogzplot Flash Fiction 2011, and Lost Children (Lost Children Books).

a name is what you are,

and a name is a wall

between.  one day

let me be earth, so you may be allowed

to say you love me. for now

i am separate. i’m afraid

that’s how i will die, 

and sometimes

when i’m in bed at night, i think,

if i stayed here for two days straight,

no one would notice. my whole life

may be a wondering of why

i am not earth and you are in your home with the lights on.

Ashley Inguanta is a Florida-based writer/photographer. Ashley is the new art director of SmokeLong Quarterly, and her first collection, The Way Home, is forthcoming with Dancing Girl Press. Keep up to date with her publications and travels at ashleyinguanta.com.