Another Dream by Berit Ellingsen

In a crowded place that is only doors and windows, and where people feel the need to come and go all the time, even in their sleep, there’s a wooden house like the ones at the coast, where the ocean takes love bites out of the land and the wind always whispers, only this in the mountains and the light is bright and rarified.

In the only room, with a checkered floor shaped like a circle, there are many tables and chairs. Here, women and men that look like you and me sit typing and drinking coffee. The coffee is black or brown or white, sweet or bitter, decaffeinated or hydrazine grade. Whatever way you like your coffee, the maitre d’ will graciously bring it to you.

In luminous letters that are mostly cosmic space and a tiny bit of matter, the men and women type prose and poetry and love letters and incantations and intentions and analyses and hopes and wishes about each other and the world. The process never ends and everyone can see what they write the moment the keys are pressed, like the thoughts in an infinite and interconnected mind.

[The author, Berit Ellingsen is a Norwegian writer and author of The Empty City.]

MUSIC OF IRELAND by Lucien Quincy Senna

 
you say your heart aches
for the music I make
Mama scented fleurs
a long ocean of flourescent spatter
that grass green clinic
splashed the fragile waters
Admitted me to the drum
calling you Sir
when you declared we’d stay away
a forest of non-decisions
moss, fern, emerald quiet lives
Dundalk
Singing to Bach
his silent nights
Apart we are.

[Photo: Annie Griffiths Belt; Farmer, Dingle, Ireland, carrying his eleventh child. via National Geographic.]

In Memory of Colby Price, Chihuahua (1996-2011)

by Darryl Price

A dog is a being that’s,well,

A dog.  Can that also make him

A person?  Only love can. That’s

What I think.  A life has a sound

It makes, a certain sound like no

Other.  When an animal you

Know dies the house bows its head and

Closes its eyes for awhile.  It

Will open them again eventually.

When an animal

You love leaves the planet all your

Feelings float to the surface like

A bar of soap, easy to spot,

Impossible to push back down.

The old familiar winds pack up

For good, the new cooler ones are

Strangers for now.  Goodbye little

Boy of mine, goodbye old man, my

Imperfect buddy for the short

Run. I’ll miss your cork nose. Your funny

Smile. The last time I took you

For a bath and a toe nail trim

They said you had fallen asleep.

Classic Colby. Enjoy the stars.

Salvation Santa by Susan M Gibb

Jack leaves for work at seven a.m. He gets coffee at the diner on 6th and East Elm. He takes it black with two sugars. It keeps him warm and awake. He cannot afford the prices at the trendy coffee shops and only once did he let someone buy him a latte. He didn’t think it tasted four dollars’ worth.

In front of the diner he sets up his pot and rings his bell and all day watches people rush by him, a Salvation Army Santa. He is a fifty-one year-old former aeronautical engineer but he hasn’t worked as that for almost three years. He had a job at Home Warehouse for nine months until they closed several stores. A few months later they had to give up the house.

A woman drops two quarters into the pot. Ho-ho-ho, Merry Christmas! he says. She smiles as if she had written a check for five hundred dollars. Smug. Her coat is fine camel hair wool and she wears a bright holly green cashmere scarf with matching gloves and hat. He suspects that she’ll be buying a laptop computer for her children for Christmas. She’ll get diamond earrings from her husband, or maybe a large sapphire ring. Claire, he remembered, preferred the pale blue of tanzanite.

He stamps his feet, he is cold, but the cold doesn’t cut into him quite as much anymore. Officer, he calls out, can you watch this for me for a minute? The policeman walks over but he won’t take the bell. Jack puts that on the ground just under the pot. He hurries into the diner, heads for the men’s room and relieves himself. He washes his hands and buys a coffee and buttered hard roll on his way out. Thank you, Officer, he says, and picks up the bell.

Every day three bankers walk by just after noon. They converse as they walk at a brisk pace, weaving around people who aren’t walking as quickly, or who stop to dig into a pocket for change. Each of the bankers looks Jack in the eye, still talking to each other, not missing a step nor a word. None of them ever throws a coin into the pot. Jack holds their stare with his own. You’re all assholes, it says but they don’t seem to care.

Merry Christmas to you too, Santa! says an unbelievably tiny old woman. She bites off a mitten and digs around in her purse to come up with three dollar bills that she drops into the pot. Cold today, she says, pulling the mitten back on over fingers blue not from cold but poor circulation, Jack believes. He smiles at her, a smile a bit warped with shame.

As the afternoon loses its sunshine and the dusk sneaks in with its cold, Jack starts to pack up his gear. It has been a good day. He’s been given two coffees, a hot chocolate, a cup of soup and a rough mental count of about seventy-three dollars in the pot. He sighs and climbs the three flights up to his room at the Y, glad that he can at least now pay the rent.

Fatboy Review 12 Days 2011

Day 1: Tore Renberg

Day 2: Marcus Speh

Day 3: Matjames

Day 4: Lynne Tillman

Day 5: Jonas Mekas

Day 6: Eva Orner

Day 7: Mitchell Kane

Day 8: Katy Darby

Day 9: Suleiman Amanzad

Day 10: John & Tom Turrell

Day 11: Elsa Braekkan Payne

Day 12: Nisrin Boukhari

Woman in Tableaux

[middle]: My Life, chapter 3

           — Vivre sa vie, Jean-Luc Godard

A street, thick-shadowed and mostly empty, with record shop, apartment, cafè, theater, is no real match for innocence.  What she sees on the screen burns to the bone — Jeanne D’Arc in a fit of perfection or grief, not able to bend, not willing to stop, can’t help but question everything she touches, everything she wants — body and soul, body and soul.  She gives herself only to herself, and finds that deliverance, sometimes, is no deliverance at all.  You may believe in lines, but there aren’t any.  Truth is nothing more than spirals of beauty and lust and essence and moment.  Running like mad over the stiff mechanics of all things opposite, she lives simply because she says she lives, her words finding her at last — or should I say “at beginning” — finding her where she has always been.

(Excerpted from: Woman in Tableaux by Sam Rasnake; originally published at UCity Review. Photo: still from “La passion de Jeanne D’Arc”, 1928)

The Number 4

by Christopher Allen

Randall was done with being Randall. He turned out his nightlight and lay face down on his bed. If not Randall, then what? A chunk of boxite? An apple pop-tart? A brilliant flash in the mind of a forgotten poet? An iron pot, the nest of hair in his parents’ shower drain? Love American Style, an electron searching for its mate, a kitchen table, the number four?

At the thought of becoming an even number, the soft blond down on Randall’s arms stiffened. He’d always envied the number four with its symmetry and its squatty complaisance. It had no deviant whims or passions. It was as innocent as a yoga tree pose, and even a kid could count to it.

Yet he’d be merely a number, wouldn’t he? He’d be stripped. Handless, eyeless, mouthless and manless. He’d be a stumpy hunk of fourteen-year-oldlessness—in effect Randalllessness. Then there was the problem of forever being stunted and boxy. Squatty, however, was better than spindly any day. He’d had enough of spindly.

Yet—Randall turned his pillow to the cool side—four-letter words and four-eyed geeks had sullied 4’s reputation. There was always that pop-tart and the forgotten poet’s forgotten thought. But all these options had a use-by date, except maybe Love American Style in syndication. (Would he be the whole series or just one show?) No, the number four was his best bet: it had longevity.

“Or that electron,” he whispered, “searching for its mate. A mate would be nice.”

“Randy?” his mother was calling.

He held his breath. The number four probably wouldn’t reply to a mother it probably wouldn’t have and especially not one who criticized the way he dressed and the “sassy” way he talked and the way he sang Blondie songs with a hairbrush mic.

“Randy?” She was standing at his bedroom door.

The number four would be so easy to understand. For one thing, it would have no gender to question. It would be solid and would never think of ending itself. It wouldn’t even think of thinking! Yet neither would the iron pot or the kitchen table. But did he really want to be in the kitchen that much, scrubbed and scoured by his mother? No, the number four it was. After all, who’s ever told the number four, “You think too much” or “You walk like a girl” or “There’s something not quite right with you”?

“Randall Mason Black!” She was pounding on the door now.

A lipless smile spread over the world where Randall Mason Black no longer lived, where Randall Mason Black no longer fielded feral questions, where Randall Mason Black would never again sing harmonies with Blondie or feel odd in any way. The number four didn’t need to feel anything but boxy, solid and even.  

[Published in: Pure Slush. Photo: The American Girl, Marilyn Monroe by Milton Greene, 1954.]