In Venice, more than four hundred bridges span the canali, water shimmering beneath them
like endless green tulle. You venture across the city, counting—this one stone, this one wrought
-iron, this one some combinazione. (There are always more, the further you walk.) You must
keep track or risk a strange alley nowhere you predict. Today your count is true. A final turn,
and you reach the Ponte di Rialto, on the border between San Polo and San Marco. You step out
onto a slip crowded with gondolas, trembling and chitinous, sleek like roaches. Your aim: to
photograph the wide, white bridge prophesied for ruin since 1591. A photographer—a real
one—commands you “Affrettate! Spostate! Spostate!” Nothing in Venice moves quickly. You
will hurry out of his way in a moment; the bride and groom must have their backdrop. You snap
your picture, wish “Buona fortuna!” to la sposa, her ruffled gown and veil destined to hem itself
with green this close to the waves. Sudden as a comet, she kisses you on both cheeks, whispers
“Mille grazie.” Your shock is short-lived, unlike every structure here; you can’t help but think
you’ve built your own bridge, from wife to wife. You make your way to the entrance of the
seething Rialto, push through the press of bodies to the portico at its center. A flotilla bursts
forth below, tugboats and waterbuses, taxis and flats, emerging like newborns from anxious,
panting mothers. Your glance alights on the bride, still beaming for the camera. Is motherhood
to be her fate, the one bridge you could never cross?
Issues
In the Lizzie Borden Opera
Lizzie goes crazy before she kills.
We watch her moods quick shifts
from dutiful to angry, each a new
idea bursting in her brain,
an epiphany making other facts
and feelings vanish for the moment.
The writer makes it clear our Lizzie
needs a man for some odd reason: jealous
grudge against Sister, father who never
will tolerate her speech, family
that prison her too long in childhood,
because she should have been a man,
or the good mother gone for good.
In opera it takes this much
to move a woman to make patricide.
Not so in life. On Evening News
we watch a face you claim
the saddest you have ever seen.
Certainly her brown hair hangs limp.
We don’t see polished anger or the flat
nothing I’ve seen in the men who kill.
Once more a battered wife has killed
her child. We are supposed to act
surprised; news presents trial as spectacle.
More than once a week, I feel like it,
like killing someone, usually you,
though it could be my mother, father,
the step-something-or-other. That’s in my
family deep, but I suspect, when you stand
waving ultimatums in my face
like pointed fingers, it’s the human part
we want so much to hide. Not a
new idea and some might claim mere rage.
I know it jumps out inevitable
as night, as shit, as rain, as worms.
Must Lizzie’s ax appear suddenly
in her hand? Does the gun have to rise
to your side? What makes anger,
a moment’s rage in the midst of love
turn toward death? In the Lizzie opera
we’re frightened to sympathy, seeing
she has nowhere to hide. I keep trying,
running the same old territory, to work
it out with words. On days like today
when I sit alone in the hot car, fled,
the words seem like the last solace to fail.
When I go back, I expect nothing. More
groans perhaps, your best choice somewhere
between silence, forgetting, and a grudge.
Promise City by the Numbers
Within driving distance
of unincorporated Confidence,
located in the middle
of the bottom of the state,
this Iowa town has a population
a mere fraction of its cemetery:
112 according to the last
census, divided into 49
households and 29 families,
all but 0.9 of whom are the color
of the space between stanzas.
Not much happens in Promise.
Most work. Poverty is work, too.
So is marriage. Birth and death
are the same as everywhere else,
no more remarkable, no less
to grieve. Main Street runs
mundane through it all, offering
Main Street kinds of items:
coffee, supplements, floss
for your teeth. But today,
a church day, the wind is a sip
of sparkling lemonade from the south
at 6 miles per hour, the air a balmy
64 degrees and the humidity is more
like Miami at 93 percent. It’s clear
that spring has come on gopher feet
to the prairie, bringing the time
to restore the blended colors
of the mesic turf with the seeds
of black-eyed susan and smooth
blue aster. Invest in it. Revel.
For the next 90 days, attract
pollinators with blazing star
and showy goldenrod, bring back
independent bison to graze
like mailmen through all kinds
of weather, who will later tunnel
through 9 months of snow drifts
with the determined shovels
of their hooves to find ox-eye,
goat’s rue, and rattlesnake master,
who lead themselves to water
at deep-enough local ponds
that don’t freeze all the way down
to their muddy seats, and give
eco-tours to curious tourists
driving cross-country, allowing
the wealthy to hunt the herds
and feast on meat tasting
of sovereign natures and a place
living wildly up to its name.
–Jen Karetnick
You Can’t Stop the Bees
My Great-aunt Gatha, in her mail-order,
polyester clothes, works in the garden,
without a hair out of place, sings alto in choir,
studies her Sunday school lesson, though she knows
more about the Bible’s verses, maps, history—
and the road to heaven— than anyone who graduated
from Seminary. She has sayings like, “You can’t stop
the bees from flying around your head, but you can
keep them from building a nest.” And she has all
these old stories, like the time her ma bought her
some new doodads called “knee-socks.” So modest,
she put them on and tried and tried to pull
them over her knees until she stretched
the elastic loose. Ma Alice was so mad she spanked
her! Aunt Gatha was the baby of the family,
not expected to live, they put her in a shoe box.
She came into the world weighing 14 pounds;
funny, seeing how slim and trim she is
now. Unable to have children, she determined
it to be God’s will, and refused to adopt. She had
her hands full tending Ma Alice, anyway, and feeding
Uncle Pete’s voracious appetite. His profession was
body repair at the Chevrolet place in town. After
he retired, he had a heart attack, and would
have lived, but a nurse unplugged him when she
insisted he get up and walk… not a good idea
after open heart surgery. He went into a coma
for a long time, while that incompetent
nurse continued to work on his floor! It sure put
a dent in Aunt Gatha’s Christian heart—
one Uncle Pete wasn’t there to smooth out…
I’m sure she has some pretty unchristian thoughts
fly daily around her head, threatening to build
a nest, but, bless her heart, she just keeps right on
shooing them away.
I’m gonna build you a house
with no walls
that don’t also double
as wings. This home
will cut through pollution and hail storms
and chart out secret courses with the bees
on your behalf.
I’m gonna build you a house and you can take it
whenever you get that urge to
go, just go
and take the roof with you. Invite your mama
and your sisters and your aunties and they grand babies
to live in it with you,
in the clouds. There will be enough room
for anyone you love
because you are the daughter of a daughter
who was always on the run
from no one in particular,
just her bones weren’t built
to stay put, a thing
hardwired in her
DNA, some cellular desire,
an echo
of an even greater migration
our kin made not so long ago
and maybe that’s how it got to be
so easy to bear, Section 8 slumlords
who picked up on the scent
of that exodus
racing through our blood.
That’s why
I’m gonna build you a house
and use my tears as bricks;
this house needs to be fire-proof
because right before you were born
the apartment burned down.
And when you were 11
the apartment burned down.
And when you were 13
your mother dreamt
ya’ll needed to move. That Saturday
you packed up everything you owed
and by Sunday, ya’ll were already gone. Come Monday
your classmates rushed over to tell you how sorry they were to learn
your house burned down,
it was all over the news.
That’s why,
I’m gonna build you a house
and no, it won’t be rooted in nothing
but these feathery memories.
For all I know
people who say
home is where the heart is
ain’t never met a heart like yours.
Your home has been in so many places
and I gladly receive them, inheritances that they are
but in this home
I am building,
let this contraption of my heart take you there
wherever there needs to be.
Demeter, Just After the Solstice
My story says that once my daughter leaves,
my heart was filled with grief and I was lost,
a wanderer, a hopeless mess of worry.
But let me tell you this – there’s something sweet
about the sound of silence, how it wafts
through the hallways of this empty house,
how I can hear my own thoughts and my breath,
the sound of winter rustling the dying
leaves outside my bedroom window. Today,
I was awoken by my body’s restful
satisfaction, not the blasting sound
of teenie-bopper music from her bedroom,
the constant rapping of her fingernails
on the keyboard, or her cellphone ringing
at the most ungodly hours. Today,
I didn’t stumble on the thousand pairs
of shoes she always sloughs off from her feet
and leaves wherever they may fall like petals.
Today, there was no wad of umber hair
nestled in the shower drain, but still
those strands remain between the carpet threads,
on her pillowcase and in my mind.
Today, I’m walking naked through the house,
just a towel wrapped around my hair.
I’ll drink a cup of coffee with no hurry –
what’s the rush? There’s nothing I can do
to bring her back, except to wait and let
the seasons have their way with both of us.
In March, she will return a different woman –
we’ll share a bottle of merlot and laugh
about the fleeting seasons, how to find
our pleasures as they thunder past us all.
Predatory Thinking
Trains are perfect vehicles for the act of murder, if you’ll excuse the pun. Agatha Christie knew that trick way back in the ‘30s, and it’s still true. They come and go, with people boarding and alighting at every stop. By the time the body is discovered, you can be on your way to the other side of the country. And especially on this island of the old Empire, people are so loathe to disturb a sleeper that they’ll leave them alone until the end of the line, and maybe not even then. Corpses ride around on the Tube for hours.
I remember a time, not too long ago, when I was sitting in a train carriage opposite a young white guy. He was only dressed in a thin yellow t-shirt and skinny stonewashed jeans despite the November chill, and looked around eighteen. His eyes were closed and his mouth ajar, but his chest did not rise or fall. Some people appear lifeless in slumber – I bet you’ve heard about people like that, or even sleep beside one of them every night, your fingers feeling for a pulse at four a.m. to make sure you’re not in bed with the wrong kind of stiff. Anyway, at Victoria everyone stood up to leave but yellow t-shirt didn’t wake. I tapped his ankle with the side of my shoe as I passed him on the way out, but he didn’t move. And he was still there when the train left on its reverse journey. So I just shrugged and carried on with my day. Not my handiwork, not my problem. That’s rule #1: don’t get involved.
My current target is Mr Henry Ragan. I know that he plans to catch the 19:00 from King’s Cross to Edinburgh for a midnight meeting with his mistress. He is scheduled to give the keynote speech at the ScotTech conference the next morning. My client doesn’t want Ragan to reach Edinburgh alive, so he won’t. After trailing him for a few days, I know his routine and its weak points. For example, he likes to run in Hyde Park at 5 a.m. every day except Sunday, when he has a lie-in before visiting his local Anglican to pray for his sins. It would have not been too difficult for a fellow runner, appearing to be in the grip of a painful cramp, to lure him into a fatal trap, but that was only a backup plan. I never can resist the opportunity for a train kill, the twisted exhibitionist in me loves the thought of ending a life in public, with dozens of potential witnesses just inches away.
Ragan’s a big deal in IT – some kind of search algorithm genius – but he’s not your stereotypical geek. He’s a stocky blond, like the current Bond, not bad-looking if you go for that type – I don’t. He has a strong right-hook from his weekly white-collar boxing matches, but I won’t give him the opportunity to use it.
I watch him as he waits for the platform announcement. His hair curls over the collar of his shirt like a boy on his first day at school. He turns his head as if he can feel my gaze on the back of his head. I look back down to my notebook, where I am still trying to finish a portrait in pencil from earlier this morning. The subject is the obese red-haired woman who sat opposite me as I drank my coffee. I retrace the fleshy folds under her chin but struggle to finish her face. I always find noses the hardest to draw.
Finally, the platform number is called and I follow him through the barriers. The train is a standard East Coast service, a yellow-faced snake of a train. Henry boards the third carriage, in the first class section. I approach him as he slides his trolley case into the luggage rack and feign a struggle with my own suitcase.
“Let me help you with that,” he says.
“That’s so kind of you,” I gush as he lifts the suitcase and places it beside his.
“It’s my great pleasure,” he says, “But what have you got in there, a dead body?” He holds his back for a second as if injured, then moves his hands back to his hips. No, just a few bricks for a touch of realism.
“Do I look like a murderer to you?” I ask, while mirroring his hands-on-hips position. A handy short cut to establish rapport with the target. I giggle, pout, and then shake my glossy locks at him. Both his wife and mistress are slim, horsey brunettes, so I’ve mimicked that look.
“Perhaps you’re an international assassin, sent to kill 007,” he says in a Sean Connery accent. I chortle, still in character, and then squeeze past him to my seat. I feel his gaze on my bum as I walk away, but I don’t look back.
They call me the “Black Chameleon”, those who hire me or simply know of me. Though in reality, chameleons turn black when they’re enraged, stressed or dead, and I try to avoid each of those situations as much as I can.
My family emblem is a jewelled chameleon in a rainforest shade, tongue outstretched to catch her prey. I wear it on a pendant hanging from a leather chain around my neck. Chameleons are fascinating creatures, smart yet emotional. I often prefer their company to humans, who are often emotional but not so smart. My family has dozens of the lizards in our garden at home. Not as pets, but as welcome visitors. They often don’t like being handled, but it is enough to stay close and watch the creature watching me. Its colour changing as it stops fearing me.
To hire me you have to post a fake advert in the “Rush Hour Crush” column of the Metro newspaper. You know the kind of thing:
To the stunning blonde
reading Harry Potter at
Stockwell on the Northern
line, 8am on Wednesday.
You’ve already put a spell
on me.
Muggle in the Red Hoodie
Is it wrong to use this forum for murder? I think not, as the column itself is sleazy, just a public outpouring of belated lust. Most of those lonely hearts will be married folk, who only wish they could call on someone like me to fix their situation.
There are certain details that must be included in the advert to draw my notice. I could tell you more, but I’m not touting for new business here, and a girl must be careful. That’s rule #2, if you’re counting. I bet you won’t read the Metro in the same way again now, will you? But you won’t be able to figure out which ads are for me – my system is too good.
My clients are usually rival CEOs, greedy business partners and the occasional mafia upstart. Not the nicest of people, I admit, but the work pays well and I’m very good at it. You could even say that I’m uniquely qualified for this position, as you’ll discover later.
I perform my usual scan of my surroundings. Being more spacious than the standard carriages, first class makes my job easier. I find my seat quickly but pass it in order to take an inventory of the nearby seats. I check the seat reservation cards above each seat – a few are going all the way to Edinburgh, but several will alight at York, the train’s first stop, in just under two hours. Plenty of time to complete the job and leave. That’s my third rule: don’t dally once it’s done. It shouldn’t need to be said, but there is a part of me that wants to stay and witness the discovery of the body, hear the screams and inhale the panic of that moment. But then, there’s always a chance of being questioned by police, which is not worth the fun of sticking around. I can fool the average person, but police officers are trained to sense those who don’t belong, in spite of initial impressions.
By now you’re probably wondering about the train’s CCTV. Aren’t I worried about being caught on camera? No, because I use the same technique as a chameleon hiding from a snake in the red grass. The snake slithers past but doesn’t see its silent, still prey mere inches away amidst all the spears of red.
My seat is in a row of rear-facing singles beside the window, whilst Henry has booked a pair of seats on the other side of the carriage facing the opposite direction. He leaves his laptop case on the window seat and sits by the aisle. I return to my seat, take out a book and pretend not to see him, kicking off my heels and crossing my legs as he watches.
“Well, hello again,” he says. “It’s like fate herself is conspiring to put us together.” I nod, then open my book to the first page.
“Predatory Thinking,” he reads out my book’s title. “Good choice, are you in advertising?”
“No, I’m starting up a search optimisation company, but there’s a lot of competition out there.”
“Naughty fate strikes again.” He laughs. “I’ve got some experience in that field. Join me and we could chat about your ideas.”
“Isn’t that seat reserved for someone?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.
“Just for me. I always book two seats on the train so I don’t get disturbed.”
“`I see.”
“So, why don’t you come and sit with me?”
“Well,” I draw out the moment, slipping the tip of my tongue just past my lips. “I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”
“Angel, you’ve done that already. You might as well finish the job.” The train’s motion jolts us both as it speeds out of the station.
After giving some useful tips on my fictional start-up, Henry becomes predictably hands on. He’s keen to get me into the loos for a “private conversation”. It’s almost too easy.
“You really turn me on,” he whispers in my ear, his palm skimming the top of my thighs. I gently slide his hand back down to my knee.
“I can’t do this,” I say. “I have a boyfriend.”
“I have a wife,” he says. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them, or us.”
An elderly woman in the row behind us is tuned into our exchange, watching our reflection in the window. I decide to wait until she goes to the toilet and endure his company for a few moments longer. One body can be explained as natural causes, two bodies attract attention. That’s not an official rule, by the way, just a general principle. It doesn’t take long – thank heaven for the drinks trolley – before she rises from her seat and makes her way towards the vacant toilet. I watch her progress through the swaying carriage, the delicate balancing on arthritic knees and the strain of each step on her swollen ankles. I imagine myself making those movements.
A ticket inspector reaches the start of the carriage and begins to check tickets. His navy uniform hangs off his gaunt figure. He’s youngish, about twenty-five. Muddy-brown hair slips out from under his cap.
“What are you looking at, Angel?”
“Nothing really.” I turn back to Henry and smile. “The inspector’s coming, that’s all.”
The inspector reaches us within a couple of minutes. He studies our tickets more than our faces, and barely looks at Henry. I begin to relax, until I remember rule #4, which is also Murphy’s Law.
“Does this train go close to Gretna Green?” Henry asks the man, with a grin.
“Nowhere near, Sir,” he replies. “You’d have to get off at Newcastle then a couple more hours on one of the Northern trains.”
“That’s a shame,” says Henry. “I’ve just met this girl, but I think I’d like to run away with her, like in the olden days.” The inspector gives him a sideward glance.
“Plenty of chapels in Edinburgh, Sir.” He tips his hat to us and before moving away. Damn, now he’ll remember us. That Ragan was not alone before his death. I will have to change my appearance before I leave the train.
“Why did you do that, Henry?”
“How did you know my name was Henry?” he asks. “I told you I was Harry.”
“Oops.” I giggle. “But how could I not recognise Wired’s Man of the Year?”
“Damn that magazine.” He strokes my cheek. “I thought it would be more romantic to pretend.”
“But you didn’t stray far from your real self,” I say.
“I can’t act,” he says. “Never could. I’ve never wanted to be anyone else. The world is full of psychos, pretending to be what they’re not. It’s all bollocks.” Finally fed up of his company and mindful of the old lady’s imminent return, I decide to act.
“To new beginnings,” I raise my cup of orange juice and nod to his drink. We knock our cups together then pour them down our throats. I watch him swallow the poison before I jab my pencil end into the side of his neck to paralyse him temporarily. It would only take a moment. I feel him shudder against me. He tries to curl his fingers into a fist, to fight it and me, but the opponent within him has already begun its work. “Shh, it’s all going to be okay, Henry.” He tries to speak but only drools on my chest. I wipe his mouth. “Carol sends her love, by the way. Isn’t that nice of her?”
It doesn’t take long for his body to give in. My people have used the seeds of the Tangena tree for hundreds of years, for murder, suicide and executions. Accused criminals were tested through the Tangena trial by kings and queens, and their innocence or guilt decided by its outcome. Ragan is not the first person that I’ve found guilty through this method – my targets are always guilty of something. Although an ancient method, it’s a perfect murder weapon as the victim only appears to have suffered a massive heart attack and the poison is virtually undetectable after death.
I gently untangle him from my embrace and wrap his coat around him. His head droops a little. I text Carol on Henry’s iPhone. Our agreed signal is simply a phrase that his wife has wanted to hear him say for years, “Love you.” Then I wipe my fingerprints away with my sleeve, stand up and walk away.
I pass the old lady on her way back to her seat. We avoid each other’s gaze. She would be getting off in York in a few minutes, so shouldn’t become too concerned about her sleeping neighbour and his missing companion. I pretend to turn left towards the toilet as the carriage door slides shut behind me. Then I collect my trolley from the rack and carry on through the train until I reach the final carriage.
I can barely fit the trolley into the tiny toilet. The train does a fast switch onto a new line and I put my hand out to avoid slamming my head into the hand dryer. I keep my hand there and look at myself in the mirror: the green eyes, slim nose, wide mouth, the low-cut top, skinny jeans and high-heeled feet. What now? Who now? My blood pulse starts to race, so I breathe deeply and concentrate. I scrape the pad of my index finger across the blade of my teeth, then swipe the fresh ichor on the chameleon pendant, staining its green surface a deep rust.
I always start at the top. The glossy mane and fringe shrink into short wiry curls. The dimples disappear and the chin rounds. The hairline retreats from the face, showing more of the forehead. Green irises turn brown, the new shade spreading outwards from the pupil. I recall a button nose from my sketchbook, reproduce it and the face is nearly complete. A scattering of wrinkles ages the face to the mid-sixties. At the same time, the body fills out and ages appropriately, the flat stomach rounding, the breasts drooping. I swap the clothes to a navy blue skirt suit and flat shoes. Then I adjust the colouring, darkening the skin to a deep mahogany in an instant. I contract the trolley case into its original doll-sized form and pop it back into my handbag, which I’ve also transformed to match my new mature persona. I admire this new form for a moment, and practice the old woman’s pained walk. Then I say a quick prayer of thanks to the gods of change, before emerging from the toilet.
“Ticket, please,” says the inspector, standing outside. I almost strike him. He steps back and frowns as if he can sense the concealed threat from this harmless-looking woman. I hand him my stamped ticket. “I must have seen you before, sorry,” he says, smacking his temple lightly, before shuffling back into the carriage.
The loudspeaker erupts, with an ascending series of beeps. “The train is now approaching York,” says a cheerful female voice. “York will be our next station stop. Please ensure you have all your personal belongings if alighting at York. Thank you.”
The train slows to a halt at York. I leave the train and watch as the elderly woman meets a younger version of herself just beyond the ticket barriers. Then I follow the signs to the London-bound platform and buy a coffee at the platform café.
I look at the advert from this morning’s Metro again. A job in Brussels. While I wait for the next train back to King’s Cross, I book a seat on the next Eurostar. Any excuse to practice my French. That’s not a rule, but it should be.
Phoenix : Tammy Bendetti
Tammy Bendetti lives, works, and drinks too much coffee on Colorado’s Western Slope with her husband and two small daughters. She completed a poetry workshop with Wyatt Prunty at Sewanee: The University of the South, and received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Colorado Mesa University. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Calliope and Grand Valley Magazine, and is forthcoming from Right Hand Pointing. She is currently building a secret room under her stairs but does not plan to keep any wizards in it.
Who is your favorite female identifying written character and why?
Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie from Their Eyes Were Watching God is a force of nature. Just to keep moving after so much hurt and disappointment is admirable. But instead of merely surviving, she keeps shining out love. She’s so full of courage and a willingness to feel everything all the way down to her bones. It’s no wonder Hurston had Tea Cake swallowed by a hurricane, just to give balance. Janie’s heart was swallowing her whole all along.
What literary work by a female identifying writer had the most effect on you as a writer and/or person?
My father used to read to me and my brothers every single night. He didn’t stick to kids’ books, either. We read Lord of the Rings with a dictionary open on the coffee table! When I was seven, we read Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I found it so comforting to think that I could be strange, I could be passionate, I could be very alone at times, and all that could ultimately be an advantage to me. I was an odd duck as a child, and spent a lot of time by myself. If I’d felt compelled to assimilate, I might have lost my voice.
How did your poem Grundy County come about?
For the first three years of college I attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. It’s like a little heaven. Lush green forest and a handful of graceful stone buildings. The teachers are brilliant, the students are engaged, and the sense of community is strong. But it’s a heaven for the wealthy, and I have the debt to prove it. Just next door, Grundy County is one of the poorest in the nation. It used to be home to the Chickasaw and then the Cherokee, which were two of the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes,” “civilized” meaning they cooperated with the U.S. government. The U.S. forced them out, anyway, by the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Native Americans, Europeans, the rich and the poor have been fighting over this bit of land for centuries. All the while, weeds and trees and flowers have been strangling each other for a piece of the same rich soil. One day, after having lived in Colorado for several years, I was washing dishes and looking across the street to the irrigation ditch. The neighbors’ rosebushes were practically climbing through the fence to get to it, and I finally knew what to say about Tennessee.
What has been your greatest writing life moment so far?
I’m going to cheat and tell you about two moments, because they seem related. An old friend and mentor of mine, Marilyn, is almost always the first to read my poems. She’s super supportive and genuinely enjoys them. I wrote a poem called “In October” last year, and sent it to her. She asked me, “How did you know just exactly how I was feeling today?” In another exchange, she told me she’d shared a few of the poems with someone I don’t know, and that woman was inspired to start writing again after a long hiatus. I’m not likely to become famous. There will always be someone ahead of me. But to make even one person feel seen and important is so gratifying.
What is your favorite piece by another writer from Issue Deux and why?
My favorite has changed at least three times since the issue came out. At first it was “America as a Room,” by Cassandra de Alba, because it feels true and original. Then Amber Atiya’s “everytime I speak, my gums bleed” punched me in the gut. But for now my favorite is “Almost Someone Coming Home.” Alexandra Smyth is some kind of magician. She’s put a whole lifetime in eighteen soft-spoken lines.
What are you currently working on?
I’m trying to find a publisher for a children’s book I’ve written. I lived on an island when I was very small, and I’ve always found the ocean’s rhythm to be the best lullaby. When my first child was born, I knew I wanted to write about it. Children’s book publishing is completely new territory for me! There are things like illustration to consider; I’m an artist, but I’m not sure if my style is the best fit for the story, oddly enough. Plus, how are people going to react if the book does get published, and I continue to swear and write about sex in my poems? People in this country like to pretend that maternal instincts and sexuality are completely antithetical. They DO realize how babies are made, right?
Who/what is your favorite Alice/Alyss?
I really love Alice from Resident Evil. She is saving the world from her own mistakes. And she makes me feel brave.
At six I wanted to marry Godzilla
He was tall, strong, warped
by radiation into crankiness and behavior
that proved ultimately self-destructive.
When he stalked back into the ocean, I cried.
It isn’t just radiation
that warps a man to the shape of anger
and sets his feet down hard on the floor.
Or maybe we just haven’t properly categorized
guilt as radioactive. Smothered anger
as glow-in-the-dark. Nuclear fusion as a byproduct of grief.
Some nights all is well. We slurp up
our giant bowls of noodles and watch game shows.
We read Gengi and Shonagon to each other,
sip tea, comb our sand gardens.
Other nights: tight lips. Anger
like the rush of scalding water
from hidden underwater vents.
Rending of rice paper screens,
shredding the tatami mats,
pots of rice down on the floor,
stomped.
Those nights I find myself
knee deep in salt water,
trying to keep him on land.
But tonight I want to turn,
lose my own shape in rough waters,
see if he is strong enough to stop me.
Grundy County
This is weed country. Not sticky pocketfuls of buds; the lush pot fields have just been burned by the Feds in a fit of irony. Besides, the locals brew up stronger kinds of numb. These are the kinds of weeds that
would shoot out of sidewalk cracks if this town could finance public sidewalks, and in the absence of
sidewalks, choose to choke ditches instead. Everyone here in some stage of not yet or no longer
belonging. Crowded Cherokee crowded out Chickasaw; Five Tribes uprooted and given a garden plot
Now people who look like me practice poverty in this rich land. The money for rosebushes ran out
somewhere west on 64. Here one of the 2 banks in town will charge you money for not having enough
money. 23 years at the Piggly-Wiggly or moonshine on the side of the highway, white rag waving in the
night. But say you made it, say you’re kudzu climbing the overpass, emerald ambition. Say you own all
the hardware stores for 3 counties. Every lawn mower starts with you. Everyone needs a lawn mower
for the weeds.
Alyss 