I’m a Victorian cowgirl with a clicking jaw.I don’t wear sweatpants with the wordTROUBLE printed on the ass because that would be redundant. This is where I up the ante by writing something even more offensive like I’m so hot I could impregnate myself. Somehow, even without the TROUBLE sweatpants, there are people who yell “Trouble!” at me from across the street. Sometimes people yell “Timber!” but that’s only when tall shoes and margaritas are involved. If I was a tree I’d want to be a pine because of the needles. People would always be finding a piece of me.
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I’d see Gabrielle once a week at the small literary magazine where we worked. The magazine had a good reputation. Thousands of hopeful writers sent their short stories to a post office box downtown. Gabrielle logged them in. The managing editor scanned the pile for names she recognized—writers we’d published previously, like T.C. Boyle, James Purdy, Gordon Lish—and for “agented work.” The rest was slush. The slush was stood upright in two large boxes in the far corner of the magazine’s one room office. There it would sit until one of the “readers” would take home a pile. Gabrielle and Listen to a podcast of Dave Malone’s “Bourbon and the Biker Babe.” You bike rideas the Harleys ride.Fast, dangerous, close. No gears but high.No throttle but full.Rest is not a stop,but death. We bikeslick across railroad tracks tumbling into the street, both of us headfirstlike old-school slidesinto second base. Wrapping our armsaround iron and railroad spike. You are up first,not a scratch,your skin as smooth as Ozark rockrivered down from centuries of May rain and creekbed fury. I’m slower. Nose scuffed, head light,as if I’m in a tiny room close to you.Towering over train track,I’m up and your voice wakesmy » Continue reading Bourbon and the Biker Babe by Dave Malone… But the next time the acupuncture stopped which it must have, must have, I remember that day in 1962 before I was alive. I was floating in someone’s parked car, but that wasn’t me beneath the windy pennants and Texaco sign, I was elsewhere, I wasn’t here. one wrecked dirty white Oldsmobile in prehistoric sand there was a mirage on pale buff highway sky dissolved in ancient sunlight as the road goes on into the invention of geometry and forgotten gangsters, bebop trumpet in the wind, tenor sax & piano, muted brushes on the snare Forget Apparently the ice-skating bear had had enoughand turned on his owner, said the directorof a circus arena in Kyrgyzstan.Dragged him across the rink andmauled someone who tried to help.The bear, equipped with a helmetand trained to play hockey(with a stick and everything!)was dangerous & had to be shot About the author: Robin Stratton is editor of Boston Literary Magazine and her fiction has appeared in Word Riot, Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), 63 Channels, Ink-Blink, Antithesis Common, Chick Flick, and others. Her chapbook, Dealing with Men, was published in 2009. I have a basic misunderstanding of science so speak softly from all that darkbecause I won’t hear you anyway a whisper a minor atmospheric event on the hairs of my neckwaves given up to the cosmosundulating in infinitesimally decreasing amplitudes so that sometime past the end of uslong after the others when we’ve done with desire heededthe heart no longer I will be sipping an espresso in some East Village coffee shoppicking the dog hair off a cardigan I no longer wear ironicallyrereading a novel I recall hating(because I want to remember once more how it feels to be satirical)smoking cigarettes again because what APARAGUS AND BROCCOLI For luck with men, I lit the mattresswith a cigarette, and was surprised when I burned out. Possession was 6/7ths of my drawer of underwear, a rolodex of once-sheer daysreplaced by weight on skin, an armhooked ‘round my neck. He said asparagus would throttle broccoliif they had duels inside a cage. I said nobody wins in cages, vegetable or no. Just look at how we kiss. Heart-decals dangled from the chains of keys that rattled in my lock. It opened. Why was I surprised, each time? The closest I could get to beauty was a Listen to a podcast of Catherine Sharpe’s “Another Lesbian Space Fantasy.” As we rocket out of Earth’s gravitational well, I can feel the g-force pull my face against itself, then down, like a bulldog. I am a victim of 2, 3, 4, then 5 g’s–the force is like shitting a cinderblock, or having a baby, or clamping down on the edge of a huge orgasm. Then I am gloriously free. I can hardly believe my luck, my lightness, my weight as nothingness. I am not running away, I am not running at all. I am floating. At first, I was reluctant to accept. » Continue reading Another Lesbian Space Fantasy by Catherine Sharpe… Listen to a podcast of Benjamin C. Clark’s “A Fall Slaughter.” I only agree to butcher my first sheepafter another argument with my mother. Dark early, day is dragged unwillingly towards its inevitable demise, and I follow my father closely, silently down the path to the barn, directly away from my mother’s sobbing, dulled with each step from her, from the house, from her house. Surrounded by pens of sheep looking onmy father teaches me the difference between a stylet and a spear point paring knife, how to crush muscle and bone most effectively with a cleaver, |
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