'WANNA PLAY' - TRAY DURHANN
CALL US FOR A PRAYER, LINES OPEN ALL DAY - nicolle elizabeth
CALL US FOR A PRAYER, LINES OPEN ALL DAY
nicolle elizabeth
(1) Party
Somebody outside said “snails, the post-modernist human condition,” so I took out my notebook to jot it down. The kid in the corner, who I didn’t see but had eyes glowing through the dark looked up at me, one leg crossed over the other and said, “I hope you write about beer and hell.”
(2) How old was Aretha Franklin?
I am germinating watermelon and sweet basil seeds on my radiator in New York. I am trying for another life.
(3) Jealousy
Thor stop humping the tree. Thor stop humping the tree. Thor stop humping the tree.
(4) Look to You
The Leviathan in the water was really stinking up the place. Every time it came up for air or to see what was happening its breath turned the sky neon green. People walked around wearing cloth masks. We watched its tail flop back in the water. She put down her binoculars, “Well if you’d just say you were sorry,” she said to me.
(5) A Game of Chess, From T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland
“This is what Jim and his wife do every day and every night,” you say to me, naked, over the chess board between our legs. “Beat me,” you say.
nicolle elizabeth
(1) Party
Somebody outside said “snails, the post-modernist human condition,” so I took out my notebook to jot it down. The kid in the corner, who I didn’t see but had eyes glowing through the dark looked up at me, one leg crossed over the other and said, “I hope you write about beer and hell.”
(2) How old was Aretha Franklin?
I am germinating watermelon and sweet basil seeds on my radiator in New York. I am trying for another life.
(3) Jealousy
Thor stop humping the tree. Thor stop humping the tree. Thor stop humping the tree.
(4) Look to You
The Leviathan in the water was really stinking up the place. Every time it came up for air or to see what was happening its breath turned the sky neon green. People walked around wearing cloth masks. We watched its tail flop back in the water. She put down her binoculars, “Well if you’d just say you were sorry,” she said to me.
(5) A Game of Chess, From T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland
“This is what Jim and his wife do every day and every night,” you say to me, naked, over the chess board between our legs. “Beat me,” you say.
FORT - catherine lasota
FORT
catherine lasota
We made a fort. We stretched green and pink blankets between our beds and dressers. We created a secret doorway near the leg on the back corner of the table. We divided the fort into rooms using string and Star Wars sheets. We kept our jars of pennies in the smallest room, inside a wooden box, covered with a pillow. We invited the friends we liked to come play inside with us, but only if they knew the code word. We changed the code word twice a day. We kept leftover Halloween candy inside the last room, near the secret exit door. We kept another pillow on top of the candy. We refused to come out for dinner. We talked to each other in flashlight code so the grown ups could not hear our conversations. We discovered that some candy was missing and held a trial of the main suspects, with teddy bear and rabbit serving as key witnesses. We never found the perpetrator. As a precaution, we prohibited friends from entering the fort for two days. We changed the code word five times in one day. On the third day, we were attacked and the fort was destroyed.
Catherine LaSota
http://www.notesfromcatherine.blogspot.com/
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
catherine lasota
We made a fort. We stretched green and pink blankets between our beds and dressers. We created a secret doorway near the leg on the back corner of the table. We divided the fort into rooms using string and Star Wars sheets. We kept our jars of pennies in the smallest room, inside a wooden box, covered with a pillow. We invited the friends we liked to come play inside with us, but only if they knew the code word. We changed the code word twice a day. We kept leftover Halloween candy inside the last room, near the secret exit door. We kept another pillow on top of the candy. We refused to come out for dinner. We talked to each other in flashlight code so the grown ups could not hear our conversations. We discovered that some candy was missing and held a trial of the main suspects, with teddy bear and rabbit serving as key witnesses. We never found the perpetrator. As a precaution, we prohibited friends from entering the fort for two days. We changed the code word five times in one day. On the third day, we were attacked and the fort was destroyed.
Catherine LaSota
http://www.notesfromcatherine.blogspot.com/
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
ROLE MODELS - sheldon lee compton
ROLE MODELS
sheldon lee compton
Halloween, 1982. An aunt applied the makeup, various tubes and fliptop mirrors taken from the bottom of her purse, the dredges, the pearls. Cloaked his face in hero smear, war paint, the face of his first father. Rock and roll all night with cheekbones flaming black.
While no one paid attention, Ben bit the tip of his finger and coppered the spill across his tongue.
You look just like him, Aunt said. Dad was gone so Mom was away.
Later, say 1989, it was Jerry Lee Lewis.
Bubble gum and milk, the same way Jerry Lee did it. Pop, gulp. Ben destroyed four dozens eggs Easter morning by throwing them at his grandmother, his aunt, a pack of smiling cousins.
While they ruptured against the porch railings, the side of the house, Ben thought of how wild his hair must have looked during the whole thing. Completely out of control.
Sheldon Lee Compton
www.wrongtreereview.com
I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down
William Gay
sheldon lee compton
Halloween, 1982. An aunt applied the makeup, various tubes and fliptop mirrors taken from the bottom of her purse, the dredges, the pearls. Cloaked his face in hero smear, war paint, the face of his first father. Rock and roll all night with cheekbones flaming black.
While no one paid attention, Ben bit the tip of his finger and coppered the spill across his tongue.
You look just like him, Aunt said. Dad was gone so Mom was away.
Later, say 1989, it was Jerry Lee Lewis.
Bubble gum and milk, the same way Jerry Lee did it. Pop, gulp. Ben destroyed four dozens eggs Easter morning by throwing them at his grandmother, his aunt, a pack of smiling cousins.
While they ruptured against the porch railings, the side of the house, Ben thought of how wild his hair must have looked during the whole thing. Completely out of control.
Sheldon Lee Compton
www.wrongtreereview.com
I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down
William Gay
THE ESCAPE - dawn corrigan
THE ESCAPE
dawn corrigan
She wears a sparkly dress and you wear jeans and you go out to eat, prime rib and martinis, and afterward you return home and nurse each other, for now you're both ill, having eaten nothing for days before the big date. And this is how faith is retained, in one endless absorbing errand after another, no escape from lessons that must be stammered out except an occasional weekend in the country where, in a field packed down by decades of boredom, you do donuts in a blue pickup truck. You think something of her because she has thought something of you. On the drive home she says a kiss is still a kiss, it is what it is. She says nothing.
Dawn Corrigan
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/author/dcorrigan/
Love Is a Four-Letter Word
Michael Taeckens (editor)
dawn corrigan
She wears a sparkly dress and you wear jeans and you go out to eat, prime rib and martinis, and afterward you return home and nurse each other, for now you're both ill, having eaten nothing for days before the big date. And this is how faith is retained, in one endless absorbing errand after another, no escape from lessons that must be stammered out except an occasional weekend in the country where, in a field packed down by decades of boredom, you do donuts in a blue pickup truck. You think something of her because she has thought something of you. On the drive home she says a kiss is still a kiss, it is what it is. She says nothing.
Dawn Corrigan
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/author/dcorrigan/
Love Is a Four-Letter Word
Michael Taeckens (editor)
BLUE - jan windle
BLUE
jan windle
Blue was his colour, he always said, went with his Michael Caine eyes.
Midnight blue velvet suit, in the seventies, their twenties. (She stroking nightly its nap as they sat on her hard Ercol sofa, until he revealed the smooth contrast of the skin beneath.)
His wedding suit a sky-blue linen creation (Her mother, late to the ceremony, breathing,”Isn’t he beautiful”, as he led her, tearstained, up to the flower-decked registry office table).
Pure cotton, cerulean and cobalt shirts in the eighties (hell to iron, but hell, they were still in love.)
Prussian blue golf shoes and an ultramarine Armani fleece in the nineties, as far as she could recall.
He bought her a cloud-blue Honda just before their blue skies ended. In it, she took off alone, struck out on a polychrome adventure, towards the blue horizon, the lurid sunset calling her away to look for the gold at the end of her rainbow.
When they met again, she saw that at some point his eyes had faded to grey, along with their hair. Blue was still his colour.
Jan Windle
http://www.artwork4u.com
Everything is Illuminated
Jonathan Safran Foer
jan windle
Blue was his colour, he always said, went with his Michael Caine eyes.
Midnight blue velvet suit, in the seventies, their twenties. (She stroking nightly its nap as they sat on her hard Ercol sofa, until he revealed the smooth contrast of the skin beneath.)
His wedding suit a sky-blue linen creation (Her mother, late to the ceremony, breathing,”Isn’t he beautiful”, as he led her, tearstained, up to the flower-decked registry office table).
Pure cotton, cerulean and cobalt shirts in the eighties (hell to iron, but hell, they were still in love.)
Prussian blue golf shoes and an ultramarine Armani fleece in the nineties, as far as she could recall.
He bought her a cloud-blue Honda just before their blue skies ended. In it, she took off alone, struck out on a polychrome adventure, towards the blue horizon, the lurid sunset calling her away to look for the gold at the end of her rainbow.
When they met again, she saw that at some point his eyes had faded to grey, along with their hair. Blue was still his colour.
Jan Windle
http://www.artwork4u.com
Everything is Illuminated
Jonathan Safran Foer
LOVE LETTERS - lily hoang
LOVE LETTERS
lily hoang
Eat me so I can falter in your mouth. My creases fray along the sharpness of your tongue, conspiring between your bleached teeth. There, I will storm an infection until your mouth inks out my words.
*
Here is my sentence hitting on your sentence--using a bad pick up line, winking at the wrong time, stuttering--but all my sentences are ultimately for you.
Lily Hoang
http://lilysvirtualpad.blogspot.com/
lily.hoang.326@gmail.com
Scorch Atlas
Blake Butler
Blue Octavio Notebooks
Kafka
lily hoang
Eat me so I can falter in your mouth. My creases fray along the sharpness of your tongue, conspiring between your bleached teeth. There, I will storm an infection until your mouth inks out my words.
*
Here is my sentence hitting on your sentence--using a bad pick up line, winking at the wrong time, stuttering--but all my sentences are ultimately for you.
Lily Hoang
http://lilysvirtualpad.blogspot.com/
lily.hoang.326@gmail.com
Scorch Atlas
Blake Butler
Blue Octavio Notebooks
Kafka
OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL SORROW - rebecca king
OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL SORROW
rebecca king
I light a candle to the lady in 3A, whose husband disappeared two months ago. She waits patiently, peering from behind her door each time the buzzer rings; hoping.
But the circles beneath her eyes betray her. The quiver of her chin. You can count the worries in her nail polish, smell the desperation of the peroxide in her curls. Listen as she whispers of the shapes he left in the sheets.
I’ve watched her wobble to the mailbox for weeks now, her pink slippers already worn thin, and her heels scraping the concrete. Each day, opening the door to disappointment.
Rebecca King
raking12@gmail.com
Arlington Park
Rachel Cusk
rebecca king
I light a candle to the lady in 3A, whose husband disappeared two months ago. She waits patiently, peering from behind her door each time the buzzer rings; hoping.
But the circles beneath her eyes betray her. The quiver of her chin. You can count the worries in her nail polish, smell the desperation of the peroxide in her curls. Listen as she whispers of the shapes he left in the sheets.
I’ve watched her wobble to the mailbox for weeks now, her pink slippers already worn thin, and her heels scraping the concrete. Each day, opening the door to disappointment.
Rebecca King
raking12@gmail.com
Arlington Park
Rachel Cusk
BACKGROUND NOISE - peter demarco
BACKGROUND NOISE
peter demarco
The diet Coke she orders seems like the kiss of death for our relationship since I’m drinking bourbon. She always had red wine, or something with vodka in it. And she says she has plans for later on with friends. I didn’t have plans forever.
The way we fumble for conversation and have trouble with eye contact makes me feel like I don’t know her anymore, probably never did. I thought I knew her when she cried one night in my arms because she said the moment, a post-thunderstorm silence on a warm summer night, was perfect. And I perversely liked her anxiety attack and subsequent throwing up in my bathroom after an incredible orgasm, because that meant I was having an effect on her.
But now this whole thing reminds me of the time I was an extra in a movie, standing around Times Square for hours on a cold winter night waiting for the scene to be lit, and then the star showed up and they were ready and the assistant director said cue background noise through his bullhorn, which was the signal to begin our fake talking.
Peter DeMarco
http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/3818-MOVIE-ART-AS-LIFE.html#extended
Zeroville
Steve Erickson
peter demarco
The diet Coke she orders seems like the kiss of death for our relationship since I’m drinking bourbon. She always had red wine, or something with vodka in it. And she says she has plans for later on with friends. I didn’t have plans forever.
The way we fumble for conversation and have trouble with eye contact makes me feel like I don’t know her anymore, probably never did. I thought I knew her when she cried one night in my arms because she said the moment, a post-thunderstorm silence on a warm summer night, was perfect. And I perversely liked her anxiety attack and subsequent throwing up in my bathroom after an incredible orgasm, because that meant I was having an effect on her.
But now this whole thing reminds me of the time I was an extra in a movie, standing around Times Square for hours on a cold winter night waiting for the scene to be lit, and then the star showed up and they were ready and the assistant director said cue background noise through his bullhorn, which was the signal to begin our fake talking.
Peter DeMarco
http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/3818-MOVIE-ART-AS-LIFE.html#extended
Zeroville
Steve Erickson
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