late at night

or early morning i am

driving just over the limit

taking big swigs of listorine

loving it

stressing over sentences

yanking my hair out

literally

clawing back to get ahead

misha, during my fifth night spent typing LF

in the rochester lab

when you shook your head

called me a masochist

i laughed because it was true

burning showers

turning wheels

begging questions

holding breath

grinding molars

chewing nails

cracking knuckles

reaching fingers through my cracked ribs

to pull poems up by the root

looking closer

reading over

finding nothing

hoping

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Elias Van Son is a young artist living in the Catskill mountains of New York.  His writing has appeared in various poetry journals, fashion magazines, basketball editorials and chapbooks.  His first full-length book of poems, Little Feather, is now free to read or download, and an EP of his Beekeeper music was recently released by Steak & Cake Records.  Elias lives and is willing to die for his ideas.

© 2012, Metazen.

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She is smiling the way she does when something has truly disturbed her. Her eyes squint and she cocks her head with tormented amusement. It’s one of those paradoxes, like reading Slaughterhouse Five and laughing, or seeing someone choke and hoping that he can’t stop.

“Have you finished, Eve?” asks Felix, sitting next to her on the couch.

“It was… I don’t know, I don’t think it was that good.”

Felix and Eve are college sweethearts in Hawaii. As usual, Felix, a senior English major, has asked Eve, a sophomore, what she thinks about his latest assigned reading. He considers her ideas useful and often passes them off as his own.

“What’s wrong with the story?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re uncomfortable.”

“I hate the character, Seymour Glass.”

“But it’s not his fault. That’s the point.” Felix clears his throat. “Isn’t it?”

“So?”

She slinks down and smiles, that mangled smile. “I don’t like him.” Felix leafs through the story. He thinks about people like Seymour Glass, very disturbed people.

Earlier in college, there was a boy named Ned who happened to sit beside Felix in many of their English courses. Ned has issues. He could never get to class on time, and he could never manage to follow instructions. He wasn’t defiant or lazy, he was just different. He would enter class late with glazed, shark-like eyes, and upon being told to leave for having no materials and no completed work, Ned would try to state his case, which he deeply believed was valid. Unmoved, teachers would still ask Ned to remove himself and he would obey, but not without a look of placid derangement. Though it was quite obvious that Felix and Eve were an item, Ned would occasionally drop untimely hints to Eve that he was interested in courting her. With a goonish grin, and right in front of Felix, Ned would ask her “So, Ava, what are you oop to this weekend? Would you like to go oot with me?” Ned could never get anyone’s name right, and to make matters worse, his Oshkosh accent made it exceedingly difficult to take anything he said seriously.

One night, Felix was having beers with his professor at a local bar. They got to laughing about Ned and his obscure shortcomings. Felix told his professor about a time they got their essays back in a Shakespeare class. Ned, as usual, had received a D+ for failure to follow the essay prompt. Postponing class, Ned proceeded to bewilderedly lament his “mark” of a D+, stating that he had followed the prompt and written an “OOtstanding essay.”

Felix and his professor howled over the account. After a few more drinks, Felix went home to Eve and shared what he and his professor had bonded over. Eve failed to find the notion of Ned as terribly amusing.

“I look at him and think he’s that type of guy that you hear about doing something awful later in his life, like going on a killing spree.”

“There’s a screw loose, alright,” laughs Felix. “But he’s harmless.”

“You ever look into his eyes?” Eve asks, countering Felix’s diagnosis.

“I’m not sure.”

“There’s nothing there. It’s like there’s nobody behind them. It scares me.”

“We’re talking about Ned?”

“Yes.”

This was a couple of years ago, earlier in college. Ned disappeared eventually. The logical assumption was that he had flunked out, but it was never confirmed.

*

“I guess sometimes I find myself feeling like him,” says Eve. “Seymour Glass. I feel I am not living, but watching myself from up above, like a tree or lamppost, going about my normal routines. Some days when I’m walking, everything will disappear and I’ll be moving down this black linoleum hallway, like I’m inside of a killer whale or something. I’ve got no legs, or at least I’m not using them, but I’m still moving just the same towards this reflection. It looks like a full moon cast across the ocean, just like that one night at Honalii.”

“Our first kiss?” asks Felix.

“But it’s not pleasant. Then suddenly I’ll be right back wherever I am,” Eve says. “It’s not pleasant.”

“I had no idea.”

“It doesn’t feel like Honalii.”

“But how are you like Seymour Glass, then?”

“The disconnect, which, for him, turns out to be generally unpleasant,” she understates. Felix adjusts himself, looks blankly at the book.

“And you hate that you can relate to someone who blows his brains out all over the room?” he asks finally.
“I hate the feeling he has, and I hate him.”

Felix carelessly flips through the story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish.

*

In the years since graduating college, Felix has managed to publish one story— an account of a young man being tried for child molestation. The character’s name is Ned, and the story is told from the perspective of Ned’s childhood friends who learn of his trial through the news. These friends, who have grown apart over the years, are gradually brought back in touch by the trial and their connection to Ned. Over various phone conversations and coffee shop chit chats, they recall different cliques and the sayings of old teachers and essentially revive the parts of youth that they’ve forgotten. They reminisce of Ned and say things like “he was always different, but I never knew like that!”

In speaking sympathetically of Ned while establishing a distance from him, they are able to feel a cathartic sense of relief; that it is him, and not them being convicted is some token of reassurance.

“Something terrible must have happened to him as a child.”

This is the recurring diagnosis of Ned among the rekindled friends. The more audacious, masculine figures of the group declare “Hey, no matter what, if I have a little girl, or boy, god forbid there be any Ned’s floating around. I don’t care if we knew the guy.” Women ultimately agree, nodding in dramatic pain at the thought of their yet-to-be-born children crossing paths with Ned.

Ned is given seven years in prison—the minimum sentence being five—for having kissed the ball of a young girl’s ankle at the beach, as well as repeatedly gotten off the bus with a boy and held his hand all the way to his house.

“Can you believe it? His life is over. Nevermind prison, what about when he gets out? Things will never be OK for him.”

Once Ned is safely behind bars, the characters return to their own lives and cease contact with each other; being that the trial was all that brought them back in touch, the end of the trial means the end of their correspondence. Over the course of the next seven years—the duration of Ned’s imprisonment—they resume to working and eating and vacationing and sleeping late on Sundays. Some even go on to have children of their own. These activities serve as constant reminders that they are doing everything right in their lives. When Ned’s prison term ends and he is returned his freedom, everyone has forgotten about him and the trial that brought them together seven years before. They barely even remember each other.

The story is called Locus Nivea— Locus being the Latin root for place, as in an object or abstract idea that is historically constant or in place, and Nivea being the name of a cosmetics product that can perform both practical and inappropriate self-services. Locus Nivea is the notion that people feel nothing until it is some form of direct gratification or reassurance, and as soon as it ceases to provide, it is our locus— our genetic inclination as it were— to forget it or ignore its existence.

Years later, Locus Nivea remains the only publication to Felix’s credit despite his efforts. Among the rejections Felix has since received from other literary tribulations, one editor has been kind enough to offer her “purely subjective” stance on his writing, stating that his ideas, while imaginative, appeal too little to the emotion of the reader— parch their yearning to feel. Felix finds it very difficult to heed the editor’s advice; to him, the concept of wanting to feel is arbitrary and vague.

Nothing he writes has the power of Locus Nivea, and worst of all, Eve is no longer around to offer her counsel; she was found hanging from the kitchen ceiling two years ago. Felix was quick, upon discovering her, to neutralize any emotions he might be inclined to have. Instead he took a strictly rational approach to the corpse: so as not to corrupt any evidence and give reason to be fingered as a potential suspect, Felix notified the cops in a prompt manner. He left everything just as he found it— her tranquil body, her biscuit-colored face drooped to the side and scrunched into the miserable grin she would give when disturbed. The only change he made was to gather a curious stack of papers which she left beneath her feet. He hid them; whatever was written on those papers was nobody’s business but Eve’s, after all.

To a cop, as Eve was cut down from the rope and unfurled across the linoleum kitchen floor, Felix explained “she was very disturbed.”

Now, Felix has begun to forget everything about her, from their first nights in Hawaii to the warmth of her body when they slept together. He doesn’t bother to reverse or even slow the natural process of moving on. If Eve were around, she would aptly label this as Locus Nivea, but as it is, she is gone, and Felix fails to make the connection without her aid.

He keeps his only published story—the stack of papers that he found under Eve’s hanging feet— hidden for himself. He has always passed her ideas off as his own. She would have wanted it this way, Felix tells himself.

He’s doing it for her.

___________________________________

Emil DeAndreis received a degree in Creative Writing from the University of Hawaii at Hilo in 2008. Currently he is a substitute teacher and high school baseball coach in San Francisco. In his free time he plays the drums, listens to music to stay sane and wrestles with big puppies to stay young. He is either published or forthcoming in Adroit, Apollo’s Lyre, Bamboo Ridge, Conte Literary, Curbside Quotidian, Corium, Foliate Oak, Long Story Short, OCHO Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, Scars Publications, and The Windsor Review among other publications. He has been nominated for the Pushcart prize, won a Story of the Month award and received an Editor’s Choice for best new author.

© 2012, Metazen.

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She shoves her tan tiny arm into the elevator and the elevator obeys and opens even though I told it to close and I shouldn’t have worn these jeans. I look fat in these jeans. I look like I’m in denial about the fact that my fat doesn’t land in the right places the way it does on a Kardashian. My fat doesn’t give a fuck about my body and I don’t give enough of a fuck about myself to do something about my fat. Instead, I wear jeans you should only wear if you give enough of a fuck about your fat to tell it, sit here, not there, up fat, up! I look like I want to look skinny, like I’m wearing these jeans for the same reason that fat women put pictures of super models on their refrigerators, some sort of cautionary tale against eating, against excess. She holds the door open and she doesn’t apologize or even look at me and shrug and she has bangles on her upper arms as if the world needs to be reminded that that’s how skinny her upper arms are. She can put bangles on them, bangles that you and me have to put on our wrists. And now he comes in, taller than her, his clothes sit on him as if in prayer, in gratitude, posturing and preening like a shallow bitch in yoga class. I’m shrinking. I’m shorter and fatter and crueler than I was before they walked in. Everything bad about my swells because of them. Their long fingers link and they don’t say hello. When he pushes the first floor elevator button his arm hits my bag of groceries and I bought all the wrong things and I asked for a plastic bag instead of paper and I hate that she can see my insides.

Lean Cuisines. Lonely.

Bananas. Bloated.

Cupcakes. Not pretty girl ones. Fat poor girl ones in a paper box, each in plastic.

Dietetic water. Pathetic.

Spaghettios. Disgusting.

I’m a disgusting slob, the most alone person on planet Earth. And I’m killing the earth with my plastic bag. I’m the kind of asshole that drags the world down with my fat ass and my socially irresponsible shopping habits. If I wasn’t here they’d be making out and they’re going to talk about me when they get out on the first floor to get their mail, which is probably a combination of catalogues and paychecks and random I-love-you-I-miss-you cards from friends they don’t love. Or miss. I should have taken the stairs. I shouldn’t have gone home with a B-List actor last night. I didn’t know how to not go home with him. I couldn’t believe he was talking to me. Me! My clothes looked better last night than they do today and he won’t call me and it’s because of this skinny couple, because of the way they stare into the door of the elevator as if my wrongness might be contagious. When I kiss men they don’t want to kiss me again and these two kiss each other every day, obliterating the space-time continuum, their love a little sand box they live in. They don’t go out hustling for it like me, like the B List actor who is obviously never calling, just gonna go out and build another sand box tomorrow because he can. Me, I go out looking for invitations. This couple, they are one another’s invitation, an open fucking house that never ends. While I was driving home from the B List actor’s house and stopping at the grocery store I believed he was going to call. Now I know that he won’t because when I was out on my way from lust back to loneliness these two snobby well clad drinks of water were probably sharing French toast and eating only the berries and making their waitress feel inadequate.

The elevator opens and the beautiful people step out before the door is open all the way. They’re so skinny that they can walk out side by side, like some Sade song personified and he slings an arm around her shoulder and her narrow frame fits easily into his muscles and she coos like a small dog and they held off talking until they were away from me because they were afraid I’d talk to them. I’d like to be the kind of brave soul who says oh fuck you and your skinny legs but instead I just stand there passively. I don’t even hit the button to make the door close faster. The door is sighing, I swear it’s closing in this bitchy way where it wishes it didn’t have to take me home and then I hear a squeal and a stumble and I lunge for the door and insert my big fat hairy and the door halts and here come two new people.

Omigod I can’t believe they live in Los Angeles. She has a large wide face, like a football player’s, like a sunset, spots of red fading into white on the prairie of her milk-fed, cupcake happy cheeks. What does she do for a living? Who in this city would pay her to be near them? Probably some aging female sociopath who wants to feel good about herself. And look at him. I’m almost surprised that he’s not picking his nose because he looks like he long ago gave up on all aspects of social codes. He has on dork brown leather shoes that would be more at home in Missouri and cuffed tan nylon pants and a gut that bolts out of him like it has super powers, like it wants a hug, like it wants cookies. I’m the sexiest person in the elevator. In this one pocket of the world, I reign and I can feel my spine stretching all obnoxious, the way a cocky 13 year-old girl might yawn on a lounge chair with her rich parents in Cancun. Or Cabo. The transformation is immediate and I almost reach for the padded wall to steady myself as my body tightens, as my ass lifts, as all the beauty of gravity returns to lift me up, up, up. I’m hot again. Everything I did is right and the prairie girl is trying not to admire my hipster jeans, my Kardashian body, my I-don’t-give-a-fuck hair and my I’m-sexy-because-I-don’t-starve-myself curves she’s wondering why I get to live on

Lean Cuisines. Light.

Bananas. Healthy.

Cupcakes. Lucky Bitch Metabolism. Trendy white trash realism.

Dietetic water. Smart.

Spaghettios. Cool.

The girl probably thinks it’s so unfair, she sees that I live on cupcakes and spaghettios and still I get to have this body, this glow. So cool that I’m obviously so confident, so –fuck-you-world that I get a plastic bag instead of a paper one, that I want everyone to know, this is how you make this body, people, that given how cool my jeans are, I’m probably some kind of artist who recycles the plastic bag into a belt or a piece of pop art. If she were I, she wouldn’t have to settle for brown shoes and cookie gut because she’d be able to go out and find a new sand box whenever she wanted. She looks at the floor and he looks straight ahead, watching the door like there’s some football game on. He doesn’t care about me, about cool beautiful people like me. He turned away from all that long ago and when they get out of the elevator I have no doubt that he’ll start talking about some Science Fiction TV show they both like and lift her spirits, which means I don’t have to feel guilty about my overwhelming beauty and coolness overtaking the air in here. He’ll lift her up, the poor thing, which is why she’ll never lose that weight, she doesn’t need to; he’s strong. What the hell else does he have to do, right?

The B-List actor is totally calling. Probably already did, in fact, but it’s not showing up on my phone yet because I’m stuck in the elevator where life is on hold because you can’t know if anyone’s looking for you, calling after you because your phone doesn’t have any service. They live on the fourth floor, the fattie and the nerd and when the elevator grinds to a halt and whinnies open she finally lifts that eight-gallon head that some feckless God bestowed on her and flashes me a smile.

“Have a great day!” she says, her eyes meeting mine for only a second, like I’m the sun and she’s the lowly human, vulnerable to my power, my light. He doesn’t look at me, probably intimidated, and a good guy that way. Looking at me would only hurt his girlfriend and anyone who would wear those shoes in public would never be cruel.

I purr, “You too, honey.”

They shuffle on down the hall toward their sad little life without B-List celebrities and coke and one-night stands and walks of shame down grocery store aisles. I hear music in my head now, R&B and it’s hard not to dance and the door slides to close, keeping me inside, because even the elevator wants me, me in my sexy jeans. I’m so happy at the order of events in my life right now. I’m lucky. Imagine how it would suck if the fattie and the dork had preceded the skinny pretties. Then I’d be going home with a shit taste in my mouth, knowing that the B-List actor won’t call because I would have ended my elevator ride with the pretty people, with a feeling of gross inadequacy and criminal inferiority. The elevator jiggles and it’s almost time to get out and it’s really true what they say about timing. Life is absolutely all about timing. Because even if B-List doesn’t call, I’ll get to know that it’s not because I went home with him, because I agreed with every opinion he had, because I told him I love his chihuahua and pretended to be comfortable in a house as nice as his.  I’ll know it’s not because I was too easy, too desperate, too yes-of-course-I-will-follow-you-up-to-your-castle. I’ll know it was just because his timing might have been off. Poor guy might have ended his elevator ride with the pretty people instead of the fattie and the dork. Poor guy, if his timing with strangers is off and he heads home on a dour note, he’ll be thinking that I would never want anything to do with a loser like him, a failed bitter actor, not famous enough to sign autographs and not un-famous enough to be just some guy who’d a girl like he would like even if he didn’t have a picture on his imdb page. My heart swells with compassion for all of us, just victims is what we are, victims of timing.

The elevator opens and I walk into the hall and then I stop. Wait. The B-list actor lives in a house, not an apartment building. He doesn’t have an elevator. He didn’t need to go to the grocery store because his house was fully stocked by his assistant and because he won’t have to go out into the world to forage for food he won’t have to come back to his home and it doesn’t even matter because he’s not like me and my neighbors. He lives in a house. He doesn’t go into the purgatory of humanity that is an elevator in an apartment building on a Sunday morning where you see the same people you know, but you don’t know. He lives in a world where there is no halfway between public and private. His neighbors don’t know if he eats

Lean Cuisines.

Bananas.

Cupcakes.

Dietetic water.

Spaghettios.

They only know that he eats.

Caroline’s stories have been published in The Barcelona Review, Calliope, Eclectica, Night Train and other wonderful places. She lives in Los Angeles and has worked as a TV writer, journalist, and young adult author.

© 2012, Metazen.

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The nervous system of the embodied man woke up exactly five minutes and thirteen seconds before the alarm clock went off. It sat on the clear plastic bedside table, a squat clicking servant of morning routine. The silver klaxon and cocked hammer, held back by metal teeth and machine gears, was so different from the separated layers. Isolated flesh and meat, organs and blood, the nerves that lay in a segregated bed. The nervous system was staring at the ceiling waiting for the ability to blink. The skin was always the last to wake up.

Each tick of the clock picked a string of twitching nerve fiber, fraying and flaying with time. The nervous system would have turned the chrome monster off before it howled consciousness and work, but the rest of the embodied man would sleep until noon without it. Despite itself, the nervous system could get very lonely. Staring at the ceiling thinking nervous thoughts.

Click.

Pain sound rush sound sound sound.

“Fuck! Argh! Fuck-damn!”

The digestive tract spilled out of bed, half-covered in sheets slick with bile and bodily fluids. The hammer rattled through thick dreams of edible landscapes, candy-coated sex and five-course, explosive war meals. The waking world shoved past the gut and through the mouth to voice displeasure and groggy hunger. It was the same every morning.

“Argh! The? Fuck! Argh!”

The muscular system was not a patient or understanding part of the embodied man. It made a meaty fist and battered the alarm into silence. Then it hit the stomach. A heavy sound of flapping, empty flesh on wet wall. The digestive system continued to moan and lament its own consciousness as the violence moved toward the circulatory system, sitting upright at the edge of the bed. The impact emptied the lungs. They collapsed to the floor with a rush of half-breath.

“Hrm. I’m hungry.”

The skeleton was already up, standing in the corner, staring at the shape of last night in the sheets. Skull sockets gazing out, sentimental, at the embodied man’s partner of scissors and chrome. The one who has grown used to the morning routine, managing to sleep through calamity and medical diagrams. With a breath between white teeth, the skeleton began to select the day’s clothing from the pull-out wardrobe. There was little else for it to do until the skin got out of the shower.

“A blue tie today, I think. Cerulean blue.”

The circulatory system struggled to fill lung tissue with oxygen again. Blood pumped through veins, throbbing red and blue. In time it picked itself up from the floor, trying not to leak on the carpet. It listened as the digestive system grumbled about stale milk but drank straight from the carton. Dripping and slopping. It saw the muscular system going through a series of practiced exercises on a reed mat, militant.

“I hate morning.”

The circulatory system snuck out the back door to the porch. Outside, the rain and the rising sun made a white disc over suburbs and stacked boredom. It lit a cigarette like it did every morning. Between the interwoven canals of the feet, rain pooled. The red stain beside the ashtray disguised as a stone owl grew slightly larger.

Feeling the buildup of lactic acid, anticipating the pain to come with adrenaline and glee, the muscular system counted to itself. Next was a second set of sit-ups, second set of squats, horizontal-leg chin-ups, push-ups, lunges and more sit-ups.

“What’cha readin’?”

The digestive tract asked between mouthfuls of bran flakes, cut banana and yogurt, that fell to the table in ink-blot patterns. The unconscious future could be read in cereal. Lacking eyebrows, eyelids, any expressive eye accessory, the nervous system settled. It lowered the morning newspaper exactly three centimeters. It stared across the distance between two parts of a body and then raised the paper again: blinders.

“Must be good, readin’ the news.”

The digestive system, by the fridge, ate the remains of last night’s meal from a Tupperware container. Cold. Angel hair pasta with artificial chicken substitute, broccoli with garlic, fresh pesto and lemon zest. The nervous system was proud of its ability to cook, and the ceaseless conveyor belt of consumption irked it. Many things irked the nervous system.

“A bus full of children exploded in some backwater country you’ve never heard of. Dozens of dead. Little kid bits everywhere.”

There was a brief pause in the kitchen. The fork stabbed a thick piece of synthetic chicken. A meat designed to be so far removed from the idea of a living creature that it became palatable. The digestive system peered at what soy and sodium had created. Almost like chicken, but unlike meat. And  the chewing resumed with abandon and relish.

“Ouch. Kids. Huh.”

In the bathroom, the skin stood and watched the fluorescent lights fill with electricity. The mirror illuminated flaws to observe in detail. After a long inspection, pinching and rubbing blemishes, pushing pimples and pulling ingrowns, the skin stepped into the shower and turned the water to scalding. It was cold at first: hairs plucked up, pores tightened. The skin imagined the nervous system spitting out its coffee in shock. Teeth rattled as the skeleton tried to choose socks to match the tie of the day. Then the water warmed, and the rising steam blocked out the rest of the embodied man’s world for a little longer.

In parts, the embodied man gathered in the bedroom to assemble himself. The skeleton, central, grabbed the digestive system by the gullet and stuffed it into the rib cage with practiced motions. The nervous system wrapped itself around the muscles and through the circulatory system;  finger bones placed the heart and lungs deep within the chest. The whole of a man jerked, staggering a bit with shock as blood pumped and ran through all of them at once.

The skin watched, marveling at the spectacle of its innards, guts and fluid, hidden from the view of the world. It watched the sleeping form in bed and felt the gross weight of it all. That weight made the skin itch and want to claw at itself. To take another shower. To return to the warmth and sexual gratification of sleep. To do anything but be.

They grabbed the skin, a hand over its mouth to cover sounds and screams of protest. It struggled, as it did every morning. They pulled it open and forced a way inside themselves. The embodied man stepped into his skin, meat toes filling out feet, flesh in thighs, filling it. Blood rose to tint the face, gathered itself up over a grinning skull. Eyes eager to blink.

He stood naked in the bedroom and sighed, cracking the neck, shaking out itches and soreness. He put on the suit of the day, cinched the tie, cleaned the milk from the kitchen floor. He went to the door, to the trim hedged driveway, to the modest yet functional economy-class sports sedan. He drove to work and tried not to think about it.

_________________________

Scott N. Wong is a Montreal-based writer. His novel, Mockery, is forthcoming later this year.

© 2012, Metazen.

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01

The sun and the moon are both very visible in the sky.

I send you a text: ‘Stab my fucking chest with a Sharpie and write your name on my heart. What are you doing right now?’

You respond, ‘Did you see the news?’

‘Come here,’ I respond.

I walk outside. Things seem fine because they always seem fine.

Things can only be fine because to suggest otherwise would be to reject logic.

The world is fine. Everything is fine.

I walk to buy some beer from a gas station close by.

Other people are looting at the gas station. The clerk seems depressed.

A man is on the phone with his wife, telling her he loves her and he wishes he’d been around more.

I walk home with the beer and sit on the porch drinking it.

The sky is blood red and you text me: ‘Fuck the world, Lol.’

I respond, ‘What are you going to do tonight? Right now there is a sad teenager making a playlist with only songs about ends for his girlfriend. I regret that I am not this teenager.’

02

Where are you?

03

It’s cold outside. There are dead birds everywhere.

I think about me, as a child, my fucking parents, my fucking brother.

We had a dog.

There’s a photo of me with my mom from when I was ten or eleven; we’re dressed the same. I’m grinning like an idiot and my mom is looking at something just past the photo’s border, sort of half-grimacing.

I walk to the car and unlock the door.

I drive to work but it’s closed so I go back home.

I send you a text: ‘The moon is melting and turning to blood; the sky is dark red; the sun has exploded; should I update my Facebook status?’

I drive home and the cat is sleeping on my bed.

I lie down next to it but it gets up and leaves the room.

The last time I saw you, you were dressed up for a dinner with your family. We drank wine and looked through my roommate’s things.

04

When you bought those fake mustaches and we wore them all night and you kept calling everything ‘bitches,’ I remember at one point, late into the night, you straightened mine, above my mouth, your face so close to mine, your hand and fingers

05

I wake up so hungover and feeling really sad. I look at my phone. I turn my computer on and look at the screen. I check my email and Facebook. Someone says something about how all the oceans are turning to blood. There is blood everywhere.

06

dead birds lying in gutters and floating atop seas of coagulated blood all thick and maroon and black.

07

You sent me a text: ‘No, I’m not impossible to touch’

08

I taste something on my lips. My eyes are watering.

There are trucks outside and men working on the phone lines or the internet or something.

‘The internet is working fine,’ I think.

I close my computer.

I send you a text.

I fall asleep.

09

When we were on the phone and I said, ‘Think about it, there’s actually no such thing as tumbleweeds,’ and you sent me a photo of one and I said, ‘That’s just a prop,’ and no one noticed all the tumbleweeds in the world disappeared that night forever

________________________________________________________________________

Michael Inscoe edits ‘unsure if I will allow my beard to grow for much longer’.

© 2012, Metazen.

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Empire Mind

growth
is not always pleasing

it’s a cold day

in the halls of overgrown columns
the realm transfigures us
and we become the architecture
the ancient heroes and villains and in-betweens
remain today

we embrace the shadow of the individual life
a green mist

and I want skeletons to rise

weeds grow in animal motion
only to shrink and shrivel

as if
seasons elapse in seconds
teenagers spin the bottle on a flat tombstone
they press faces
burrow into the ground

halted movement
is not always pleasing

it’s a blank
above the lit city
the realm takes light
every photon
it eats our knowledge
and we didn’t want this kingdom after all

we trace a shadow for life
a purple veil
movement
is not always pleasing

it’s a hot day
on the tracks of one train
the realm takes of metal
a shackle

we don’t mind being bound
as long as it’s on our terms

we trace a shadow for the individual life
a green boisterous cloud

I’m only a curator
in this realm
I have nothing else
except a few bent skyscrapers
collapsed because they can

let’s move on
because we can
let’s eat yellow jewels
to ease our rusted stomachs

would you rather
fall asleep on a thousand shards
of broken beer bottle glass
or have your eardrums
vacuumed out
and no

you don’t have another choice
in the matter

again
you don’t have another choice
in the matter
again
you don’t have another choice in the matter

here’s what we know for sure
warning
usually when we hear that we get bullshit

we think therefore we are
an empire is only as strong as its rival empires
we don’t have another choice in the matter

it’s too easy to say empires rise and fall
it’s too singular to say we are empire

how dare we claim such status
do we have choices in the matter
are we part of said we
we don’t have another choice in the matter
again
we don’t have another choice in the matter
would you rather
eat your head
or eat someone else’s
you don’t have another choice in the matter

Odysseus and the Stripping Sirens

Without hesitation,
the sirens of the cave slapped their curves
on the laps of the lotus eaters.

They slid up
and down
the screeching
poles
and the lotus eaters ate
with dilated pupils.

Destiny and Serenity floated onto
Odysseus’ worn lap,

and they promised
him the lotus of a lifetime.

Destiny’s black cobalt cross
bounced between her tits,
and Odysseus found himself
gazing at the hypnotic necklace.

Serenity sung.
Odysseus rose.

His crew was dead.
They represented all
he neglected in the world.
He reached into his pocket for money
but found a handful of silkworms.

____________________________________________

Adam Crittenden holds an MFA in poetry from New Mexico State University and serves as an editor for Puerto del Sol and Apostrophe Books. His work has appeared or will appear in Whiskey Island, Thumbnail Magazine, >kill author, Bluestem Magazine, and several other journals.

© 2012, Metazen.

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There were all these people throwing beads off of a railway train, and then the train looters jumped up and began shooting as the greenery raced past. I sat in a church, because there was an important ceremony, and I felt also that that the earth began to shake. The one time I was ready to be good and centred. Then the table I was at moved about four feet from me. I said, “That was an earthquake. You people better watch out. We have to do something.” And everybody else was relaxed and didn’t worry. I could hardly believe the sight of them. Then the earth sounded and raised us up twenty feet into the air and cracked everything and let us down again. I said, “Do you see now? Do you understand that it is an earthquake?” We walked but in a hurried fashion, out from there, and we talked, and everyone was in a strange way. I surprised myself by saying, “How is the ceremony going to be completed now?” I also told the man beside me, “We can’t live in the cities, and it is lucky we are out here. Stay away from the South. Stay away from the cities.” And outside the ones that had overtaken the train were running, and had sacks in their hands, and once and a while one would shoot a gun, fire it into the trees, and yell something. It was getting quickly to be night.

Then the sun flashed one last time in the distance, like it had never done before, and we were driving through the rainy darkness. Someone said that they felt weird, but I told them not to worry, that it was just because they were doing something that was not in their regular routine. There was also a war going on, a few districts over, with big machines, and it was a queer thing that this war would only happen at night, and in the day the machines went away. Purple cherry trees stayed by golden flakes of snow that fell, and someone or something kept lighting up the sky. There was a boat, that looked abandoned, and I had wanted to steal it, but the owner came back in a bigger boat. He drove it somehow under the water and I thought he would be dead, but then he brought it up again. There was a strange bird, and it appeared on a coin, and then on various pictures, and then on journals and kept appearing in the strangest places. The train was long gone, and the earthquake had stopped. Nobody was around. Lights flickered in the distance from somewhere we couldn’t make out. A strange and beautiful dark lady appeared, and then the lights in the distance flickered more. She said not to worry — that she had seen something like this before, and that it would all pass. I looked at the ground to see if there were any beads there, but I could not tell.

Then a shift in something. I can see more. Stars but they have to wait until fuller evening. Big and strange steel structures by the sides of dirt roads. Berries, and the fruit stand ladies look right through you like seers that clean out the eyes with salt. Brackets painted with galvanizing paint the cans wait on shelves with oil, rags, and pencils. The old welder, long dead — his keys and his broom waiting for the next. A letter: “Thank you for being a kind friend to our father. You were always good to him and we were happy to see you last week.” And in the sun, where the old welder held his hand out to receive something unknown. Crashing music. Cymbals. The forest. The voice. It had been over one year since the King saw the peasant woman — her eyes sullen, daring and bright, her energy great and her clothes catching sunlight like the scales of a fish coming to the surface to see what is going on. The tall grasses. The Europeans. Catechisms. The cats by the dumpster running around…

Someone was always playing loud music. Gateways. Paths. The trains on the bridge. Everything good as long as the cops were out of sight. Spirits hiding in the design of doors. Beer. Two women walking through the world. The storms hit — the ravine overflowed. Snakes biting. Blood and dirt — pens and ink — cups and little golden leaves on the ground. Hail. Lime green. The old man stole model planes, boats, and cars. Shucks. All I had to not do was one thing: take the car out. So I took the car out and crashed it because it was wet and cars hydroplane on water. Oh, I thought secretly, — fuck em’ and the horse they rode in on anyway. Lies. Power. I have to tell you something, she said: I don’t love you anymore. Miscreants waiting in the hallways. “There is one thing I don’t understand,” the old writer asked. “Who are your friends?” So I told him I had none, and that all my friends were dead. Besides, who in the hell would want to write military history and science fiction? Outside it got stranger — bad feelings in the greyest of places — towns with no redeeming qualities whatsoever . It’s amazing the world keeps up. Why? Guttural voices at dawn. Why all these nightmares and strange stares? The wind is the same as it ever was — oddly indifferent. Writers that all sound the same. Music that bends and breaks the nerves. Soda pop and plastic.

I need a whistle, and with a whistle I would usher in my own Providence — stand in the tops of puddles or on busy streets and sound the whistle. Someone would ask why, but I would have no answer. Counting days. Marking calendars. Terrible heredity. Palms swaying. Dead superintendents. The second one alive is a Christian — that is what was weird about him — not so bad, no, just something different. The motels down there. I wish you were a drug addict because then I would know what was wrong with you. As it is, you are just unclassifiable. Jaundiced world. Pathways. Her mouth was so beautiful, like a foreign thing that doesn’t have a name, and you see and it is emblazoned on your psyche. And to refuse something like that, to refuse something like that I thought I must be a real piece of work, — not to mention the rest of her — that was beyond description. I acted like a saint though there is perhaps no saint that was offered such a temptation as that.

Bikes. Mountains. Egypt and the past lives. The soothsayer stopped and said, — You had a lot of money. I mean a lot of money. We are talking about very much money here. Dying grandmothers unknown. Camps. Strings. Hooks. Colds. Mice. We could drink down this whole case of beer in a couple hours, drink it warm — it can get down faster. Nah. Minds. Reels and reels of film. What struck us the most is that those people were good people — actually good people — I had reason and years to know this to be true and time has claimed all of them. Time. Soundtracks. Marriages. Ghosts. Wet behind the ears. Wind through passageways. There is a breeze — in the summer — when you wore cotton blue pants — and the wind was from this world — but came as if from another world- sprinkling, telling. It was telling things.

Ah — divine music in the year before that. Sliding down slides of water. The Puerto Rican twins — silver bathing suits and they smoke and drink in the quiet night — serious — everything so regulated. Quiver like that. Be still then. Lizards in dismay. Big booted women with short hair. Red books. The man sat and ate a pear while the dust came in all dashing through the air from the solid and rumbling trucks that brought the wares of the world to the world. Sacraments. Sacraments in the sun. One time, sometime, it will go down and down and down — into the sea — where it’s burning will be put out by the ocean blue. And the other stars will shine in the night and the moon will reflect just a bit off of the curious frog’s back. But for all that, we will have to wait until the evening.

____________________

Brian Michael Barbeito is a resident of Ontario, Canada. He is the author of the prose poem novel Postprandial, a compilation of short writings entitled Vignettes, and a collection of flash fiction called Windows Without Glass. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, book and film reviews. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various venues such as Glossolalia, Synchronized Chaos, Otis Nebula, Kurungbaa, NFTU (Notes from the Underground), and character i.

© 2012, Metazen.

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An extra day I could have done without ends in troubled sleep and dreams of water. Rain has fallen in drops the size of grapefruits and the streets are rivers, the parks are lakes and the road leading up to our apartment building  – a slope – is a gushing torrent. Nevertheless, this is the place a North Korean gunboat has chosen for its mooring. It is carrying hundreds of armed soldiers, some celebrity starlets from the Pyongyang movie scene and a team of elite athletes here to participate in a sports event which is being held in our town and which is like the Olympics but a little bit less so – the Golden Globes to the Olympics’ Oscars. The starlets are stunning. They are glamourous – feather boa nineteen-thirties pin you to the wall with an icy stare glamourous – and I really really like them but decide not to think about them too much. I’m not at home; I’m on my way home, swimming up the rapids after work. A soldier won’t let me in the building. He says that it’s a bit suspicious that I, a westerner, happen to live on the very same suburban Japanese street that a North Korean gunboat has chosen for its mooring for the duration of the Golden-somethings sporting event. I must be a spy. I’m not a spy, I tell them: I’m an English teacher, please let me in. Can’t do it, the soldier says. But he’s kind enough to compliment me on my flawless Korean. I thank him and confess that I had no idea I could speak Korean but I’d always found its script aesthetically pleasing. We part as friends.

I’m unable to get into my home and see my wife and son, so I have no choice but to move into the athlete’s village, which means becoming an athlete. I’m on the swim team. The high-jump swim team. It’s a new event. It means jumping over a horizontal bar at the pool’s edge and landing in the water. Points are awarded for jumping over the bar, naturally, and for entering the water smoothly. The slightest ripple on contact results in a deduction of points. I’m wearing swimming trunks I remember from childhood holidays and a pair of green rainboots with Kermit eyes on the toes that I did not possess as a child but certainly coveted. I take a jump. It’s good. My flop Frosbies nicely, the bar is untouched, and I enter the water with minimum fuss. Graceful. Everybody cheers. Then comes the Belgian competitor. He outjumps me and manages to find space between the air above the bar and the water’s surface to adopt a high-dive position and arrows into the pool without causing the slightest ripple to its surface. Amazing. Everybody screams. I get silver, the Belgian gets gold. Bastard.

The games end and the gun boat leaves its mooring. The North Korean soldiers, the athletes and the starlets all wave beautifully as their vessel travels down the torrent of our street, turns into the road and heads for the Pacific. I rejoin my wife and son and we follow them on rafts made of reeds, waving back at them frantically. The boat disappears and we wish them well.

It starts to hail cold, white video cassettes of long-forgotten sitcoms and the water is getting very choppy so we head for home where my son takes the Kermit rain boots and claims them as his own. He always does that. I’m left in nothing but the swimming trunks and my wife is unimpressed. They’re stripy. I decide not to share my thoughts about the glamourousness of the North Korean starlets and am immediately awoken by the unmistakable and miserable sound of late-night cat sex. It goes on for ages – one awful, agonised scream after another. I fantasise about filling a bucket of water and pouring it over the cats, but I don’t, and eventually they stop. But that’s me for the night: no more sleep. I decide to run a bath.

______________

Edward Price will move back to the UK in May after spending the last seven and a half years in Japan. His work has appeared on nftu.co.uk. He tweets @edprice7 and blogs occasionally: http://anglesofincidence.tumblr.com/

© 2012, Metazen.

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Two consecutive evenings with two consecutive Helens were spent at the new restaurant Switch. The first night with the Helen no.10 didn’t go so well. She was confused and believed it was a job interview. The second night with Helen no.7 the same waiter that had served me before came to the table, his eyes marveling, I thought, at my selection of girls: tall, beautiful, dark haired girls all of them. But he said, “It’s wonderful to have you two here again!”

Helen no.7 squinted at me. She was not one of the dumb ones. I knew that she was no stranger to internet dating and that she was aware of my other dates that she was excluded from by being but one in a series. Her own series was far more convoluted. For strange men recognized her and retreated before her. She entered a room, as would a velociraptor, and they seeing and knowing, departed swiftly, as herbivores. Even then a lone man, dumbly handsome, was startled up from the bar. He retreated in haste through the kitchen. It was our third date.

“Why do certain men always leave when you enter a room?” I asked.

“You say ‘certain men’ as if you were sorry to be excluded from them.”

“I didn’t say it that way at all.”

“Who did you come here with before?”

“I’ve never been here before.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well that’s the truth.”

“Oh god!” she said and laughed loudly. “Why does this always happen?”

“What?”

“There’s always some other girl.”

“There isn’t. You’re the only Helen I know.”

She got up and left laughing. I watched through the window as she sashayed her ass across the street to my car and got in. The waiter delivered our food. There she sat in the dark.

The food steamed as I waited. Waiters and others made discreet glances. After a while, she glanced at the restaurant door. I waited.

Then I got up and went to the car. I sat in the driver’s seat and she straddled my lap and kissed me savagely. “Oh Saladin! Saladin, kiss me.”

My name is not Saladin, but it didn’t matter. We had never kissed before.

“You are all the same.” She moaned.

“Except that I don’t leave when you enter a room.”

“Hmm.”

I moved my hand up under her shirt and I could feel that the skin of her back had a zipper. It was stitched in welts along her spine up to the nape of her neck. My fingers held the pull.

“You have a zipper?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said and removed my hand from the zipper pull.

“Whatever for?”

“It is not so very strange.” She removed my hand again.

“Can I unzip it?”

“No.”

*

The Helens come in all kinds. You’d never believe how many Helens there are. I write down different physical details and make notations about what they eat and wear and how many times they give a flying fuck at the moon, so to speak. Some Helens are kind. Some like to ruin everyone’s party. Some are just like every other girl in the world and probably shouldn’t have been named Helen.

The next evening I was in the unlit alleyway behind Switch with Helen no.8, her eyes gleaming hotly in the dark, because she had been crying.

“Why are you following me?” she asked, crying.

“A girl can’t just leave dinner and run into dark alleys.”

“Leave me alone,” she cried. “We had so much in common. We had a 97% match.”

“Well that 3% must have been a big deal.”

“You’re like all the rest,” she moaned. “Why can’t someone love me madly for me?”

That anyone could love Helen no.8 madly was a stretch. She was the kind of girl one merely liked and in a very reasonable way. I informed her of this. But she did not want to hear it. What is the other name for dating? Learning.

I called Helen no.7 on the phone but she wouldn’t answer.

*

I received an e-valentine from Helen no.11, who wrote “Dating girls only named Helen is kind of weird but your profile is lols. hahaha.” I knew that this childish language, together with her zaftig physique, would be complementary/disorienting in lieu of the other Helens.

We met up at Switch.

She stared at me, an angle set in her jaws, her brow moving together into a grimace of annoyed suspicion.
“Tell me what you are thinking.” I said.

“That’s pretty personal for a first date, buddy.”

“What do you think of me?”

The waiter appeared marveling. “This time you two should skip dinner and just go out to the car now.”

“Scram,” I told him.

“Hey, what are you trying to pull?” Helen asked.

“I’m getting to know you.”

“What is this? You take different girls out to the same restaurants or what?”

And then Helen no.7 came into the restaurant, a man following her like a dog. Another man, seeing her face, departed from the bar. He ran out through the kitchen. I ran also, leaving both Helens behind. I sprinted through the kitchen out to the alley. I could see the man still running. I followed.

“Stop!” I yelled. “Wait up.”

After a minute he halted, resting his hands on his knees, his paunch heaving.

“What do you want?”

“That girl, Helen, that just came in. Do you know her?”

“Sure.”

“You unzip her?”

“What?”

“Did you unzip her?”

“Hey. You know what? Fuck you, you pervert.” He breathed hard. “You know what? I did unzip her, all right. But she’s a lady, ok? Not some goddamn jacket.”

My phone leapt in my pocket: it was Helen no.5.

“Hello, Helen.”

“Do you want to know what I’m wearing?”

“Yes, I do want to know what you’re wearing.” I answered, grinning at the winded man who shuddered in envy.

“I’m wearing nothing but the moon which is on fire and under that is the blood red host of the damned followed behind by the dragon and the mother of the dragon cast floating over the face of a tenth of the waters of the earth which are of wormwood and death to any who even gives them a sippy sip!”

I bit my fist. I howled. I humped a garbage can out of sheer want.

___________________________________________

Forest Lewis writes Horoscopes in Minneapolis MN. You can find them at yourweek.tumblr.com.

© 2012, Metazen.

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this tasty foot funk mixed with tequila, a tourniquet for my tongue to absorb your skin cells, fuck the knock, break my door down with your wood, fragile, fearless, you can’t tame this, but I’m beyond your angel, and I won’t ever need to prove this, because your eyes are in my panties, and this is all a god on earth needs to know, to stay, my incubus, my rotting husk, and when we’re old, you’ll still put your toe in my snatch

_______________________

Jennifer Hollie Bowles is the author of three poetry chapbooks and the nominee of three Pushcart Prizes. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Gutter Eloquence Magazine, Echo Ink Review, Thieves Jargon, and dirtcakes. She is editor-in-chief and publisher of The Medulla Review and Medulla Publishing.

© 2012, Metazen.

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