The Drowned Man

At first, after Beth left, there was relief, like a tourniquet undone, then that standard aching loneliness, some subgenre of boredom, simultaneous with a refreshed horniness, no longer the horniness of a man trapped in a dead end thing but the horniness of a man outside any relationship and, also, the horniness of a man without any decent prospects, which circled back into a kind of self-pitying depression, which I numbed with drinking for a week or so, till all these indulgent emotions segued to a more practical concern with the literal emptiness of the apartment, Beth’s departure having also been the exit for the couch and the kitchen table, the television and a whole ensemble of supporting-cast appliances – toaster, microwave, coffee machine, etc.

Feeling Death

We called it Pass Out. Morgan learned it at soccer camp. She said all the girls did it. The first time we did, I had had too much to drink. She said you sit in a circle and wait to be tapped. Me and John were tapped. Morgan put a pile of pillows in the middle of the floor and stood us in front of it. “Now choke yourself!” she ordered. I looked at her blank. We all laughed until we realized she wasn’t joking. “I’m serious, it’s actually fun. Watch.” She wrapped her hands around her neck and instructed us that if you choke yourself, for just a little while, you can make yourself pass out. I asked her why we’d want to do that. She smiled knowingly. We snickered as she stood there, knuckles white around her neck and her chest still. We stopped when her eyes widened and bulged, her face fading to pale. I stood up when her eyes slammed shut and her neck fell slack. Her body collapsed on to the pillows behind her. I stumbled over and shook her leg, her body twitching under my hold. Her eyes flung open and she giggled relief. “It’s the best,” she sighed. She stood up slowly. It was like flying without going anywhere. That’s what she said.

The Ballad of Judas Piledriver

They announced at the place that this guy had died. “Car accident,” it was said. No detail: head in windshield, snapped spine, drunk, rib through lung, seatbelt. Put up his picture in a frame on a little table near the front entrance. Round face, half-smirk mouth. Long hair pulled back over the ears. I hadn’t known him. I’d seen him walk in and out the door, but I hadn’t known him – not a word. They hadn’t been paying me enough to worry about every guy who walked in. Long-hair guy, round face. Dead, age 31.

Murder, she wrote: An interview with Rennie Sparks

“That kind of thinking drives me crazy. It shows a complete lack of understanding regarding the purpose and possibilities of art in general. Murder ballads are nothing like real murder. They are rituals to celebrate the fleeting beauty of all things.”

The Zookeeper

The Zoo had been evacuated of people. The animals were left to starve. Lionesses were joining their mates in the eating of the cubs.

The Zookeeper had known this was going to happen for a long time, well before the rumours started and the news reported. Long before the army moved in.

Walking down the streets of the town during those days, people nodded hellos to the Zookeeper as they always had done. It caused a fizz and pop at the back of his tongue and a fire in his solar plexus. He began to chew through pack upon pack of antacids but only work helped douse the guilt.

He carried on working for as long as he could. He wanted to find the creature he would save. He had room for just one.

Falling

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
                                    William Blake

I

The day you came home from work,
not feeling too ill, but enough to
want to
lie down in your bed;

nuzzled in your room; one of four in
the shared house you’d moved in to
quite
recently.

Your room: small; mephitic.

A used single bed: rickety, more
than an embarrassment to you – a
mush of
dead skin cells.

The water boiler above jutting out:
a gnarled carbuncle, bubbling with
pus,
complimenting the heavily
wallpapered wall.

An afternoon poleaxed in your bed,
tightly wrapped in the duvet that
had seen
better days.

Pizza Man

Before I was a professional Dominatrix, I used to work the Peep Booths in Times Square. You know the ones, put your tokens in, the shutter slides up and you get to look through a little window at a LIVE NUDE GIRL. You can even pick up a prison-type telephone rig and talk. Our joint had something for everyone. Surgically sculpted porno queens all stiff blonde hair and big red lips. Cornfed promqueens looking like the cheerleader you always wanted to bang in High School who wouldn’t look twice at you cause you were on the chess team instead of the football team.

Manic crack-hos like hungry insects and voluptuous Mamacitas and sad old lushes who squeezed their sagging flesh into cheap lingerie and prayed for leftovers when the younger ones were busy. And me.

Unzipped

Maybe it was the way she handled the pool cue. There was a quiet confidence about her as she eased her way around the table, looking for her shot. Bending over, her tight red shirt rode up, exposing her lower back, and a hint of pink panties. Tan flesh exposed for a moment, as my eyes wandered over her blue jeans, every curve and bulge raising the room’s heat. Smoke drifted around the room, paneled walls and dim lights framing the lines of voyeurs that dotted the edges.

“Four ball, corner pocket,” she said, her long brown hair tied up in a ponytail, her doe-eyed gaze eliciting a simple nod.

A hard smack of balls and I am transported to my apartment, my hand on her sweaty ass, as she vibrates on all fours, my imprint turning red as the air fills with a sharp slap, her body twitching, eyes closed.

Rats

Rats ran amok. The carpet was essentially their playground, and as they traversed the shag pile concourse they stopped to say hello, to greet each other and to shake hands and to compliment each other’s children. The owners of the room, and the home – the humans – well, these humans, they’d affectionately see the unmistakable infestation, at worst, as a cramped living space, and at a best, as a rodent village – a community. They found an endearing quality in the rats, and each morning before the humans left for work, they would leave the rats strict instructions to complete several rather laborious tasks before they returned home. This was all part of the deal the rats made on arrival you see – when they were handed the lease it became blisteringly self evident that they would struggle to meet the monthly rent – therefore Howard, the elected spokesrat, drew up plans to pay living costs via more practical means, and the proposal was duly accepted by the humans.

The Saturday Boy

Today is a contradiction. Henry realises this when he finally stops walking and takes a seat at the top of the steps. Beneath congregating rainclouds, his particular part of the world seems awash with silver. In front, the twisted, unpolished tin can frame of the Lowry looms, its retrousse nose stretching skyward as if in sick desperation. Henry, perhaps strangely for a fellow of his sensibilities, admires the building intensely, but still he wonders whether this is because of the structure itself, or as a consequence of some inexplicable adopted sense of civic pride. Even the name fills him with excited curiosity.

The Long Murderous Life of Serena Pemberton: Ron Rash’s Serena

The moral center of George Pemberton, timber baron and hero of Ron Rash’s fourth novel Serena, is elusive at best. The time is 1929 just after the stock market crash. Pemberton has knocked up and abandoned a local mountain girl named Rachel. In the opening scene Pemberton returns to his logging camp in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, bringing with him his new bride Serena. Rachel’s father waits at the train station armed with a hunting knife, intent upon revenge. While Rachel watches Pemberton disembowels her father and walks away. That night Serena confesses to Pemberton her deep desire to experience killing another person by her own hand, to feel the surge of adrenalin in her imagined cojones.

Untitled

Tits pendulum-sway as she rises from her knees. The arc of cream-soft fluid settles in slug smear, sinks onto poor sheets. A brief snore rises on cum-musk air. She gathers crumpled effects, slides slender hand into discarded jeans. Extracting a twenty, a manky tenner, she dabs spunk lips on boxer hem and tiptoes off.

Smell of Female: how a bunch of exploitation directors rolled with some street-fighting girls and created the ultimate feminist icons

Ladies and gentlemen — welcome to violence!

Method Writer: An interview with John Wray

“I’ve thought of each of my novels as comedies, in a certain sense. They’re easier to write if you don’t take them – or yourself – too seriously.”

Pasadena

Remember there was that antique fair at my Mother’s house on the brough. You came to see me and we stood in the backyard drinking bottles of Miller and taking careful steps so we wouldn’t step in dogshit. We leaned on the galvanised sheets holding my mother’s fence up, staring out at the ugly property developments, the lakes and the hills like crooked bottom teeth beyond the concrete, the brown strip of the Irish sea just out past the plastic factories on the Murrough in Wicklow town. We had an argument; you wouldn’t come with me to Pasadena.

The Blush II

12th June

The windows are open wide and I can hear someone coughing steady as a pulse, and I can hear someone’s TV, gameshows I think, loud brash music and the inflexions of many voices and a child is shouting something over and over. (The lilt, the intonation and singsong of the French spoken language which makes ours sound so monotone. I’ve heard it said that the French are very protective of their language and that unless a foreigner’s commandment of it is perfect, they will be disgusted by the sound of it rolling around a foreign tongue like a piece of leathery sausage, rather than the delicate caviar of sounds the language does indeed demand. And in fact I’ve noticed the number of people who will chatter to themselves as they walk down the street or pass each other in the supermarket aisle, as though enjoying the vibration of the sounds as they echo around their own mouths.) And I think – this is Paris; our arrival has interrupted no- one, hasn’t made the slightest dent in the surface of this town.

Three Poems

Reaching for stars; catching flies

At last
it is long-trouser weather.

We’re not far from
the glockenspiel chill
of winter.

The air-raid sirens that signal
shift-change at the refinery slide
into inland whalesong.

Today is world
“break a world record day.”

I would have settled for
getting through a poem
without mentioning myself
or writing poems.

Again
I set my sights
too high.

The Present is a Gift

Just quiet enough for it not to count, she says he may as well be dead.

Under her damp, lifeless breath it doesn’t matter. The words dissipate in front of her, turning into nothing.

A turquoise dress drapes her fifty-year old bone white skin. The dress once hanging starlight bright in a shop window display, now hangs from her body crumpled, uncleaned for weeks, possibly months. Her face is like creased linen. The loose flapping skin by the sides of her mouth pulled by gravity towards the floor. In the light her cheek glimmer’s with a two-inch line of unhealed scar tissue. She wears a circle of death around the eyes. You can tell she was once beautiful, and that’s what makes her so hard to look at.

Three Poems

i had long harboured fantasies of impotence;
but i wasn’t sure how to act on them.

there is always a risk of sabotage / a deep distrust
but it fits perfectly in my hand; if i need to
hold on to something i will hold on to that.

the best answer to power is suspicion, so if you
stand over me like that i will think dark thoughts.

the few occasions when i read you i read about characters;
there is nothing eccentric in the writing but it’s an INSECT.
we are parasites but don’t despise us- you can’t say fairer than that
for a work of literature; it can stand for anything you like; it’s delicately uncanny,

uncannily delicate and it’s fragility is frighteningly odd.
that was a description of love worthy of its place in
this poem, reproaching the sounds, marrying.

& (sixty-five)

Going back his father was the shell of an egg. Paper thin, cracked. His father the egg. Making the box, the angles, the lines, the shape of his mother, bellowing in silence. A coffin. A box. White shell, a sheet over the body, corpse drapery. Up to the sky going grey, pieces of him, pre-ash, pre-funeral pyre, his body burning inside out, his wife, their mother, coughed out and gone. From planks and boards, nails, he made her a box, the shape of her, room for a heart, their mother, his wife. He cried. He did not cry. He went without pause. Trees, planks and boards, nails, nothing to make fathers, daughters and sons, missing mothers. A father shell, bruised.

Untitled: Desert

i think of i a desert
ever-slow and hidden.

violent.

Every day she lies a little: An interview with Jenn Ashworth

The best test of a good book is when you get through it rapidly, unable to pry your eyes from the ink on the page. Jenn Ashworth’s A Kind of Intimacy feels extraordinarily real in depicting loneliness, delusion and deception, with a fantastic pace and a vivid protagonist whose cleverly delineated psychology is testament to Ashworth’s cunning ability as a writer. A book that is at turns hilarious, sinister and poignant. As Annie Wilkes might say, “Oh darling it is so wonderful….”

Collide

I sit silently and wait for the nightmare to end. Quick flashes of blue-gray and tints of purple, fingernails cutting through pastel flesh. A placid star to the east, sky ripped open like a newborn baby’s stomach. Golden teardrops of rain pelting tired skin and the roof feels like it could collapse at any second.

She takes quick breaths, tiny slices of air inhaled through dry and cracked nostrils. She could die now or tomorrow and still the echoes of a life wasted will haunt even the tiniest portions of my body, haunt my soul down to the bone. Her face looks like that of a porcelain doll dripping with condensation, dark eyes the color of an obsidian heaven speckled with fractured green jewels.

Quayle at Table

If I’d known the sequence of events that would be triggered by that dinner party in Belgravia in the winter of 2009, I would have told Myers, slowly and declaratively, exactly what he could do with his silver card. Or perhaps I would have still gone along, much as I hate dinner parties, telling myself that I could take my fill from any situation and get out as soon as things got messy. If I have a fault it’s a blind faith in my own powers.

A Cold Experience

They arranged to meet during a short exchange on the phone. She suggested a sidestreet adjacent to the tube station and he arrived there half an hour later at 7.30 sharp. The street was just a short walk from the station exactly as she’d described. It was a long, dark, narrow street with cars parked on both sides all the way down, filled with workshops and business premises, abandoned at the end of the working day.

She was late, but it was okay because it gave him more time to prepare himself. Previously, they’d exchanged emails and phone calls after meeting on an internet dating site. As he was down in London on business, this was the first opportunity there’d been to meet in person.

She described the car she’d be driving and as soon as it turned into the street he recognised it. She saw him standing near the top of the street, tooted the horn and waved as she pulled in. He emerged between two parked cars by the kerb and got in beside her. She looked older than she did in her pictures, and significantly older than she’d claimed on her internet profile. He knew as soon as he saw her that this would be their one and only date.

More on Pismith

Since last writing Pismith added a “i” to its name, trying to distinguish itself from Psmith, its founder, discoverer. The “i” signifies a healthy addition to its nationhood.

You remember that it was a species discovered by Jergen Psmith at his own expense and effort, but as will happen he was more and more displaced by his creation. You will also remember that Pismith was a being that grew a shell to protect itself from its enemies, who we at this point take simply as a given, though they can be specified later.

Answering the Hemingway Challenge

They met. They loved. She left.

The Premonition

I’m not drunk, he said. I’m just feeling tender, like I’m really open and anything might happen.

Two Poems

The American Consumer

Intentionally targeted by ad campaigns
to be the best possible version of myself
acting out someone else’s fantasy of owning my capital,
I work harder to produce less efficient clones to rally
around a poor and starving theme collapsing
into its own hunger like a nomadic cannibal sitting
    in one place, eating itself.

A Minor Blues

Robert ‘Bro’ Brown and Little Eddie Graham are sitting at a small wooden table in Bro’s kitchen. Since it’s his apartment, he picks the tunes. They’re listening to Robert Johnson’s recording of ‘Crossroads Blues’. Bro is leaning forward with his eyes closed, short gray beard almost touching the table, as if he’s in a trance. Eddie, wearing a black cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes, has his arms resting on the table tapping time with his fingertips. Both are blues guitarists.

Alternative Tuning: Infinite playlists

Just the other night, me and my good lady sat ourselves down on adjoining couches and watched a check disc – which is a sort of low quality coverless DVD PR types send out in order to curry favour and get things reviewed and all of that – of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist.

This elevated pitch: An interview with Tom Bradley

Tom Bradley’s latest books are Vital Fluid (Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink), Even the Dog Won’t Touch Me (Ahadada Press), Put It Down in a Book (The Drill Press), and Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch (Dog Horn Publishing). What follows is a “post-neoplatonic dialogue” between Bradley & Mikael Covey, on food, music and books, but not religion and fucking.

Mikael Covey: There’s this image of Tom Bradley as the madman from across the waters. But is the real you perhaps a kind, gentle, loving husband and father who quietly nurtures tomato plants in the backyard garden?

Tom Bradley: Fuck no. I’m a crazy mean son-bitch. As for tomatoes, I behave sadistically toward them, with my teeth. But nobody’d better dream of calling me a vegan. If you’re looking for a mean son-bitch, just briefly consider breathing the word vegan within three city blocks of my bristly knuckles.

MC: Thanks for the warning.

Three poems

Calypso

He won’t let me touch him. On the back of his leg there is a tattoo of a geisha’s head cut off, blood spilling from the base of her neck, there to remind him. I rest my head on his knee. The girl he trusted that cheated on him. Calypso. He runs his finger along one of my eyebrows. It feels rough. I tell him I cheated once. Kissed the wrong guy. He pulls his earring out and rubs it against the skin below his nostrils. He wears a solid black shirt and red striped boxers. There’s a wet stain to the left of his crotch. The button on his boxers is undone. He smells my hair. Drinks a twelve pack of Newcastle. Leaves the empty bottles on the counter tops. Beer caps on the kitchen floor.

The Past is Never Past: Carlo Lucarelli’s De Luca Trilogy

At last, Europa Editions has published the final novella in Carlo Lucarelli’s superb historical crime trilogy starring Commissario De Luca. These three linked tales [Carte Blanche. The Damned Season, Via delle Oche] are a great read, rich in atmosphere, sense of place, history and character. As an added bonus each book includes in its cast of characters a strong-willed sexy woman with whom De Luca fornicates heroically and without sentimentality. After the first encounter (pgs 52-53 of Carte Blanche), in which a beautiful and busty fortuneteller with wavy red hair fucks De Luca’s brains out during an air raid, I knew I was hooked.

Everything whispers, I love you, but no one whispers, I love you, Tim

Tim goes indoors holding a feather in each hand warbling, “Look mom, I’m a bird.” To which his mother snaps, “Stay outside; I don’t want bird shit on my carpet.”

“I was just fooling, mom.”

“Well, I’m not.”

Angel

We found him lying by the side of Highway 91 under a light coat of snow. He was wearing only printed cotton pyjamas, his blond hair was caked with ice, he was certainly dead. We put him in the back of the van and drove home. When we got home we brought him into the house and lay him down in front of the hearth. In no time he was sitting up, ruffling his grey-orange wings before the fire to dry them out. He didn’t speak our language, nor any of the other languages we tried on him. He may have understood a few words of Italian, for he smiled when Paulus, the musical one in the family, said allegro ma non troppo, but why he should smile at that is hard to see, so perhaps he didn’t understand after all but only liked the sound of it.

The Time of Heroes

The woman with three breasts stopped to look at the card, and even picked it up. It was one of those all-occasion greeting cards done in mock retro style. On the front was a fifties-style illustration of a prim but sexy and curvaceous housewife. She wore the dress you always see, that very domestic dress that doesn’t show much skin but really makes the point that the wearer has an hourglass figure. Her lips were big and red and smiling widely, but something about the smile was ironic. The housewife was poised behind a big easy chair, and she had both of her hands on the top of the chair-back, hovering over it lovingly and protectively. The most noticeable feature of the easy chair was that it was empty. Clean as a whistle and not a single crease or bump in the cushion. And the message, in a retro typeface, made it clear what she was smiling about. It said: Sometimes the best man is an imaginary man.

The Art of Seduction (or the Music Anyway)

Private Midnight, published by Overlook Press, is a psychoerotic thriller with lashings of the supernatural. The story has a lot to do with seduction, its pleasures and dangers – and music.

There are many kinds of music that may give you traction for the action with the greatest satisfaction – but when it comes to creating a stylish, mature mood that will appeal to and inspire a woman of genuine taste, it’s worth considering making your own soundtrack for seduction.

The horror, the horror

Hanif Kureishi, speaking of the influence of his dead father, likes the Ibsen line, ‘We carry a body in our cargo…’ One could apply this to perhaps the most disquieting piece in Andy Murray’s collection of modern horror shorts, ‘The Coue’ by Jeremy Dyson, when the acquisition of a jar (the cargo inside is a scarified fetus) from a ratty salesman leads to hell, a taut piece with some sly references to Barker’s Engineer, “no tears please, it’s a waste of good suffering.” Kureishi’s entry ‘The Dogs’ is similarly horrifying, wherein a mother and child have the flesh ripped from their bones by feral dogs.