the boxer and his girl

Whilst living in their old apartment, the boxer and his girl raised a certain kind of hell. The boxer was searching, stumbling through fights he could never win. All the while, his girl held him by the hand and stood beside him, silently. She, handicapped by years of neglect, was struggling to manage her emotional output; it was agreed between them that this was something she needed to work on and improve. Together, they found real moments of joy and laughter. He always found new ways to entertain her, gently teasing her and wrestling her into a position where he could look into her black eyes and see things that don’t come around every day. She impressed him with her ability to goof-off; he said that this was the rarest thing amongst the good looking girls. So they laughed. And they fucked.

Stone

Sometimes I don’t even understand myself let alone other people. Life isn’t so hard. I have both my parents, though they haven’t loved one another since before I remember. I am healthy, maybe a little inactive and I can be lazy when it comes to food. But life, it’s easy really. Too easy. It becomes pointless it’s so easy. I am not meant to understand who I am or relate to anybody. But I have no other challenge in my life, so relating to people and myself becomes that challenge.

So I am sat here listening to the radio for the first time in a year. Music doesn’t change really. You don’t need me to tell you that. There is a stone resting in the pit of my stomach, a smooth, heavy thing. I look at the letter she wrote me and I try to feel something about what she said. I know the stone in my stomach is connected to it in some way. But I am unable to form the feeling into anything clear or understandable.

Dark genre-transcending absurdity

GUD (Greatest Uncommon Denominator) has what is to the best of my knowledge a unique selling point, in that it offers readers the opportunity to save money by purchasing only the parts of the magazine that are of interest to them – a “pay-per-view” service. This makes some sense, as GUD is highly eclectic, with Issue #4 combining apocalyptic sci-fi, comic fantasy, alternative history, dark poetry, surreal artwork and – just when you thought it was getting predictable – social realism and an essay on Kafka. With a net cast this wide, many readers are bound to prefer some parts of the magazine over others.

Four Little Pieces

ULYSSES
by James Joyce
(remixed by Eve Ensler, Vagina Monologues writer)

“Absurdly, I suppose I did say it. I didn’t mean to offend the memory of your mother,” said Stephen, speaking himself into boldness.

Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, added very coldly: “What did her vagina smell like?”

Ruggy O’Donoghue answered gloomily: “Like her husband’s face.”

Dog Days

The guy who owns Long Beach Liquor is a total prick, yet for some reason he’s now cool with me. I think it has something to do with my aura. My pompadour makes me look like I’m a knife-wielding drunk, but that’s not the case: I don’t even own a knife. I started going in there two years ago to buy the Press-Telegram, three-month old cans of beans, homemade birthday cards that sing when you open them and, when I was feeling good, a bottle of Boone’s Farm. The place is, was and forever will be dirty. Decades ago it was a fully functioning carneceria. Now the meat cases are full of women’s bras and stockings. The same two VHS pornos have been sitting behind the counter since Beta died a painful death. Often I’ve thought about purchasing these videos the next time I’m invited to a gag gift get-together, but if you’re not a regular at this place, getting a dust-covered copy of She Likes it Raw Volume 8 probably isn’t that amusing.

Van Story

We were up all night on pills in a farmer’s field. Now it was morning, and we’d straggled into town for some sort of puppet festival taking place in the streets. I lay on the floor of somebody’s van watching giant puppets canter up to the windshield. Their eyes looked alive with vision. Were we in the parade?

The guy in the driver’s seat was telling me how he’d met the drummer of the Rolling Stones in an elevator. I didn’t want to hear about that, but there was no stopping him. More and more words came out of his mouth, filling the van with a thick whirling alphabet soup. Verily, he was sucking the air right out of my lungs! I tried sitting up but couldn’t manage it. A greasy yellow sunlight seeped through the windshield making my eyes feel like a pair of fried eggs.

Invisible girls with green eyes

I heard her call the bartender and I felt her palm on my forearm. She asked if I wanted a drink but I shook my head without turning towards her. She was flirting. I could hear it in her voice but I didn’t respond to her. She was invisible to me, she had green eyes.

Flying Working Men’s Club

The Brinkley Working Men’s Club was not quite you’re average working men’s club. Sure it had the one arm bandits, the Neil Diamonized jukebox, the squalid, battered, pool table cloth, and the lonely man in the corner, drinking the customary drink and sporting a high visibility jacket despite seemingly lacking any form of employment. Yes, The Brinkley had all that, yes it did, but The Brinkley could fly, that is, it could fly high, high into the sky.

an old man who needed help with the garbage

a piece of
crap in my left eyeball a piece of
broom that a Spanish man from work
breathed in to my face,

i sat in a
tall room, shrank at his weakness
i
twitched somewhere on the ceiling.

Red Tips

It was all so friggin simple, wasn’t it, back then. All us young shites, seven year olds running havoc around the estate, putting the craps up the old folks setting our crackers off behind them like that, driving our mams wild walking dogshit into the house, or letting off stinkbombs, not sure which smelled worse, but all the friggin same we were loved. Don’t you think? Or am I remembering it with a bit too much rose tint?

Someone was trying to bee-bee gun the cat

Will, high on liquid coke, jumped up and down in the sterile dining room, up and down on an occupied long table, up and down, yelling—

“Moose! Moose!”

We’d play coaster wars, ricocheting the drink coasters across slate floors. His grandmother thought that guests had stolen them.

“We were playing with the cat.”

Three Poems

A Day At The Market

You mistake my head
for a cantaloupe.

Your mouth is speed metal
against dry chalkboards.

I dig your inner thighs
out of my ears.

I wear what’s left of you.

Not Waving

“There’s a real thrill in finding some home-made personally-put-together comic offering that does outclass the expensive, glossy but often very shallow output of the mainstream. I guess the musical equivalent would be discovering those rare obscure 45’s that you can’t believe aren’t more well known.”

Guiltless

Her eyes are the color of broken emeralds and she throws back a shot of whiskey like it could cure cancer. I’ve been staring at her for nearly an hour and the span of four or five drinks of my own. She sits with legs crossed, two pale knives entwined with fishnet tights. She’s wearing big black boots and I imagine she could kick the shit out of me if I came within three feet of her.

I down another vodka tonic and pretend that I’m interested in the baseball game playing on the plasma television in the corner of the room. Blue and green light mixes with the dim halos of the bulbs above the bar and for all I know I could be dreaming. I make eye contact with her once more and this time she catches the glance and swallows it whole. Frost seeps up my legs and back and I swear the bartender has turned on the air conditioning. Hands are cold and the flimsy hair on my knuckles stands on end, surrounding the tattoo on my ring finger and reminding me that my intentions could break the heart of a woman that isn’t here.

Dear Michael Kimball

“I was for a very long time, a big letter writer, a big postcard writer. After college, after I moved away from home, my grandfather and I wrote letters back and forth, and that was an important time in my life. Now I suppose it was after I stopped writing letters and postcards, that they took on a new form—the epistolary novel and the postcard life stories. Anyway, the thing I most love is the intimacy that is conveyed.”

Two Poems

Shot Across the Bow #2

Poetry for poetry sake swimming around
my head (The Collected Poems of
Ted Berrigan)
while I plant my feet and demand
subject matter:
dark rich Beethoven strings
televisions painted red
Bukowski
and beer
because:
India is teeming
Melissa never loved me
and my mother was beyond
love or even
      discussions of love
this and a million more wasted pebbles
turning cleverness into
a cop out
that can’t be allowed
in my search
for a home
neither desperate
nor gleaming.

Don’t Tell Me Good Morning

Maurice, my roommate, always eats a hamburger for breakfast. Like with the bun and ketchup and all of that. So he’s sitting there just clobbering that thing, and I’m like, Jeez, can’t you just fucking close your mouth when you chew, and he’s like shut up, man, I don’t want to hear it from you this early.

You know, usually I’m not up this early so I don’t know what is and isn’t normal for people to do in the morning anymore. I mean, now I’m all nostalgic for cereal and pop tarts and those packets of instant grits.

So I turn on the police scanner to drown out Maurice’s molars and saliva glands and I hear this cop talking, like giving a report or whatever, right over the radio. The cop goes, yeah, this guy’s been stabbed. And Maurice goes, Jesus, shut that fucking thing off. I don’t though, because if I’m going to shut it off he’s going to have to stop chewing, and we both know nothing’s going to stand between Maurice and his morning beef.

King’s Cross

I get up and head down to the kitchen, and my dad is there. He must be off work today, which is rare, means we’ll have to spend more than a passing moment together. He’s cutting himself a ham sandwich, his lunch, and I’m pouring myself some corn flakes, my breakfast, and within seconds we’re arguing over literal spilt milk. I get a cloth and clean it up, clean up the surround also, ask him is he satisfied, but he isn’t, starts firing off, telling me I’m a fucking dosser and he’s sick of the sight of me and to get out of his fucking house and get a job right now. I get my jacket and make for the front door, the bloke still ranting and raving in the background. Fuck you, I say under my breath, slamming the door behind me. Prick.

Thanksgiving

I don’t want to talk about bars, the people who go to bars the endless interesting events that don’t occur in bars when you’re actually in the bar but, rather, happen after you leave or years before you arrived. It’s a tired and trite subject, and I very much want you to like me. It’s a new country with new teeth, and I want that new teeth reflection on me before my amazing looks disappear, leaving me tear stained, and dimly poisoned, merely good looking. I want us to get along. Like coal miners in depleted air.

Deep Blue (Sea)

I

Gigi sleeps through the night. This is problematic. She swims with great white sharks, dances with starfish, wiggles a trunk of fin. All the while the sun illuminates her sparkling scales, blinding the sea creatures around her. Gigi drinks a lot of water that she sips from a glass with a candy striped straw that bends. She writes in her diary that she has a “special relationship to the sea.” Gigi wakes up in sopping sheets. Gigi is a prolific bed wetter. She has ways of dealing with this. It is all part of the plan.

A Drink with Patrick deWitt

“In high school, my friends and I drank whatever malt liquor was available, usually Olde English 800, in forty-ounce bottles. In my heyday I could down two of these at a go through a beer bong. That’s eighty ounces of the lowest quality liquor available ingested in around ten seconds.”

Levity’s Fountain

The life and times of Ha-Ha, 5001 – 4968 B.C.,
Neolithic age nomad, lummox and stand-up comedian.

It was having the shit scared out of him that earnt Ha-Ha his name. Ironically, the outcome of this vexatious evacuation was to sweeten mankind’s otherwise dismal lot by prompting evolution’s most democratic benefaction to humanity, the viral joy of laughter. Prior to the momentous faecal happening, not one of the butt-naked, flea-ridden hairy-faced neolithic tribe he roamed with gave a monkey’s about him, much less believing the lummox they saw him as was worthy of a name.

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Lists

In the morning – after her shower and dressing the boys, but before breakfast – she goes back into the bedroom and picks up her list. She’d finished it late in the night, while her husband slept as soundly as their children. She folds it in half, then halves it again and she slips it into the pocket of her jacket, the pocket where the lists go.

In her car, after the boys have said goodbye and walked into the playground, she takes out the list and inspects it. It says:

Saint John

“And if bad luck should lay my strength
Into the shallow grave,
Remember all the good you can”

- John Cornford

The Worms

The first time was when he came out of the shower after shaving his head. He had three towels piled up – one to wipe any remaining hair from his skull, one to do the same to his face, neck and shoulders and the last to properly dry himself with. The first two were hand towels that had been in the bathroom for a couple of weeks and needed a wash anyway. He always did it like this. It might seem complicated but then again he was saving on the cost of a haircut.

Plans. Needs. Blues.

You have left the station and are trying to remember your way to the town centre. You are two hours early for the appointment with the psychiatrist who wants to discus the state of your child’s mental health. You are trying to formulate a plan.

The spring morning is sharp and bright. You stop in the middle of a wide road. It is not a safe place.

The Sunrise Calls it a Night [excerpt]

After-Hours

My cab was the first to arrive back at the house and I took pride in being a member of the team who turned on the lights and stereo and resurrected the makeshift bar on the kitchen table. It was similar to peeing in a circle I presumed.

“The important people are here!” Mac shouted as he and his cab mates climbed the stairs a few moments later. Within twenty minutes the rest of the after-hours crew trickled into the house up the white-carpeted stairs and the good time resumed.

Good old Ricardo was usually the first to start dancing to the music most were regarding as background noise. I could always tell when he was three sheets to the wind. He would walk backwards to the beat of the music with his hands in the air and his head pointing towards the floor with half-open eyes. Very similar to the ‘Mardi Gras dance’ drunk adults perform on the streets of New Orleans.

Ribbit for Her Pleasure

Bullfrog was pretty upset by his place in life. He was, in effect, a superhero; but one with fairly insignificant powers. Breathing underwater? Jumping fairly high? An extraordinarily long, sticky tongue? What kind of powers are those? he thought. His pointy green head, his bulbous, fat body seemed hardly befitting the proper physical appearance of a hero… of anyone, for that matter. However, his cynicism and humility having grown by extraordinary leaps in his life so far, he was able to accept it… at least.

The most satisfaction he got from his daily existence was ordering food (a Sicilian sandwich and French fries) from Gino’s, the Italian restaurant down town. He’d leave twenty two bucks on the doorstep to the old house his grandfather left him with a note that read simply: Take money, leave food.

Peach Juice

Nobody actually expected Peaches Geldof to turn up to the weekly fight to the death tournament with Fearne Cotton, but when she did, it was the prime PR success spectacle of the season.

People had been salivating for this bloodbath for weeks. The fatal carnage between Lady Gaga and Lilly Allen had gone down a storm, as had the earlier flesh-ripping punch-up between Bruce Forsyth and the man who’d won Big Brother 25. (An unanticipated triumph for the late flowering Brucey-the-Brute).

SEGUE

Discombobulated,
prone, alone, facing up,
errant wafts of aerosol lilies,
I,
having used up every organ
and passing on the post-mortem,
wonder, who chose the music?
Goddammit, I said when I was dead
I wanted a feast in a field
with pissed people pissing around
swilling whiskey to the dulcet sounds
of Bobbie Gentry and the Grateful Dead,
instead, I have Mozart, Chopin, Brahms,
and some poor bastard I can’t even name:
I would’ve preferred Wagner, loud.

Hive Mind [Confidential and Restricted]

The processing information of hive mind covers clothes, cars, class and financial assets. Anonymous feedback via a cohesive in-group appraises leaders of the hive mind’s health.

Shared norms (saying ‘bless you’ when you sneeze for example) are a choice collective practice. Those disobedient to such ‘norms’ can expect to receive ’system shock’. Frequently, this is delivered by fellow ‘Hivers’ in the form of reproach and alienation, rather than authority figures themselves.

Modern haiku

Dusk

pale wrinkled eyes search
through window panes framed in white
dusty reflections

Night

heavy clouds murmur
storms assail dark leaden skies
alcoholism

Sadness & death, Jose Luis Peixoto’s Blank Gaze

Blank Gaze is the first novel by Portuguese writer Jose Luis Peixoto to be translated into English. This is a story of love, death, fatalism, triumph and defeat told through two generations. Giants, Siamese twins, the devil amongst others inhabit the nameless Portuguese village where this novel is set.

Esther Severeid’s Unpaid Phone Bill

Esther Severeid is seventy-three years old. She lives alone in a bottom-floor unit in an apartment building not far from the airport. Esther’s a simple woman of simple tastes; it doesn’t take much to please her. Hearing the voice of an old friend calling from a convalescent home, or a niece calling from upstate can make her glow brighter than kryptonite. So it sucks about what happened several weeks back, when the local telco pulled the plug on her landline. It essentially cut the poor woman off from the outside world.

What were her granddaughters thinking?

Applewhite

Fading in and out, listening to the wet music my lungs played, sloshing air in and out of my body, I watched television, learning of Hale-Bopp – how the skies of the world were afire with twin comet tails. Alan Hale spotted the comet from his driveway in New Mexico and Thomas Bopp happened to look through a borrowed telescope in Arizona in 1995. As the comet became more visible, I faded. When it finally blazed onto the canvas of the night in January of 1997, they shut off my brain.