On Voice

"i could have been a famous singer

if i had someone else's voice---

but failure's

always

sounded better."

-Conor Oberst, Road to Joy

I saw Bright Eyes live, cried and sucked out the marrow.

Conor Oberst is a barbed-wire swan. His voice is raw, irreplicable. Seeing him live, I swayed in a sea of skinny jean wallflowers. Some guy had a joint. Some guy had beer. Some guy had a Kurt Vonnegut tattoo:

"Everything was Beautiful. Nothing Hurt."

"A Romantic Enters the World"

Richard Stine

I've listened to Road to Joy a thousand times--under my blankets, running on a treadmill, outside watching birds fight and make love-- but i didn't understand it until hearing it rib-ripped from Conor:

i could have been a famous singer if i had someone else's voice

but failure's always sounded better

Imagine telling Conor Oberst to elongate his vowels. I'd just as soon tell Jack Kerouac to use a comma. Splice Hemingway's prose with adjectives. Straighten Van Gogh's brush strokes. Un-gay David Sedaris.

A Reading from the Book of Salinger:

“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”

For me, this means submitting to magazines without worrying that I might not be selected for the next Norton Anthology. There's a confidence that comes from knowing you've poured your blood, sweat, and semen (or whatever) into your work. Anyone seeing your empty husk will respect you.

Some may express their respect in the form of a very sincere rejection letter.

This is okay.

Fuck them.

If you died a little writing it, it's perfect. If you died a lot---you're mostly dead.

Suck out the marrow, but always leave some for another poem.

No one else has your voice.

what i saw in Dylan's collarbone

----Antlers forking blue with great bone Y—--the Either/Or of trips not taken in shiny cars stolen from sputtering stations with light bulb moths beating against---- stars---- the Imaginary West—--an undead tree rooting deer skulls---- decay the too sweet smell of death on the highway—--the too sweet smell of life—--skin salt--—stopping to gaze into canyons in desert femurs—--stopping to gaze into questions that fall off maps wrinkling walls of black coffee diners where fat Mod bends to refill your cup—- passing trucks----static---- the tune we all knew—--we all knew it once— --some kid leaning over my drawing “What are you on?”—--“Nothing this is how I see it” ---–how I see God--—tigers freed with skeleton keys that claw and pray and maybe even love--—

ed rushan's imaginary west

editors drink my

if you

no one will drink your sauce

not even him.

OOF.

i'm a wolf in a brick oven waiting for the door to open. If i'm gaunt and charred by then, which is likely, considering there's a bone in the air conditioner, kindly pull apart my jaws and remove Pennsylvania--a nuclear simmer--from my stomach.

Coca-Cola kids slouch in parking lots gambling for an endless summer. My veins swell; there's too much blood, and no place for it to go but my heart.

OOF.

Fifteen punches to the stomach gave me an extra rib. Sometimes i throw it like a boomerang; it likes to come back and hit me in the face.

Nothing to do but throw, listen to records, and melt.

a letter from the kids

The Pepsi machine opened into another world, and we all fell through.

Since then, we've been alright. We don't eat as many sandwiches as we used too, but we still spit from the top of the parking garage. Sometimes our spit touches the ground.

We read books with titles like "The Gay Science" and stuff liquor bottles with naked women. When the night is too bright, we drive to the field and roll our eyes in the mud. We saw a deer, once.

Alex lost his virginity to a deer. Her eyes were brutal. Afterward he said they smoked cigarettes. We like cigarettes. Cigarettes are alight.

We saw this play where the main guy's always smoking cigarettes. The guy's name was Tom, but his name isn't important. What's important is that he smoked cigarettes.

In the last act, Tom brakes his sister's glass horse before running out the fire escape. He really didn't give a fuck. Or maybe he gave too much of one.

Anyway, we're alright. I don't want you thinking we're not. Not alright, I mean. There's music and girls and stuff. Sometimes the girls make vegan muffins, which are like real muffins except better for you.

On this side of the Pepsi machine, every thing's like real life except better for you. You don't think so hard, you know? You still think about words, but words are easier to think about than sisters and neighborhoods.

We're thinking of getting tattoos. We don't know what we want yet, maybe a quote from some movie. We have an artist friend who says he'll do them for free.

You know it's alright here. It's alright.

Arcade Fire - The Woodlands National Anthem

boil fire and stop fish

"Together, I said, we shall boil fire and stop fish"

-Werner Herzog

I'm writing a story (read: i'm thinking about writing a story while scribbling one-liners on the back of my hand).

Stitch the above pictures with an IV, add a Salingarian monologue, play this song at the end, and you won't need a plot.

Also wrote an untitled poem:

On the other side of the false world

Ink pools hollow roots.

You find the tree lying at the bottom

of a smoke stack, or cigarette.

Reaching for the blue, you dig sky, soil,

root, and rib; Rainbows oil your hand,

congealing birth

certificates and epitaphs that glow

like the sky above our city,

a treeless fossil gridding the desert with bionary.

I ask: what is America?

“The Wasteland!”

“Dharma!”

“Fear and Loathing!”

Perfect and unpublished, you fold the desert in my ribs

and say “America is a boy at the bottom of a smoke stack

reaching for the blue.”

I roll the tree into a cigarette. Watching the interstate,

we smoke the false world as the city grows dark,

a hollow car passing in the night.

***

footnotes (from a biography)

burton and carter

These are excerpts from a larger project, maybe a book, or a poetry collection, or a TV series pandering to Juno fans. My narrative voice wears tweed and sleeps on benches. Sometimes it drinks too much, but it gets to class on time.

I hope it's not annoying.

"My waiter looks like a hobbit. I never finished Lord of the Rings. "

"The tower is the pulse of the city, an eager, traditional taboo of discovery; Spheres, sundials, compasses, astrolabes, wheels, quadrants, clockwork, the gears and bones of exploration. Under Einstein’s blackboard is a jar of dust. I look to the stars and see a periodic table, a zodiac of vinographs and camera shutters. Lewis Carroll shares a needle with Lawrence of Arabia; fever powder kills poets. The Germans must not have Deuterium Oxide. In 1943, our parlor rooms consumed us; Hiroshima, our magic lantern."

"Then something in me, something small, whispered you’re going to die. It was the voice of a single cell, barely audible, but the rumor spread like wildfire, ripping up my spinal cord and engulfing my neurons in a wild, life-preserving panic."

"We sit at the table and are dirt. We're not better than anyone for having reading Nietzsche. We're just old. Our parents die in the rooms we used to know. We drink coffee but our teeth are white. We eat shit, develop eating disorders, and through it all our bodies look fresh. Inside we're Hemingway's Old Man. All any of us want is a shack by the sea and the leisure to bicker over wine."

"Sometimes I don’t sleep, so I sit on our patio (just renovated) under the purple-orange sky and wait for my skin to get warm."

"I don’t know if he believed me because the next morning he said he didn’t want anything serious, which was okay, neither did I, but I didn’t want him to say he didn’t want anything serious, I just wanted to kind-of –eat-breakfast and maybe love him."

"I have a story idea, actually, a memory from when I was young. They were having one of their dinner parties, and I had just bitten Mike Williamson. Mike Williamson was the dean of something, and everyone was angry about the bite except Mike Williamson. I was a lion under our living room table; his calf was a wounded antelope. Anyway I didn’t come out from under the table until everyone left. My sister was smoking and talking to me and she talked for a long time before I followed her upstairs."

"I met a boy who dreamed of filling a house with art, books, and musical instruments. The house would have large windows so he could look at the sea as he pondered whatever brave, new ideas entered his head. There would be a movie screen but no TV. All outside communication would be achieved through letters; Phone lines could not cut his Plutonian sky."

"Walking back I meet a farmer. We talk about the sheep, their shyness, and then about Disney World. We chuckle over America. A John Deere tractor roars into the pasture and the animals scatter. We don't use Border Collies anymore, the farmer explains."

***

"I'm useless and I hate bread."

"I've seen the faded Polaroids. I've overturned cardboard boxes trying to find the tweed professor in the hair and sunglasses of the boy in the photographs. I know they're his, just as his Duke Ellington records, Aztec prints, and motorcycle gears in the desk drawer are his, even though they're from another time. Having read Kerouac, I understand the time of my father. Amazon offered him a thousand dollars for his first edition of On the Road. He didn't sell.

Our books become our children."

"I will never be Dean Moriarty. My role is observer. I'm Sal Paradise watching from the passenger seat as his friend pierces the roundabout like a sperm entering the egg, a wide-eyed Paul chronicling the acts of Jesus. I knew Jesus, and I knew Gatsby. I knew them all, and like Nick Carraway stood by the river staring at a green light as they lived a dream that wasn't mine."

***

"I’ve never seen the bay. In my mind it’s an oil painting, one where the colors move so the ships bob in the harbor. I’ll describe it but because it’s in my head it will be ‘fiction’. This is different from what I’m writing now, which is ‘nonfiction.’ I don’t know which one is real.

Take the inside of an oyster shell. This is your sky. Remember the way your dad smells after autumn and mix the color of the smell with the sun in airport eyes. These are the waves. Then think of the time you sat in the Andy Warhol museum watching the empire state building get dark as lines from the window moved across the room, and your mom ran in and asked where you were but you didn’t hear because all you could hear was night making the building darker and darker until it was just a star flickering in the screen. This is the feeling you have when you look at the bay."

"I was born too late. Part of me feels like I've lived through it all, looked through Bob Dylan's glasses, sweated in Bowie's leather. My lungs are purple from that stuff I smoked the 60s. When Kennedy died, I was waiting tables in a diner. The radio was playing Back in the U.S.S.R. before the signal broke to deliver the news. I spent a year in jail during the McCarthy era. I didn't vote for Regan."

"I want to say that everyone is brilliant and beautiful and I love humanity. It's all a yellow swirl in my head, a primordial soup of feelings and ideas; ideas, the fat finches exploding from our mouths as we sit in the pub and talk about Kerouac and Marcus Aurelius, about our dinner party that Ayn Rand won't be attending. She's out in the snow, splitting a can of beans with Dostoyevsky as we digest curry with Dr. Seuss and Geoffrey of Monmouth. Somewhere, Emily Dickinson is watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show as Salinger ignores the invitation in his mailbox."

***

"Alan's a harp-player “dabbling in funk and reggae”. I like him for using the word “funk.” We talk about music and The Motorcycle Diaries, a movie about the life of Che. Che was a doctor from South America who started a revolution in Cuba. I don’t know why he started a revolution in Cuba when he lived in South America, when it was his own people he saw crowded in newspaper huts, legs dead with leprosy, wages useless as their phantom limbs."

***

"There's a coyote, or twelve, in my purse."

the fox cub : a short story

eileen soper

Between my mother’s poncho and the scratch on dad’s Bowie album is a fox cub. He was born the same day I was, a Taurus on the cusp of Gemini. Toothless and gumming for meat, he dug through my ribs and licked the protein from my stomach walls until he grew strong.

When the sky is yellow, he leaves through the cuff of my shadow and follows me into cafes. Licking his paws, he watches the friends, lovers, and chai lattes accumulate around my table. He keeps a respectful distance, curling in a corner to sleep with one eye open. A boy with a scarf and big-framed glasses reaches through him to plug in a computer. The fox does not move, but waits patiently until the boy withdraws his hand.

I write a poem on a brown napkin. The fox feigns disinterest. Stretching on matchstick legs, he follows me outside. His paws leave soot marks on the pavement.

The wind smells like the fox, a whisk of smoke and raspberry leaves. Cigarettes clog the cracks in the sidewalk. I turn down the street I used to know. A tree grows in the middle of the parking lot. I look back at the fox. “What is that?”

“When you were young, you rode your bike in circles. On the morning of your sister’s birthday, you fell and scrapped your knee on the pavement. The skin you left behind became a seed that became a root that became a stem pushing toward the yellow sky. Every time you exhale, the tree gets taller.”

The sky bruises, and lights wink on in the houses. My shoes pinch my feet. I’ve had blood between my toes from the day I found out heels make your legs look longer.

In ancient China, women bound their feet to make them more attractive. The pain, they attest, was unremarkable.

I sit on the curb next to the bus stop. Someone painted a pair of eyes on the glass. The irises are very green. “What is that?”

“The first time you kissed a boy was in this bus stop. You were wearing make-up you stole from CVS. He was wearing his brother’s Che Guevara shirt. He told you your eyes were the color of sun through a bottle. Later, you left him for a college boy and broke his heart. He painted your eyes on the glass so he would never forget them.

Every time you break a heart, your eyes get a little bit greener.”

Inside the houses, people are turning on their televisions. Light flickers through the windows. I keep walking. Water sloshes under the street. Flapping in the drain are the dirty, frayed pages of a book. “What are these?”

The fox’s eyes flash in the night. “These are the pages of your favorite book, published by your favorite author forty years before you began writing. You can take them with you, if you want, but you do not need them.”

I take a few pages but I do not take them all.

The fox’s breath is hot on my ankles. “Take off your shoes but do not throw them away. The pavement is still warm from the sun, and you must feel what you are walking on to know where you are going.”

I carry my shoes with the pages of my favorite book. My feet step on something soft and cold. A dead bird. The body is no bigger than a bumblebee. “What is this?” I cry

“Keep walking,” says the fox.

The sidewalk is littered with dead birds. From far away they look like rubies, but their bones break like toothpicks. I cannot walk without stepping on them.

“Let me put on my shoes,” I say.

“You cannot,” says the Fox.

“Why?”

“These are your insecurities. They are every country you do not visit, every boy you do not talk to, and every poem you do not send for publication. They are every minute spent in front of the mirror.”

“Please, my shoes.” I cannot see the moon. The telephone poles are a forest.

“You must know each one before you put on your shoes. They will never go away, but knowing them tames them. To know them is to live with them.”

“What is that?” A human skeleton hangs from a tree.

“Keep walking,” Says the fox.

Feather bodies crunch beneath my weight. “I’m killing them.”

“They’re already dead.”

My teeth are cold, my face hot from crying. I think of ways to kill myself. The fox growls. I keep walking.

Then I do not feel the birds anymore. My feet sink into wet grass “What is this?”

“This is the grass you set on fire the Fourth of July you got drunk because you didn’t know you were a light-weight. This is the grass you laid in for hours listening to your skinny neighbor play guitar. This is the grave of innumerable fireflies. This is your parents' backyard.”

“What are those?” In the middle of the yard are two urns.

“Those are your parents.”

I walk toward them.

The fox nips my leg. “You cannot touch them.”

“Why?”

“Those are your parents, and your parents are dead.”

I sit down in the grass. “No.”

The fox says nothing.

“I'm an orphan.”

“We are all orphans,” says the fox.

I’ve always been afraid of making eye contact, afraid that my eyes would betray all my weaknesses, the thousands upon thousands of dead birds crammed inside my skull. Lashes quivering, I look straight into the yellow-fox eyes. “What are you?”

The fox licks my nose. “I am the breath in your body and the green in your eyes. I am your favorite book. I am the insecurity that almost killed you. I am your sister’s birthday. I am music, grass, and fireflies. I am your mother’s poncho and the scratch on your dad’s Bowie album. I am hope. I am all you need.”

It’s been months since I could feel my bones through my skin, but my ribs, always protrusive, rise thinly through my shirt. “Then,” I say, pulling them apart, “You better get inside.”

The fox leaps into my chest. He nestles between my lungs and my breath swells. He tucks his tail around my heart. I close my ribs behind him and stitch the skin together with blades of grass. Dropping my shoes, I turn from the urns, take out the pages of my favorite book, and read.