ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Jon Riccio interviews poet David J. Daniels

Secular Cleanse: An Interview with David J. Daniels

I had the pleasure of meeting David J. Daniels at the Denver-based Lighthouse Writers Workshop when he read there in June. A native Texan living in Colorado, Daniels had published two chapbooks, Indecency and Breakfast in the Suburbs, prior to his full-length collection, Clean (2014), winning The Four Way Books Intro Prize, judged by D.A. Powell.

Clean is an extravagance of ratios. For every Saint Gregory there is a Dolly Parton, each glory hole weighted by intimacy at its most unabashed. The book’s VIPs range from Joseph Conrad and Fleetwood Mac to Richard Hugo’s ghost (who admonishes with the jarring “Bitch, you didn’t,”),all wandering “Into the penetrating light where/ somebody’s shirt has just stopped moving,/ unable to see whose mouth it was/ that sucked and treasured you.”

Generous as he is well-read, Daniels discusses the writing of Clean, sharing his thoughts on sonnet crowns, Stations of the Cross and the occasional closeted groom.

JR: Clean is a trove of images: a bee circling an open bleach bottle, a snowdrift of rouge, sea-washed nipple hairs, a casserole’s vacant weight. I could continue (the reliquary of coffee urns, pink sun rimming the Conoco). How did you develop such an image-driven ear?

DD: First, thanks for the interview (CutBank published one of my very first poems, by the way, so it’s nice to be back) and thanks for the compliment. In terms of sound and image, when I begin to write, I’m primarily interested in sound. Thus the number of rhymed poems, for instance. I’ll often make lists of rhymes in the margins of early drafts and change the direction of poems (I mean, invent stuff like “nipple hairs” if I have to, and thus invent a couple of lobster catchers) in order to match that sound. Maybe this explains the variety of images? I also have access to a rich Catholic lexicon, having been raised Catholic, and it’s simply delightful to me to write out some of those crazy, erotic words.

JR: In a recent interview with Martha Silano you said Clean, from start to finish, took twenty years to write. Imagine the David J. Daniels of 1994 reading his finished product. How would he react?

DD: He might be shocked by its plain openness in terms of subject matter. Being still half-closeted in 1994, that kid might tremble a little. He might also be shocked by the humor and plainness in tone, the non-poetic turns of phrase and jokey asides. Being very serious and dumb about lofty poesy in 1994, that kid might think Clean isn’t ‘poetic’ enough but too much like bathroom graffiti.

JR: You have an MFA from Indiana University, and held various fellowships/scholarships at Bread Loaf and Bucknell. Were there any other programs that impacted your writing?

DD: My only other workshop experience really was at Tulane, as an undergrad, where I studied with Peter Cooley. Cooley remains a good friend and deep, early influence on my work. Not directly, in terms of our tone and attitudes toward the religious, but still profoundly: he introduced me to practically every important poet of the mid-20^th century, from Bishop and Ashbery and Ammons, to those who were youngsters at the time, like Stephen Dunn and Bill Matthews and Rita Dove. I read voraciously under Cooley’s smart eye.

JR: What was the best writing prompt you ever received? The hardest?

DD: The best was probably to write a nonce poem, following Marianne Moore’s examples. That was a prompt given to me during grad school by Maura Stanton, and it was the first poem I wrote where I felt the simultaneous strangle-hold and liberating energies of an imposed form. The hardest prompt – or what I consider the cruelest – was given to me by a fairly well-known poet who I won’t identify. It was to “write a poem that you imagine I [the faculty member] won’t like.” Well, he didn’t like them, duh, and we went in a circle being reprimanded rather sadistically by him, for having failed by having succeeded with the prompt. A nightmare.

JR: “Missing,” with its absentee janitor (freshly detoxed) and cheaply Xeroxed black-n-whites (“Face of a kid you fucked last fall”), devastates and haunts. Could you elaborate on the poem’s background? Was it intended as a sonnet from the beginning?

DD: The central two background details of the poem are true: I’d chatted with a young kid in a bar one night (although we never even kissed, let alone had sex) and, months later, his face turned up on a Missing Poster near campus. It was a startling feeling for me, that someone I’d sort of half-intimately talked with had simply vanished, and that there were those more intimately involved with him who were missing him more profoundly. Yes, I imagine it was intended to be a sonnet at the time because I remember writing about six sonnets that summer, some of which appear in the book: “Glory Hole,” “Shell Station,” and “Julia” among them.

JR: “Julia” may well have been called “My Immigrant Grandma Shit-storming the American Dream via Bendix Aviation in Mishawaka (Polishing Off Her Fourth Manhattan).” What advice do you have for writers exploring the familial truthful?

DD: Simply to do so – write truthfully. Your grandmother deserves to be memorialized, so please, please actually memorialize her, in all actuality. Don’t shroud her in cliché and pretense, because she deserves better. And read Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s brilliant poem “To a Young Girl Writing Her Father’s Death,” which is what prompted me to write “Julia”.

JR: Since we’re on the subject of everyone’s favorite form, suppose Clean had additional room for a sonnet crown. You would have written it on…?

DD: I’ve been working on a crown for years now actually, which I hope to finish for an upcoming book, and it’s about my earliest visits to bathhouses in contrast with the double life I lead with a woman at the time, who I still love and remain dear friends with. But the poem ranges in subject matter quite a bit, from my adolescence as a competitive swimmer, shaving my legs in the mornings in my parents’ bathroom, and my early experiences in the Catholic church. I’ve often thought a sonnet crown on the Stations of the Cross would be handy in the world, if such a thing doesn’t exist already. It’s a ready-made poem practically.

JR: “The Age of Nancy” features Scotsmen, birthcracks and blown VHS, inhabitants all in “the Age of Otherness/ and thus/ of self-reflection.” What Age are we in now?

DD: Wow, good question. I suppose, with Facebook and Instagram and all, we’re in the age of self-disclosure and I would hope greater transparency. An age of fewer inhibitions and greater forms of brave authenticity. Yet, my hope would be that we’re thus in an age of greater compassion and acceptance of others, which is clearly not the case. We’re indeed in an age of increased anxiety and polarized political stances, of heightened panic and hate.

JR: “To a Closeted Groom on His Wedding Day” is a scorcher of a title appearing near Clean’send. Your toast to writers and artists who self-identify as queer would be?

DD: Wow, great question. I can’t write the poem right now, of course, but it would be something about clinking our champagne flutes together (ladies, am I right?) in a way that made them vibrate a little but not shatter. (And here, I begin to think in terms of clatter, scatter, smatter, matter, mad-hatter, and I’m on my way.) But yes, something about that delicate level of firmness qua gentleness.

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David J. Daniels is the author of two chapbooks, Breakfast in the Suburbs and Indecency (winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize), as well as the full-length collection Clean, winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize. He has received scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Kenyon Review, Bucknell University, and the Colorado Arts Grant. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, Boston Review, and Pleiades.

Jon Riccio studied viola performance at Oberlin College and the Cleveland Institute of Music. An MFA candidate at the University of Arizona, he is a recipient of the UA Foundation Poetry Award. Current and forthcoming work appears in Bird’s Thumb, Plenitude, Blast Furnace, Your Impossible Voice, Four Chambers, Small Po[r]tions, Paper Nautilus, and Petrichor Review. He is a coordinator of the Tucson-based WIP Reading Series.

ALL ACCOUNT AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Jessica Franck

Superstition in Girl Years

I’ve been warned about a pond in bloom—

standing water, fence strung so cattle can’t get in.

But adults always tell it like they miss it, the days

of leech mouths pinched off skin. Meanwhile,

I’m trying to be a version of myself I’ll someday miss.

No one seems to notice. Every time I brave a stare

into the burnt eye of a pig roast, someone creeps up

to nab me under my ribs. Whenever I build a pit

from foraged rocks, they say the fire might make one pop

me on the nose. Or I’ll wet the bed. My biggest fear

is fluster, so I don’t flinch when the tinder cracks. I’m careful

to catch the squirm of my face, to blink as if there’s no bother.

I risk loose cradles of spiders in the cabin shower to wash

the smoke signals off. Sleep is more a meditation

on not peeing. The raccoons in the trash are not the sound

that something’s found me in the dark. I know it’s the wait

in the will-it-or-won’t-it that makes me want everything

to have happened already. When it does, I’m sure it’s quiet.

The too late kind, almost cautious, how coyotes pluck shadows

until rabbits, stuck on barbed wire, jingle softly in praise.

Haddie & Missy

kissed each other. They were cool.

They covered their eyes in charcoal. They looked good

in shirts, baggy or belly. They smoked, too.

So we waited for old cigarette butts

and pressed our lips where they did.

We were ordinary. When you asked me,

would you be my— the last word was easy

to guess, but we didn’t know what happened next.

So you stopped and I didn’t start.

It became secret to wonder why our bodies

stung whenever Haddie and Missy laughed.

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Jessica Franck is a Hollins woman who calls Minnesota home. She is currently a Yusef Komunyakaa fellow and MFA candidate at Indiana University.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Essay on queer temporality by Cecile Berberat

“Port to Port”: Queer Temporality in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours

“The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo—that is what Virginia Woolf lived with all her energies, in all of her work never ceasing to become.”

Gilles Deleuze (Sedgwick 401)

Some of today’s leading queer theorists are engaged in an emerging discourse of ‘queer temporality,’ their dialogue concerning the ways in which the dominant heterosexual worldview has shaped the experience and expectation of time. In attempting to envision and analyze the queer temporal experience specifically, this theory explores and interprets other temporal shapes and directionalities both independent of and in relationship to that schema already established and reinforced by the heterosexual ownership of history (Freeman).

Kate Haffey’s article, “Exquisite Moments and the Temporality of the Kiss in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours” (2010), establishes the appropriateness of both novels as locations for the discussion of sexually oriented experiences of time. Narrative and storytelling, Haffey asserts, work to both construct and reinforce expectations of temporal experience. The ‘happily ever after’ motif, for example, Haffey identifies as the repetition of a heterosexual expectation that bliss can be achieved through courtship, marriage, and reproduction (in that order). The fairy tale’s temporality is therefore linear and powerful, building upon itself so that every scene is a step closer to marriage, to reproduction, and to a progeny-dependent futurity that is never ending.

Haffey cites Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay, “The Queer Moment,” in Sedgwick’s 1993 collection, Tendencies, for a different angle on temporal experience. Queer temporality, Sedgwick explains, is made up of exquisite “moments” that eddy outside the linear current of heterosexual futurity and recur without need of furthering the dominant narrative of progress toward immortality. Such eddying occurs as Clarissa Vaughn experiences her kiss in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Michael Cunningham continues this theme of nonlinearity in The Hours, multiplying the setup’s potential variations to tell the interwoven stories of several romantic relationships taking place in different locations and time periods. Cunningham’s re-imagining of Woolf’s 1925 novel at once illustrates the distinctions queer theorists have identified between sexually determined experiences of time, heterosexual and queer, and works to trouble oppositional notions of sexuality. Cunningham’s multiple and fractured representation of both identity and desire resonates with the field’s developing notion of the “queer moment” (Sedgwick), also laying bare an extreme anxiety surrounding, or more specifically in-between, essentialist categories of sexual orientation. The Hours brings into question the use and meaning of the term “queer” within the emerging field of queer temporality, encouraging further imaginings of various temporal experience across and in between established expectations.

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Like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours features Clarissa Vaughn as a character whose ‘exquisite moment’ comes as a kiss, hers to a predominantly gay man whom she loves and has had a past love affair with (in between her other usually female partners). Clarissa has since cohabited with her girlfriend, Sally, in a monogamous relationship that, although same-sex, closely resembles a traditional marriage. The memory of Clarissa’s ‘exquisite moment’ with Richard returns to Clarissa again and again, even as she pursues her own ‘ever after’ with Sally:

She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself. Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That’s who I was. That’s who I am- a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you’ve made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. (Cunningham 97)

Clarissa’s inner monologue raises the question of belonging. She has chosen to live her life as a lesbian yet continues to feel the potential in herself for more and multiple desires. Clarissa could have pursued other attractions, to Richard for example, and the possibility remains. Clarissa asks herself whether the security of her singularly lesbian lifestyle is exciting enough to be satisfying. We begin to recognize the familiar refrain of “is it queer enough?”

The irony of Clarissa’s situation, however, is that the sexual orientation of her questioning is reversed. The more radical relationship for Clarissa, a lesbian, would have been a heterosexual love affair with a gay man. By twisting the narrative of ‘queerness’ from same-sex to opposite-sex, Cunningham disrupts our notion of the queer moment as necessarily homosexual and spotlights the temporally ‘queer’ aspect of the moment as distinct from the sexual orientation that it performs. Clarissa’s maturity and independence surpass her initially essentialist self-questioning. She knows that her lesbian desire is not entirely defined by a revolutionary or transgressive purpose and no longer feels the competitive urge to be the most radical. Her lesbianism can assume a more traditional “marriage” model and she tells herself that she is content. However, Clarissa’s own potential for multiplicity has become the location of her anxiety, so much so that she fears change. She has lived both heterosexual and lesbian orientations; a fact that suggests to her that she may not truly belong to either. Clarissa fears her own abjection to the void in between, which she describes as “sailing from port to port.”

A reification of these separate, and oppositional, categories of experience, as determined by sexual orientation, is initially apparent in the emerging discussion of queer temporality. Haffey describes the linear heterosexist versus nonlinear eddying of temporal narratives. The dichotomy between linear futurity and disregard for reproductive eternity is the focus of Edelman’s seminal book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Edelman was among the first to examine conceptions of temporal experience as dominated and determined by the heterosexual, and he asserts that procreation puts forth a myth of reproductive futurity to which heterosexuals are slaves. The expectation of the heterosexual majority is to live forever through genetic reproduction, an entitlement that at once privileges and defines heterosexuality and its experience. Along this physiological differentiation, Edelman defines queer sex as that which is without thought to reproduction. Queers, Edelman suggests, actively discard the heterosexual purpose to procreate so that each coming is indeed a ‘little death’ (to take the direct translation of the French term for orgasm, la petite mort). Edelman posits this lack of sexual endgame in queer relationships- satisfaction via pleasure versus a need for immortality- as the reason for the heterosexual establishment being so threatened by even the existence of homosexuality.

This physiologically based binary plays out in The Hours’ narrative of a romance arising between two neighboring housewives. Laura Brown and Kitty both appear at first to perform the heterosexual temporality that Edelman details. Kitty represents the myth of futurity. She is the “untouchable essence that a man…dreams of, yearns toward” (Cunningham 109). As the object of heterosexual desire, Kitty symbolizes the purpose to procreate. Then she acknowledges that her marriage remains childless because she may in fact not be physically capable of having children. Kitty asks her neighbor, Laura Brown, to feed her dog while she goes in for a medical procedure, and it occurs to Laura that Kitty may not, after all, make it to that “hale, leathery, fifty-year-old” (109). Laura had imagined Kitty aging, but Kitty may not live on at all. With her fertility in question, Kitty is denied reproductive futurity as well. Her physical limitations prevent her from successfully performing the heterosexual script.

Kitty’s admission of infertility coincides with Laura Brown’s own failure to perform the cultural representation of a straight temporality. The 1950s era housewife represents a quotidian fairy tale ending, as Haffey described, and Laura has succeeded in all the stops along the way to this goal. Cunningham outlines the progress of Laura Brown’s courtship to Dan, their marriage, followed by their son Richie’s arrival. At such a point, post-climax, post-reproduction, heterosexual temporality should cue ‘happily ever after,’ and Laura has in many ways upheld this expectation. She “makes good coffee carelessly… lives in this house where no one wants, no one owes, no one suffers. She is pregnant with another child” (107). Yet despite her best attempts, the happily ever after does not come. In the kitchen scene where Kitty reveals her inability to procreate, Laura Brown’s self-doubt concerning her own flawed performance of the heterosexual script compounds. Her inconsistent engagement with her child, symbolized by a bad birthday cake, stares at her as an accusation of failure. Both Kitty and Laura’s shortcomings in the heterosexual expectation, both cultural and physiological, cast them into queerness, and the women kiss. The demonstrated conversion between expectations of temporal experience prompts a change in both characters’ behavior.

The parameters of heterosexual and queer temporality, as set forth by Edelman, mirror Cunningham’s representation of linear heterosexual temporality and the same-sex ‘exquisite moment.’ It would appear that the temporal experience and sexual desire of both characters switch seamlessly, with no locatable space in between the expression of identity within categories of sexual orientation and corresponding temporal narrative. Their lesbian kiss, a transforming moment with no goal of futurity whatsoever, satisfies the expectations of a queer temporal structure such as Sedgwick describes. Laura does not want a relationship with Kitty but nonetheless cannot stop thinking about their kiss. The failure of Laura Brown and Kitty to perform the heterosexual temporality, its physiological or narrative expectations, prompts both characters into moments of ‘queer’ attraction.

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In her book, The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Judith Halberstam broadens Edelman’s theory of reproduction-based temporal experience to include other forms of “queer” lifestyle. Interpreting Edelman’s No Future as an assertion that “death and finitude are the very meaning of queerness,” Halberstam goes on to find the queer’s behavioral disinterest and/or inability to “succeed” in the heterosexual expectation of procreation as an opportunity for reversal (Halberstam 106). Halberstam situates the absence of queers from traditional markers of heteronormative success, reproductive or otherwise, as evidence of a purposeful and stylized form of losing. The result of this reframing is the transformation of outsidership into a radical way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power. Much as Adrienne Rich re-envisioned the spinster as a purposeful repudiation of compulsory heterosexuality and a subversion of male power, Halberstam’s theory of failure shows “that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent” (88). Queerness and heterosexuality are entwined and relational. Halberstam references the artist Tracy Moffat, whose photographs capture the expressions of fourth place ‘losers’ at the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney, Australia. Moffat’s images spotlight the “(non)place” that queers inhabit outside of recorded history, insisting upon a record of not only their participation, but also their failure in the face of a ludicrously narrow conception of success (93). While Moffat’s photographs capture the moment of “losing,” both rendering it visible and emphasizing the absurd relativity of assignments of achievement, their example also serves to further a divisive sports analogy. The phrase “queer aesthetic” in this context even invokes an image of different colored uniforms, opposing teams as it were.

Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure is an extremely valuable reversal, a necessary perspective shift and voice of rightful pride in a lifestyle that has been rendered other and illegitimate. Although the very existence of a winner and a loser implies a competition is taking place, Halberstam’s analogy works instead to show the truly relational definitions of “gayness” and “straightness” (one cannot exist without the other). So too, Cunningham’s novel appears at first to portray Laura Brown and Kitty’s default to the queer moment from their initially reproductive and linear heterosexual expectations. Yet both women remain married, Laura with children. Attractions and behaviors exist between the strictly homosexual and heterosexual, of which Clarissa Vaughn is an example. How then can we locate transitions of temporal experience that occupy this space between the as yet set forth mutual exclusivity of hetero and queer categories?

Halberstam’s expansion of Edelman’s losing at reproduction into broader realms of behavior draws attention to the exclusion of same-sex couples and single homosexuals (of either sex) who desire children, transsexuals who have reproduced before transitioning, as well as heterosexuals who have no intention of reproducing. Indeed, Halberstam’s work seems to self-consciously focus upon the ‘team’ mentality eclipsed by the visibility of the LGBTQ continuum and the progress made toward acceptance of flexible identities. The reader wonders how theories of queer temporality will evolve as sexuality study expands to meet a multiplicity of identities and behaviors beyond gay and straight. Will there be space for uncloseted gays excelling in culturally privileged arenas such as business or entertainment? Advances in fertility medicine and evolving state laws surrounding the definition of marriage enable everyone to have biological children, in wedlock or outside, and while the availability of this option may currently rely upon financial wealth, the rapidity of political and pharmaceutical change suggests that this may not always be the case. The absence of these exceptions from the discourse of queer temporality not only privileges fixed definitions of what it means to be both gay and straight, but elides more orientations from the visible world. As definitions and expectations develop within the expanding field of queer temporality, does the discussion turn once again to what is ‘queer?’

My purpose here is certainly not to determine beyond a doubt the dominant orientations of Cunningham’s fictional characters—for how would one calculate this based upon limited and perhaps purposely ambiguous pages of representation? And what import could these fictional characters’ definitions possibly bring to the autonomous lives and behaviors of readers? Although there is little to be gained from the exercise of defining the identities of these characters, their anxiety surrounding such essentialist categories, or teams, as Halberstam alluded to, is evident in each narrative thread of Cunningham’s novel. His characters are capable of performing more than just one identity. In fact, the anxieties Cunningham describes appear most often to be addressing the challenge of achieving a singular performance. The impossibility of being just one person, one role or one singular sexual desire, echoes through The Hours. Clarissa Vaughn’s anxiety about the multiplicity of her own sexually oriented performance causes her to fear outsidership. Looking at the objects she owns in her domestic life with Sally, Clarissa Vaughn “feels the presence of her own ghost; the part of her most destructibly alive and least distinct; the part that owns nothing” (Cunningham 91). Clarissa’s recognition of her own multiplicity manifests in her fear of not belonging, but instead being relegated to an adrift and wayward status, outside the homo/hetero binary. The in between “ghost” that she describes as “sailing from port to port” exists in banishment from both the worlds of the living and the dead, expressing the liminal space between essentialist categories of identity. Interestingly, the worlds of the living and the dead between which a ghost may be caught relates to Edelman’s language of heterosexual reproductive futurity and the queer’s sphere of death and dying. Clarissa recognizes her own need for an acknowledgement of the space in between these oppositional worlds and their categorical temporalities.

Laura Brown also recognizes the fracture of her singular self when she pauses with her son, “motionless, watching each other, and for a moment she is precisely what she appears to be: a pregnant woman kneeling in a kitchen with her three-year-old son…She is the perfect picture of herself; there is no difference” (76). Laura’s acknowledgement that she does have other identities, and the realization that her own performance is inconsistent, focuses upon her intention, albeit failed, to perform only her role as ideal housewife and mother. Laura’s anxiety surrounds her understanding of the unacceptability of duplicitous desire and performance within the heterosexual narrative. Cunningham emphasizes the necessary splintering of the self when performance of multiple roles and categories of identity are required.

Cunningham extends his awareness of the performative aspect of identity to his representation of Virginia Woolf in his novel as well. “Virginia walks through the door. She feels fully in command of the character who is Virginia Woolf” (84). The roles of author and character are rendered relational here, each affecting the other in a dialectic that demonstrates the capacity of identity expressions to interact with one another. Cunningham seems to imply that authorship itself entails a fracturing of one’s persona to generate literary characters. The consistency with which Cunningham represents a multiplicity of identity performances works at once to ‘normalize’ highly personal and flexible notions of self and, perhaps more importantly, to voice the anxieties that surround the specific expectations and consequences of said performance in categories of sexual orientation.

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Anxiety over identity and belonging is not surprising given the prevailingly dichotomous structure of sexuality discourse as represented by the texts this paper has surveyed thus far. One instance of the liminal space created by the oppositional staging of gay and straight sexualities can be found in the prevalence of biphobia. Beth A. Firestein’s 1996 anthology, Bisexuality: The Psychology and Politics of an Invisible Minority, addresses the prevalence of biphobia and the double discrimination that bisexuals face from heterosexual, and homosexual communities. Bisexuality challenges the categories with which the queer movement is attempting to establish a coherent identity expression.Paula C. Rust’s 1995 book, Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics: Sex, Loyalty, and Revolution, surveyed lesbian women and found that “many doubt bisexuality exists…and are generally consistent in seeing bisexuality as having no distinct politics of its own” (Michel 538). The bisexual woman’s anxiety concerning a lack of true belonging to either heterosexual or lesbian communities is exacerbated by the likelihood that the bisexual may share neither the same gender nor the same sexual orientation as their partner; both personal as well as political outsidership results, reinforcing the biphobic erasure of this population. Clarissa’s metaphor of “port to port” intimates the deep expanse in between binary categories and the negative space into which so many, including bisexuals, often fall. The oceanic metaphor carries forward into Halberstam’s queering of the Olympic games as an event for which individuals of opposing countries separated by oceans meet to compete for success. The ‘adrift’ outsider is excluded from competition entirely and therefore resigned also to the un-photographed, the absent, and unremembered. In fact, Halberstam established this exclusion to be precisely the queer aesthetic.

We see here a contradiction of terms within the foundational vocabulary of the discourse of queer temporality. Those individuals excluded from Edelman and Halberstam’s initial categories of temporal experience on the grounds of ‘not queer enough,’ or ‘not straight enough,’ do, by virtue of the dominant binary narrative’s refusal to recognize their politics, their liminal status, and their failure to succeed in winning acceptance by either team- these individuals are in fact performing ‘a queer art of failure,’ as Halberstam defined. Failure to succeed in either or just one category of temporal experience sheds light upon the as yet negative space between “ports” in the early establishment of a queer temporality, raising the question again, is it queer enough?

It may be useful to consult Donald Hall’s 2003 book, Queer Theories, to clarify the definition of the term “queer,” and whether or not a disparity has evolved between the term “queer” and its use in the dialectic of temporality. Hall surveys many scholars in his effort to pinpoint the definition of queerness and its particular goal and advantage as an analytical lens, finding it to signify much more than same-sex desire. Hall cites Eve Sedgwick’s Tendencies, in which she further divorces the term queer from resolute homosexuality. “One of the things ‘queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality are made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (qtd. in Hall 70). Citing performance theorist Sue-Ellen Case, Hall asserts, “queer theory, unlike lesbian theory or gay male theory, is not gender specific. In fact, like the term ‘homosexual,’ queer foregrounds same-sex desire without designating which sex is desiring” (55). In this way, ‘queer’ serves as an umbrella term for gay, working to unite disparate populations, sexes, genders, and orientations toward the common cause of awareness and rights for alternative sexualities outside dominant heteronormativity. But Hall further differentiates the gay-rights reclamation of the noun queer, meaning homosexual, from a ‘queer’ adjective describing the theoretical lens put forth by Foucault and interpreted by David Halperin in his 1995 study, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography:

Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality...Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers… (55)

These examples of historical renderings and advantages of the term ‘queer’ illustrate the ways in which its different parts of speech have been adopted to multiple purposes, all the time serving to offer variation from the ‘normalized’ sexual orientation, power dynamic, or analytical framework. As Hall asserts in his introduction, “the concept ‘queer’ emphasizes the disruptive, the fractured, the tactical and contingent” (5). As this emphasis distinguishes between ‘queer’ as a sexual practice and the term’s significance as a lens of analysis in regard to ‘queer theory,’ I will put forth Hall’s broadly useful definition of the adjective ‘queer’ in this investigation of the field of “queer temporality.” Queerness, as Hall says, “is to abrade the classifications, to sit athwart conventional categories or traverse several” (13).

After illustrating a binary of hetero and homosexual temporal narrative structures, Cunningham’s depiction of Clarissa Vaughn’s performance of desire assists in re-imagining a ‘queer moment’ that is not simply same-sex desire but an attraction and behavior outside and in between any one singular performance of desire within the binary. In order to achieve this, The Hours calls attention to the moments of transition between oppositional identities. Laura and Kitty’s moment, for example, is the conversion of their desire and performance of temporality from heterosexual to homosexual. Similarly, Clarissa and Richard’s kiss reflects a moment of transformation in which they both express heterosexual desire. The queer moment, Cunningham suggests, is not necessarily that of same-sex behavior, but the fluidity of an expression of desire beyond demarcations of gay and straight. Cunningham’s focus upon ‘exquisiteness’ can be characterized as this moment of transcendence of categories.

The potential for more voices joining the field of queer temporality all but ensures the eventual evolution of categorical definitions. Jose Esteban Muñoz’s book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, with a title noticeably in contrast to both Edelman and Halberstam’s focus upon endings, asserts that “queerness is essentially about…insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (Muñoz 1). Muñoz’s language makes clear that the singular and definitive category is unnecessary, for queerness is “a mode of being not quite there but nonetheless an opening, utopian feelings indispensable to the act of imaging transformation” (9). Creating or performing the new ‘image’ or act of that next potential, its behavioral expression, is significant. This is what Cunningham’s characters enact in their queer moments. Clarissa describes her exquisite kiss as exactly the embodiment of perceived potential. “Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment” (Cunningham 97). Years later, having recalled their kiss again and again, Clarissa still feels that “perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more” (98). The queer moment persists and returns again and again because of its ability to transcend the singular.

Despite the ability of queer theorists to disrupt essentialist categories of identity, as well as the past several decades’ emphasis upon unsettling binaries of gender and sexuality via the LGBTQ continuum, early discussions in queer temporality at times reify an oppositional staging of gender and sexual distinctions. The assertion of such separate categories needlessly flattens the diversity of experience as well as the breadth of the term queer. As performances of same-sex and opposite-sex attraction, as well as the fluidity of sexual and gender identification, become increasingly, and visibly, apparent, the discussion of queer temporality will expand with what Muñoz calls “the anticipatory illumination of the utopian” (Muñoz 11). If “queer studies offers us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of elsewhere, but existing alternatives in hegemonic systems” (Halberstam 89), then this alternative may be in the face of heteronormative dominance, or in reaction to an exclusive binary of queer vs. heterosexual temporalities. The radical and transgressive distinctness upon which lesbian and gay political identities depend will necessarily evolve as communities continue to ‘succeed’ in expressing the multiple, other, indefinable, and as yet of sexual identity. The globe of sexuality studies turns, the queer lens and its voices taken up by other(s), be they bisexual, transgender, asexual, some, or none of these.

The question then becomes not “is it queer enough” but how can queer temporality discussion continue to disrupt its own definitions and expectations, resisting limited and oppositional categories of representation? Michael Cunningham uses narrative temporality in his novel, The Hours, to suggest that the queer moment arises upon transformation, upon conversion, upon the unexpected. The queer moment is in fact the space in between categories of sexual orientation and temporal experience that theorists are still to discuss. The Hours offers an opportunity to expand the discussion of queer temporality and reimagine what that exquisite moment can look or feel like.

Works Cited

Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar Strauss, Giroux, 1998. Print.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University

Press, 2004. Print.

Edelman, Lee. “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive.” Narrative. Vol. 6, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 18-30. Print.

Freeman, Elizabeth, ed. “Queer Temporality.” A Special Issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay & Lesbian Studies 13.2-3: (2007).

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Print.

Gallup, Jane. “Sedgwick’s Twisted Temporalities, ‘or even just reading and writing.’” Ed. McCallum and Tuhkanen. Queer Times, Queer Becomings. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. Print.

Garber, Marjorie. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Haffey, Kate. “Exquisite Moments and the Temporality of the Kiss in Mrs. Dalloway.” Narrative, May 2010: 137-162.

Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Hall, Donald E. Queer Theories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Michel, Frann. Rev. of Bisexuality: The Psychology and Politics of an Invisible Minority/Bisexuality and the Challenger to Lesbian Politics/Hybrid. Signs Winter 1998: 536.

Munoz, Jose Exteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs. Sex and Sexuality, Summer, 1980: 631-660.

The Purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 2010. Web. 8/13/2013. Internet.

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Cecile Berberat grew up in Ohio and Washington DC. She has her MFA in fiction and her Masters of Literature from the University of Montana. Her favorite things are storm clouds and houseboats.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry from CutBank 81 by Oliver Bendorf

FROM CUTBANK 81

PROVINCETOWN

In my mind, I beg our blood to work. To keep us loving

long after we’ve breached. I lean into your shoulder, not light

like a shearwater, but heavy and insistent as the horn of a goat.

The dunes that separate our maritime kingdom

from fields of corn are an elaborate set. The puppets may be

tragic, may be lonesome, full of gravity, but we are deliberate

and afraid of nothing. We kiss at the bar, tequila heavy

on our knees, like whales identifiable only by certain scars.

He slaps the water with his fin because he can, the naturalist had said.

Back at the campground, sunburnt, in the dark, we find each

other’s heads below the blueberry shrubs (because we can)

and we do so in the shape of love, which is a peninsula.

We are setting up the rain fly. We are stoned and can’t get it right.

We are inside our minds thinking, I was almost an island.

It never does rain. I never do get bored. Leaving the Cape

on Route 6, we chew taffy and listen to oldies. Here is

the bridge. We do not hit traffic. We do not break down.

THE WOODLOT

I practiced on a dead possum

my father and I found on a walk

through the woodlot. After dinner

I snuck back down to the woods

where the skull hung at eye-level

in the knot of a tree and I said

“Marry me.” The possum’s other bones

lay to the side of the trail,

buried under the first fallen leaves.

Other days, I thought

I might ask it with glow-in-the-dark

stars on the bedroom ceiling,

or on the chalkboard if she got a

teaching job. We were, as they

say, not getting any younger. In

the little woodlot in Iowa

under the quiet gaze of bones,

queer theory nagged at me

like yesterday’s nettle in the finger.

There were too many reasons

why I was not supposed to want

to marry her, but we wouldn’t

have to tell. We could just do it.

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Oliver Bendorf is a writer and visual artist living in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the author of The Spectral Wilderness, selected by Mark Doty for the 2013 Wick Poetry Prize and forthcoming September 2014 from Kent State University Press.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Prose and Visual Art by Cooper Lee Bombardier

 

And When I Move I Won't Stop For Anything

 Abington & Boston, 1986

If it weren’t for Joey Marck, I’d probably still wear my hair in asymetrical bangs like a pony’s forelock over one eye, rocking one lace glove and embodying the tough secret lez of Wendy and Lisa. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, although my predilection for Prince and the Revolution was seen by my parents to be the root of all of my teen behavioral issues. Joey Marck was a quiet, tall kid with a low sensuous purr of a voice, dark hair and pretty nondescript, avoiding both cliques and negative attention in the halls of high school. He maybe was tangentially a band kid, but I knew him from my neighborhood, where his family lived up the other end of Lincoln Street. His older sister, who came home on occasion from college, Framingham State or something, was a distant, dark shadow of coolness. Her tall spikey hair and Eye of Horus mascara was just a passing blip from car to doorway, but I watched her quick trajectory between the oak trees along the Marck’s driveway with a longing and curiosity I couldn’t name, wishing she’d come out and talk to us, throw us a lifeline. Her knifey goth looks let me know that there was something out there beyond our little town, that there was more than this. A confined herd of wild ponies stamped and snorted in my blood, calling me away, my eyes always compassing toward the distant horizon. I was afflicted with a constant, unnameable yearning to be somewhere else. Joey Marck’s big sister was proof of the bountiful frontier.

One day, maybe Junior year of high school, Joey Marck invited me to an all-ages show at The Rat in Kenmore Square.

“What kind of show?”

“Hardcore,” he said. “A hardcore punk show.” His mom dropped us off at the Braintree T station at the end of the line. Somehow I was able to secure permission to go, which must have been because Joey hadn’t yet seared into parental memory as a bad influence, hadn’t been involved in any of my previous wrong-doings. Plus, it was just a matinee show, we'd back before dark, even.

The Red Line train swayed and clicked north, rocketing us toward Boston. South Shore trees parted to thin tendrils of land saddlebagged on all sides by marshes and inlets of murky saltwater, thundering underground and springing back above the crust. To the West crowded the rear-ends of three-flat houses, laundry flapping off of back porches, the population thickening. We rattled along to JFK/UMass, the city rising above, and then again into darkness. We transferred to the Green Line at Park, and then we were there, Kenmore Square, humming with cars and students, shoppers and pan-handlers, the smell of hotdogs and human shit, sag paneer and perfume, the already-open bars wafting the dank rot of spilled beers, endless cigarettes, and regret.

Out front of The Rathskeller a line of kids already waited, a dark horde bristling with Knox-gelatine Liberty spikes, leather jackets with favorite bands’ logos painted on in cracked white acrylic, shaved pates glistening in the early day glare, mohawked kids crowing and pecking like roosters. Skinheads leaned against buildings smoking, lean and tough in tight maroon flight jackets and bluejeans, their tall Docs laced as secure as corsets, a secret language in their shoe-lace colors. The girl-skins were buzzed close save for bleach-blonde curtains of hair combed down straight over eyebrows and temples; their eyes tough, obsidian sharp, flickering up from beneath their fringe bangs as they dragged hard on smokes pinched tight between black-nailed fingertips. Here even the goths and death-rockers were harder, tougher, freakier, their skin pastier and their make-up more theatrical. They practically traveled under their own personal stormclouds. The death-girls were ornate and beautiful, hot vicious ghosts, but I’d glance away sharp and shy whenever one cast their Elvira eyes across me.

We walked past a gangly, dreadlocked homeless guy who pointed at us and smiled until we flashed nervous smiles back, and then he ripped out an lavish lick on his guitar.

            Hey, Mr. Butch, some of the kids called out to him. He waved and smiled.

“Who’s that?” I stage-whispered to Joey Marck. A kid standing in line wearing a too-big Minor Threat teeshirt locked eyes on me.

“Mr. Butch?” the kid said, “He’s like, the King of Kenmore Square.”

The Rat was a low cave in the underbelly of a building. My boots scuffed and slipped on the alternately gritty and wet floor. I wandered inside after Joey, close and overwhelmed, someone just off the train in a foreign country. My eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom from the bright outside. Silhouettes of architectural hairstyles swum in the haze, terrible predators swirling in a primordial sea. The music was ear-popping. It entered my body through every orifice, every pore, electrifying every follicle, every cell. On the stage the band Slapshot hunkered down, the thick neck of Choke, the singer, was roped in bulging veins. He screamed into a mic and brandished a broken hockey stick in his other hand. Every half-note of rage I’d ever swallowed down was given permission to be voiced, a terrible faucet I was reluctant to open for fear that I might never be able to crank it shut. My anger and the anger of the group pooled with the anger of all kids everywhere who thought the shit continuously spoonfed them as gospel truth was a bucket of lies. I shuffled to rear of the mass of bodies knotted closest to the dance floor, peering through the hairdos and past the leather and tattered denim, the odor of sweat and cigarettes.

Slapshot was followed by Verbal Assault, and then the headliner, Dag Nasty. One band blended into the next, my brain on audio-visual over-stim. Kids were flying in the pit, a teeming throng of bobbing heads. Fists, elbows, and knees shooting out from torsos in an anarchic martial art, skanking to the furious beat of the music. There was a current, a counter-clockwise tide churning bodies in a centrifuge, an undertow that could rip you right off of your feet. Every so often, a boy—never a girl—would launch himself onto the stage, and flip from it as if into a public pool. A mass of hands formed a conveyer belt, moving the boys in Christlike repose across the throbbing miasma of bodies in motion. Whenever anyone got sucked under, the violent whirlpool bent and scooped up the fallen one without a single break in rhythm.

I stood there in the back, on the edge, in my Revolution-angled bangs, my temples shaved, my denim jacket painted on the back with the word “Prince” in violet acute-angled Purple Rain typography. I had on brown pointy boots to which I’d fashioned loops of chains around the ankles. I felt like a little kid who had just woken up to the fact that the world existed outside and around them, with or without them.

On the train back to the suburbs, the cheap metal trumpets of my ears rang loud white echoes, the quiet became louder than the noise. Joey Marck slid over close to me on the plastic bench.

“What did you think?” His eyes studied my face closely. He was that kind of kid, a watcher, a payer of attention.

“That was fucking cool.” I didn’t have anything more erudite to say about it. I always needed some time for experiences to absorb in to my psyche. I knew I’d heard the tolling bell of change at the show, but I didn’t quite know what it meant yet.

Joey nodded, always patient, kind. He pressed a wrinkled, thumb-smeared newsprint magazine into my hands. The Suburban Voice. Gritty black and white photos and text, cut and pasted together like a ransom note, yelled out from the cover.

“You should get into this stuff.”

“What is this?” I held up The Suburban Voice. I hated not knowing anything. It was pretty much the worst feeling, but Joey didn’t sweat me for being a rube.

“It’s a ’zine. It covers the punk scene. Music, shows, record reviews, other ’zines. Stuff like that. I think you’ll like it.” And just like that Joey Marck introduced me to the world beyond our town.

I ditched my Prince jacket and shaved a small patch of hair off one side of my head at the temple. My mother, with her ever-scrutinous eagle-eyes, spotted it immediately and gave me a sound yelling at. I took off and hid out in the fort in the woods all day and into the night and when finally I got cold and tired of being cramped up in the small damp plywood structure I went home. I was getting a little old to hide out in the fort, but I knew she wouldn't pursue me. She left me alone when I came back. I had to knock so that she’d unlock the door to let me in. She left me a note, the first written apology I ever received from her. You’re almost an adult, you can do what you want with your hair, it said. But I had to play it cool. I was still living at home, still in high school, still in Abington. My first ever all-ages punk show might have changed me, but my surroundings and circumstances were, for now, still the same.

My father smote the kitchen table with his fists and whipped a hot buttered English muffin across the kitchen at my face when I said I didn’t want to go to summer school. For a small, light object, the muffin caused quite a bit of pain and I held my fingers to the point of impact. I had to go for algebra or risk being held back from senior year. Being kept back a grade was worse to my parents than a ruined summer was to me, it appeared. In the high school office I went to register for summer school and one of the teachers turned and loud enough for everyone to hear said, “Aren’t you supposed to be our senior class president?”

“Yeah,” I said, filling out a form on the counter with a Bic pen.

“Well.” He looked at me like someone just farted. “We’ve never had a senior class president wind up in summer school before.” I didn’t want his goddamn boot on my neck. I ran for office just to be a pain in the ass to the kids who cared—I won. My hand went to my cheek, where my dad’s English muffin had left a hot-buttered road rash. I was deemed a gifted and talented kid early on, but it seemed clear to everyone, myself included, that my gift expired. I wasn't bad enough to be a bad kid, I wasn't fucked up enough, as least as far as anyone could discern, to merit intervention. I was now relegated in to the energetic rubbish bin as a lazy kid who wasn't living up to their full potential. The culture of silence was so effective that no one ever had to tell me not to reach out for help, to make steps to foment change. It was by osmosis that I knew not to tell people about my problems, that it was our cultural inheritance to endure. Without direction or options, I decided to apply to art school once I got this crummy summer school session out of the way.

“Well, it’s a whole new world I guess.” I passed the form over to the receptionist and walked out of the office. I tried to imagine what holding my head high would look like, and did that.

I saved up my money from my job at the local supermarket and bought a cheap leather biker jacket. I painted it and over time encrusted it with countless pointing things, like a pier piling under the sea, more and more matter barnacled onto it until the jacket became its own ecosystem. For my birthday, Eric gave me a pair of black leather monkey boots he mail-ordered from London. I wore ratty jeans etched with band names in ball-point pen, patched at the knees with scraps of a cut-up American flag, or spattered with stark white dapples of bleach that before long eroded into holes. I shaved my hair around the sides with hair clippers and ratted out the long top with Aqua-net and a steel comb. My dyed hair hovered above my head in a noxious cloud. Here I found a uniform of disenfranchisement that gave me a moat of space, a prickly uniform of individuality that afforded me a physical buffer equal to the volume of alienation I felt. I recast myself in a subset, placed myself in a bin of broken toys.

My new uniform meant something—a tough fuck you I couldn't yet muster aloud, a tangible manifestation of my rage and disenchantment. Most important of all this uniform served as a disguise, with my gender missteps neatly hidden beneath other transgressions. The outlandish hair, the armored pointy jacket, the rings of black eyeliner casting lunar eclipses over my clear blue eyes, the mounting number of sewing needles I poked through my left ear until there were ten tiny holes with metal hanging from them, the scraggly tattoo of an ankh, a symbol of eternal life that I etched into my pinky finger with a safety pin and India ink—I was reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead after we covered the art of ancient Egypt in a survey course at art school—all of this worked as dazzle camouflage behind which my inability to present as sufficiently female could hide. There were exceptions to this, sure, but now there was a large swath of people, based on my outward appearance, that I could fit in amongst. Girls and boys alike looked similar to each other and to me. Yeah, there were the clean-cut skinheads who were just jocks with tall Doc Marten's on one end, and on the other pole of the spectrum, the unbelievably ornate, spooky, gorgeous goth girls. But in the middle of this noisy rookery many of us appeared to be flavors of each other, with fucked up hair and silkscreened band teeshirts, jangling metal bits, creaking musky leather, smudged and weepy eyeliner. It didn't really matter what was between our legs. My pointed and shadowy veneer allowed me to be both a girl and to feel like myself. Looking like this I finally was able to telegraph out into the world how fucked up and not a part of the fucked up world I felt.

Being punk meant hanging out. Near the steps of the Boston Public Library in the cold months homeless folks lay in gray bundles on huge sidewalk air vents staying warm in the exhalations of some great subterranean beast. Lots of places to lurk about inside and be warm but the point was to hang out and be seen. So you'd shuffle back and forth on your boots and stuff your hands deeper into your coat pockets, trying to warm up and be seen. There was the BPL steps, where I felt heroic standing near the great seated bronze robed figures, the thinker and the artist. There was Copley and Kenmore Square, but I picked The Pit at Harvard Square, a brick and concrete depression on the back of the Red Line stop, as my primary roost because I got a job making copies at a store up on Brattle Street. The place sheltered a mix of annoying polo-shirt wearing angry young skins, older ska punks with thick forearms and thick-lined tattoos, gothy-death rockers, and kids looking to score or sell drugs sat around, the confluence waxing and waning throughout the day, rising around dusk, the number of kids reaching critical mass on Saturday afternoons. Some punks spare changed, something I never did and judged. They could fucking work. Sure, it was harder to get a job looking like any of us did but not unheard of in the parts of Boston where we all hung out. Some kids with large fin mohawks or liberty spikes tended to tamp down their exuberant hairstyles with a comb and a hat for their workdays.

“Hey, C____, check this one out,” Crazy Todd said, trawling in the deep pockets of his beige trenchcoat to retrieve a book. He handed it to me in his mallet hand. The cover looked like sci-fi meets Carlos Casteneda. Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

“Original cyberpunk,” he said in his way of talking, which felt like staring even though he didn't make eye contact with me. He hoisted himself up onto the wall beside me. The young skins looked away, even though one of them had just been trying to mouth off to me a second before Todd sauntered over.

Crazy Todd didn't look punk at all and yet all of the punks regarded him with a type of nervous deference and swiveled out of his way when he came to hang out and sit on the wall in The Pit. He was just a couple years older than me but he seemed far older. He spent most days out in front of a cafe in the Square that had chessboards carved into the tabletops, playing against the aged chess masters who brought their own game pieces and timers. In addition to his tan trenchcoat he always wore a ubiquitous hickey on his neck. He also often sported the bluish remains of a black eye. He and I got along well and he always wanted to talk to me about the books he was reading, which he fished out of the bottomless reaches of his trenchcoat pockets and presented to me in his large raw-knuckled hands. I marveled at the way Crazy Todd's violent-looking hands held a trade paperback with such ginger tenderness. Knowledge was important to him.

“Read it,” he said, “Borrow it.” I was about to tell him that I didn't much care for science fiction, but then I didn't want to refuse this small kindness from Crazy Todd.

When no one else was around I would find a spot in the sun in Harvard Square and draw or write in my journal. My journal was a constant companion, I always sketched in it and wrote down the minutiae of my days. People engaged me and my journals as if we were conjoined twins. When people referred to my journal as I was writing, I wrote that in my journal too. Writing was my companion and I never felt alone when I scrawled thoughts, ideas, and images into the black hardcover books.

On days I worked at the copy store I'd grab a slice of pizza  or if I had enough money, a felafel from The Garage, and wander up to Allston Beat and examine the overpriced leather and spikes imported from England, or the rack of second-hand vintage clothes, where I'd either be ignored or flirted with depending on the salesperson. Hey, nice Creepers. I like your leather jacket. Did you paint that? Or: silence, sneers. Then a stop into Newbury Comics to look at records, and a spin through The Pit. If it was only the clean-cut younger skinheads I'd keep walking and make a round through the Harvard Coop and say hi to Eric or Sluggo if either of them were working at the frame shop. But if it was Boots or any of the other punks I would eat my food sitting up on the wall in The Pit. And then I would go sit in the sun and write in my book. It was while alone I was approached by strangers. Hey, can I take your picture? I appreciated good manners. But I always forced myself into a serious face and asked them for a dollar.

Every Saturday night at midnight the Rocky Horror Picture Show was screened in Harvard Square and that was a good place to hang out too. It was hard not to have a boner for whoever was Magenta that week. It was fun to go with Eric. He hated the singing but loved the shout-along audience participation parts. It's like being in a room full of people invited to heckle. He usually brought not one but two rolls of toilet paper. I hated musicals, but liked all the men in fishnets and the tough girls with arms akimbo up on stage before the movie screen. I was glad I didn't work in the theater, what a fucking mess.

Being punk meant taking a break from hanging out and going to places where your friends, or people you wished you were cool enough to be friends with, worked. If they liked you enough maybe you'd get free shit, like a new button for your leather jacket, or maybe something to eat for the five-finger discount or at least half-off. Making the rounds downtown to the underground cave of the little rock and roll shop Stairway to Heaven where a pretty pale girl with perfect Siouxsie Sioux makeup that arched up theatrically into the crevices between her eye sockets and the bridge of her nose would give you sarcasm that felt almost like love as she sold you a button or a black teeshirt. What are you looking at, dicknose?  She snorted as she slid the eponymous button across the glass countertop toward me. Why issue them an invitation to read your lapel? Both terrified and thrilled that she spoke to me, I slid her a rumpled dollar and hurried up to the street. Then ride the old elevator with an operator in a red twill vest up to the enormous expanse of Strawberry Records where you could browse the import vinyl section. The operator looked up from his crimped posture and crooned, Third floor: Straaaaw-berries, as he pushed the tarnished lever to one side. The accordioned gate complained when it open to spit you out into the cavernous store. Peruse the import vinyl section and the independent label section. Too expensive. Then down to the edge of Chinatown to where the remains of the old Combat Zone hung on with a couple of tenacious and ragged sex shops, a jerk-off booth movie theater, and a tiny strip club huddled together for safety. Take a gander into the fenced off remains of an ancient and crumbling entrance to the Green Line tunnels, the chipping tiles and rusty gate and the stairs leading down into the mystery of the city's bowels, how badly you want to go down into the dark.

Then back up Washington past the old opera house, the iron gate pulled across the ornate foyer of the place but an observant eye is rewarded by the discovery that the padlock isn't clasped closed, and with a subtle move, in a beat between pedestrians who tend to steer away from this end of the drag, you can slip inside, fish the heavy manual 35 mm camera out from  your army surplus shoulder bag, and take black and white photos of the ornate baroque scrollwork back-lit in silhouette by the dim light of the gray day in the gray city. Being an artist was part of being punk. Then finish the downtown rounds with a walk through the Commons and maybe buying a tiny bag of popcorn from a vendor for a dollar and sharing it with the extroverted squirrels who come and lift each white puff from your fingertips with their tiny gray wizened hands and regard you with black eyes as they sit on their haunches and eat with you.

Being punk meant going to shows at The Rat, TT The Bears, The Middle East Cafe, The Channel, Avalon, Axis, Man Ray, The Living Room down in Providence, Rhode Island. You were always looking for shows, looking in the paper, looking at flyers, waiting in lines along the sidewalk til doors opened, trying to scrounge the money for tickets or cover, trying to sneak in.

            Hey are you going to see _____?

            _________ are touring, did you see in the Suburban Voice that they're playing at T.T.'s?

            Aw man, _______ is playing at The Orpheum? It's gonna cost a mint!

Going to shows was a never-ending quest and you always had to go to be seen and know you were alive. If you were lucky a kid would kick open the back door of The Channel to let some cool fresh air in and hold it open with their foot long enough for you to slip into the churning current of kids. It meant getting into bars like Ground Zero even though I was only eighteen because the spectacularly goth Sadie Night from MassArt worked the door and let us all sneak in. It meant getting hammered on vodka tonics and dancing in a circle until you thought you might puke in a swirl of teevee sets set to static and covered with chicken wire and painted black and being too hung over to go to classes the next day.

Being punk meant people saying weird shit to you and strangers touching you or taking your picture or asking questions like why would a pretty girl like you do something so ugly to your hair or face. It meant sometimes people would ask things out of friendly curiosity and sometimes others would ask out of undisguised hostility.

“Hey, what are you, a boy or a girl?” Shouted by some construction workers up on scaffolding alongside a building.

“Why don't you suck my dick and find out!” My response. When several of the burly men in tool belts and hard hats drop quick as panthers down off the scaff to the sidewalk and start tearing toward me, I run faster than I ever imagined possible, my purple hair flapping in the wind, black leather uniform jingling, into a nearby Red Line T station and vault myself over the turnstile and don't stop running until my body is safe inside the propelling tuna can under the city.

Being punk meant spending a lot of time alone, walking about, waiting around to hang out with others, standing around waiting to get noticed, lurking around also to watch. If I could position myself somewhere in the world where people knew my name and would come over and talk to me, perhaps it meant I did exist. If I could see other people turning their heads and noticing me, perhaps I too could be seen.

--------------------------------

Cooper Lee Bombardier is writer and visual artist based in beautiful Portland, Oregon, where he grows kale and listens to the freight trains and ships all night. His work appears in several anthologies and periodicals, including Sister Spit: Writing, Rants, and Reminiscence From the Road, Cavalcade, The Rumpus, and Original Plumbing. He teaches writing at Portland State University.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Patrick Samuel

field that is tongues

mostly guttural in pipe whines how rarely folds brain out my skull, sap instantly antiquing… I ended up eating some eggs that yelped when lifted. A great TV tomb gabs blind that night. Chain through slit; vodka in milk. I’m related to a famous train robber through marriage (the boardwalk attracts mostly foreigners or is a place to kiss); either one’s loud. Pump soap down and not wind racketing back through. For curdle, cups in waterare ships so survivors gather on the hull before drowning soap from my hair. It was nice, for them to do that— I’d been sour all day.

--------------------------

Patrick Samuel lives in Chicago, where he received his MFA from Columbia College.  He stays active in the community by co-curating a local reading/performance series called The Swell.  His most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Bloom, Gertrude, LEVELER and The Corduroy Mtn.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Leah Horlick

Monotheism It takes three years to forget her. The first, I circle

seven times to cast out the devil. Crush it, glass beneath my heel. Lift the veil. Say,

this was not the bride I wanted. Until I sound like I mean it, canopied and alone.

The second, I leave behind. Burning, disastrous, a trail of salt

from my own pillar. What I turned when I turned back.

The third, I arrive at the doorstep of her memory, smear it

in blood. Somewhere, I call another woman

by her name, on purpose.

-------------------------------------------

Leah Horlick is a writer and poet from Saskatoon, SK. A 2012 Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, her writing has appeared in So To Speak, Canadian Dimension, GRAIN,Poetry is Dead, Plenitude, Adrienne, and on Autostraddle. Her first collection of poetry, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012) was shortlisted for a 2013 ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award. She currently lives on Unceded Coast Salish Territories in Vancouver, where she co-curates REVERB, a queer and anti-oppressive reading series.  Her next collection is forthcoming from Caitlin Press in 2015. 

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Jessica Jacobs

Music—Pink and Blue II

O’Keeffe, with Stieglitz [New York, NY; 1917]

Tonight, I’d paint the world

with a broom

and not be careful

of the floor. Sweep your wife,

your daughter, your any

other women

away. Here,

now, your body

shows me

how to play the notes,

not as written

but as meant

to be played: incantation,

duration, dissolution. Breath,

a circle with two

centers: each

cerulean reservoir; each

a seed syllable—creped bulbs:

vermillion, viridian, byzantium

white. In our hands,

a garden.

Self-Portrait in Absentia

Stieglitz, with O’Keeffe [New York, NY; 1918]

His eye was in him, and he used it on anything nearby. Maybe in that way he was always photographing himself.—O’Keeffe

I see you better than you see yourself.—Stieglitz, in a letter to O’Keeffe; 1918

Part that kimono so it frames you like a stage

curtain. Here, on this stool. Slump a bit.

Let’s take faces out of it. I’ll begin

where your breasts do & end

with your hips. Sag your stomach,

inhale to flatten—no matter;

I control the moment

of exposure. And in my jerry-rigged darkroom

across the hall—while you, in our studio,

remain naked & waiting—I decide

to overexpose the rift

between your thighs, leaving burnt

black absence where a presence

once had been. What lies

in that darkness is mine.

Opening night, I’ll wear you

on my arm; spin you like a child

playing pin-the-tail, with you

on every wall. You deny those faces

could possibly be yours, but

glassed and hung in the gallery

they become you—& you, them.

Composite [Self-]Portrait as Wise Desert Elder

O’Keeffe [Abiquiu, NM; 1976]

I was 32, and she was 79 . . . I took some pictures . . . [then the] game had ended, and I’d won.—photographer John Loengard

All these men

with cameras

in hand,

comparing the length

of their lenses.

I am not twenty-nine

anymore. I am no one’s

wife. I own

and abide in two

houses and inhabit

my face as fully.

In my desert,

I orchestrate

the light, seat

myself beneath

this cow skull.

I need them only

to take the picture.

Georgia O’Keeffe, by Alfred Stieglitz (Composite Portrait)

O’Keeffe [compiling Stieglitz’s early portraits of her into a book, Abiquiu, NM; 1978]

When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives.—O’Keeffe

Tilted black bowler,

white collar just so:

androgynous dandy,

fingers splayed

as any mouth

in amateur soft-core.

It was so much easier

to just disappear. One grows

tired of insisting.

Cowled scowler, arched

brow; propped against

a wooden wall, stuck

with hay and staples.

When we were just words,

I mailed him hasty bundles

of brown wrap and twine.

He shellacked my drawings

with fixative, chided me

a careless mother. But

the instant I gave them

to another’s eyes—even

his—they were no longer mine.

These portrait selves, the same.

Unheaded torso against

diaphanous screen,

pelvic jut and breast,

muscled chest, dark

rivers of thigh.

Public carapace, a surprising

relief. Aquifer-me freed

to branch subterranean.

While, overhead, the clicking

whisper of his acquisitive eye.

-----------------------------------------------

Jessica Jacobs’ debut collection, Pelvis with Distance, a biography-in-poems of Georgia O'Keeffe, is forthcoming from White Pine Press in 2015. Poems from this book have or will soon appear in journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, and Redivider. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, Editor of Sycamore Review, Acquisitions Editor, and now as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Hendrix College. She lives in Little Rock, AR with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown. (jessicalgjacobs.com) 

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Flower Conroy

Me, Me Not  

Not a contrived still life, but as if I hid

in a field behind a giant bloom, efflorescence obscured.

Tepals, skin & sepals.  Petrichor—scent of rain on garland,

on dust, my breath & the word

for blood in the mouth is hesitate.  Is ichor.   My face

a giant flower.  If I could be reborn something beautiful.

You vacillate, plucking my heartstrings, does she/

does she not… Orchid wicked, or fringed in cones.

Steeped in eucalyptus.  Or among the apple clover.

You alone in a corn field reveal your corolla.

Behind you, the sun, a candle wrapped in paper.

Necrosephilia

From the window, their unencumbered skeletons

cradle the overcast light, piercing the crisp

purpling sky:  I’ve pruned the bushes, ravished

hands hatched in scratches, caked in dirt. 

Weak canes whittled until only a few stalks jut

against a colorless landscape, rust switches, leaf- & bloom-

less.  Gnarled thorn spangled stems.  Dead rose

love.  I’ve raked the leaflets; broken peduncles

top-heavy with petal, I’ve ushered the unopened hips

into a mound & have left a wake of bouquets, undressed

as x-rays, bruised eyelids, damp swatches—Bit O’ Magic,

Angel Darling, Sweet Surrender—strewn at your feet.

You Refused to Leave

the unsaid, unsaid & I somewhither, wanderlust-

ing among the hedgerows in the small

hours.  My footfalls, like dye seeping through

the memory of blooms, & the blooms

themselves, clairvoyant, broken-

necked in their urns.  Ornamental.  The solipsistic

manner in which they stare at the abandon

(that is, the giving of themselves un-

restrainedly) their shadows scatter

across the stepping rocks I navigate—rattles me.

And when you find me

you startle me, I did not hear you

approaching, & before whatever

it is that will befall, before you are

breath—I fix my fingers to your mouth.

A sinkhole encroaches and my sub-

conscious won’t relinquish you.  Earth divorces

itself from itself  like a piece of cornbread

you try to butter, all crumble in your palm.  I cup

my ear to the wall, eavesdrop on the popping—

like a can tab knuckled opened, or a dropped light

bulb exploding, a tongue tocking across its roof’s

mouth.  Grass sunders, a raw avalanche.

The approaching abyss has consumed the row

of hemlocks once bucking this street & a bird

bath, & now threatens to devour our weeping

willow.  Where I stand looking down at the lip

thoughts tumble in unable to climb out.

--------------------------------------------

Flower Conroy’s first chapbook, Escape to Nowhere was selected as first runner up in the Ronald Wardall Poetry Prize and was published by Rain Mountain Press.  Her second chapbook is forthcoming from Headmistress Press.  Her poetry is forthcoming/has appeared in American Literary Review, Poydras Review, Jai Alia, Sierra Nevada Review, and other journals.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Visual Response to Federico García Lorca by Crystal Hartman

Medium: acrylic, gold and latex on raw canvas

Date: July 2014

Dimensions: 5feet x 9.5 feet

FROM THE ARTIST:

Long after witnessing the unraveling of desperate lovers all around me plagued by the impossible desire to be understood, after falling into the trance of ego, lust for childhood, want for emptiness and hate of love, I find myself trapped with the weight of finishing a task I'd begged to be given.  Sitting on a bench thick with years of fresh red paint, silent beneath a wooden roof held high on granite pillars cut from the quarry one hundred years ago, kids squealing with joy and terror as they weave between mechanical airplanes, trains, photo booths and fortune tellers, shielded from the cracking light, deafening roar of a storm so heavy, it has filled the creek, flooded the streets and closed the roads in and out of this small, mountain town.  The parallels are almost unbearable.

Federico García Lorca whets my perception everywhere I go these days. Words, so many words, tumbling through imagery, metaphor, history and experience that at first it is hard to understand just what he is saying, all I know is that something within me moves to the sound of a familiar, ephemeral angst.  As I read and re-read and translate and copy Tu Infancia En Menton what comes to the surface is a universal concept, one that cries out so loudly from the depths of experience that without intentionally going there, a mountain of chapters -Pop, Contemporary, Deco, Nouveau, Renaissance, Rococo, Abstraction, Realism, Expressionism, Impressionism- show up in my response.  This yearning, longing, impossible desire, encouraging acceptance, dream of childhood's empty perspective, disintegrated ego, thrown away mask and drama of a romantic who's found his god in love, lost love, returned love -none of these prefaces matter- is so beautiful. Lorca illuminates the exquisite imperfection -the humanity!- and allows me, slowly, to revel in the ardor of process and discovery with undulating breath stirred by a delicate hope until I know without a doubt that

You are not alone.

-------------------------------------

Artist Statement: I create mischievous delights... whimsical, carnal, sculptural pieces that grow from a meditation on beauty, compassion and jubilant life. In the fingerprints of Gaudi, Bali, Dali, I aim to awaken the foxy sincerity that revolts from symmetry and flourishes in genuine experience.

The impetus for my work is a love of conversation and process. What I find interesting are the connotations we attach to language, to life, and the compassion required to appreciate divergent perspectives. A field of grass is just a field of grass; yet, in a breezy afternoon, when the sun shines through bright white clouds, it is alive and a part of me and a part of you.

Bio: Crystal Hartman is a multi-media artist, a writer and a jeweler. Her work has been shown at locations such as The Lill Street Art Gallery, Chicago Illinois, The National Palace of Culture, Sofia Bulgaria and the Center for Contemporary Culture Barcelona Spain. She received her BFA for Printmaking from The University of Colorado at Boulder and studied Image in Enamel at Ox-Bow, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After studying Femininity in Argentine Society, she filmed for Null Skateboards in Spain, and studied public art and cultural craft in Chaing Mai, Thailand. Inspired by storytelling, culture, and the natural world, her work -large and small- opens conversations within and between disparate perspectives. Hartman uses her paintings as sketchbooks for sculptural jewelry showcased at select galleries and fine jewelry stores throughout the west. Her writing can be found at The Brooklyn Art Library, Brooklyn, New York: her visual poetry, in CutBank Literary Journal, Interrupture Literary Journal and through Plumbery Press.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Prose by Jan Bindas-Tenney

Bow Down Bitches

On my girlfriend’s birthday, the day Beyoncé dropped a surprise album with her name in all CAPS, Drunk in Love and all of that, my girlfriend sat backwards on a tattoo chair while a woman in lipstick and bright white skin scrawled a green and magenta cactus on her collarbone. That day everyone in the tattoo shop shared stories about how many times they had already listened to BEYONCÉ. We hadn’t listened yet and felt both out-of-it/part-of-it, so I burned the songs to a CD. A week later I picked my girlfriend up from work right before dusk, the gray mountains back-lit by strawberry ice cream clouds. I pressed play as she walked across the parking lot to the car. She leaned in to kiss me with her work I.D. still on a lanyard around her neck, clunking into my chest. I breathed into the blond curls around her neck as Beyoncé told us that pretty hurts.

My girlfriend wanted to go to the ocean for her birthday. Lesbians love the ocean. I talked her into the desert beach town in Mexico a couple hours south of Tucson on the Sea of Cortez: Rocky Point or Puerto Peñasco. Right before we headed south, the federales shot up a tourist resort in Rocky Point killing 5 people including Sinaloa drug cartel kingpin, El Macho Prieto or “El MP.” Macho signifies hyper-masculinity. Prieto means dark or black. So Gonzalo Inzunza Inzunza was known, above all, as the black man. Tucson social media buzzed about whether it was safe or not safe in Rocky Point. About whether Rocky Point would now be like Juarez, run by the cartels with body parts in black plastic bags in the streets and what it would mean for tourism, for the half-built condos on Sandy Beach. In an online comment from Mexico, “Good. Now those rich college kids will know what real life is.” El MP’s body went missing after the gunfight.

We drove out of Tucson west on Ajo Way.

Ajo Way quickly morphed from dense city hotdog stands and the corrugated metal of raspado restaurants into a loose suburban sprawl, either side of the road lined with large signs: Tucson Estates, Spring Vista, Babbling Brook, endless x-axes of identical homes in the distance.

We listened to BEYONCÉ once, but not really. We yelled over Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech and “I woke up like this” with the windows down. My girlfriend talked to her mother on the phone. Her mother spoke about the trip to Mexico as if she might be going alone, asking, where will you stay? Do you have enough cash? My girlfriend responded each time with we, we, we. Should we listen again? I asked, popping the CD back in. She nodded. Her mother wanted to know if she’d be safe in Mexico. She rolled her eyes. Yes, we’ll be safe.

White lesbians whose parents try to pray away the gay love BEYONCÉ and it’s complicated. I wonder if Beyoncé knows or cares about her white lesbian fan club.

Some reports of the gunfight said helicopters arrived as people on the ground shot up into the sky. In a YouTube video the shots sounded like electronic beats. Duh-duh-da-da-da-duh. Rocky Point schools cancelled classes that day.

We planned to stop for dinner, but I hadn’t looked at the map and the road snaked through the Tohono O’odham reservation and national park lands. We passed through the O’odham Nation’s capital: Sells. Sells what? After long stretches of empty road, we came to a hospital. We came to a cluster of houses. We were hungry. We took a left after a casino and I started to worry about gas. We needed more. We drove through Why, Arizona. I took a photograph of the sign. Why not? We found reservation gas.

As we set back out I could hear duct tape flapping against the car’s wheel. My girlfriend ripped the bumper on our car when she ran into a fence. The plastic had a strange spiral hole in it. I fixed it with duct tape. Flap, flap, flap as we drove in darkness through the Organ Pipe National Monument. Organ pipe is a type of cactus, but I imagined thousands of church organs anyway, with their tall brass pyramids spread across the brown desert. I imagined short ladies with gray hair wildly playing the keys.

We were broke. No cash, but I charged two nights at the Casa Buena Vida in Las Conchas just south of downtown Rocky Point on my credit card.

At the border we hid our wine under t-shirts in the back seat and got our passports ready. The pink-faced border patrol agent stopped us on the American side. What’s your business in Mexico? Just going to Rocky Point for the weekend, I said. You two look like trouble, he joked and waved us through. Two smiling white faces. I rolled my eyes as we inched across the dividing line. On the other side an officer with a green hat peered in the open window and pushed us along. My girlfriend put our passports away, unused.

The road between the border and Rocky Point felt like a tunnel, like Space Mountain at Disney World, careening through blurry stars. No rest stops, just endless pavement.

In the photos, the five dead men lay supine with arms spread wide, machine guns just out of their grasps, their bellies exposed. One man’s blue shorts looked like swimming trunks. Had he just taken a dip?

It was late, past midnight when we arrived in town. We bumped through flooded ditches then out on a stretch of flat dark sand. We drove past a half-built hotel with no walls, rooms like empty shoeboxes and a plastic nightgown tarp. We approached a security gate. She looked at me. I don’t know, I said. I fumbled in Spanish. We are staying here. I don’t know the house number. Casa Buena Vida. The security guard smiled wide. No problem, miss. He gave us a guest pass for three days, no questions asked. We drove around the corner to a luxurious two-bedroom house. The white stucco fountain spewed water in twinkling evening lights. The waves crashed 30 feet away. We laughed and looked at each other. How did these two penniless dykes end up in a gated luxury palace by the ocean?

In the next house over several white American men blasted Bruce Springsteen. Their Ford truck dwarfed our car. We locked our door and closed the shades. You never know.

The next morning we stepped out on the December beach. No people for miles in either direction. Huge flocks of pelicans dove for fish. There must have been 1,000, maybe more. Millions? We sat watching their greasy brown feathers crash into the shallow froth then back up to the surface, for three hours. Their wide gullets open as they dove at 45 degrees, swooping up gallons of salt water and small fish. We watched the fish glug-glug down to their stomachs. Sometimes the pelicans passed in long clumps and lines, right above our heads.

We walked along the beach to downtown. The malecon is a raised section of rock wall with a jenga game of houses, restaurants and bars teetering over the surf. We looked at blankets for sale. The men yelled at us. Do you want to have a good time? Come to this bar! Cheap margaritas, ladies. You are sisters? At some point my girlfriend reached down and touched my hand. I told her no, not now.

Lesbians sometimes pass as sisters as friends as cousins. I have a deep, mostly irrational, fear of being machine gunned in my stomach for being gay. I imagine they will tell me to bow down, bitch. I imagine my body flat on my back and my belly out, my fingers curled in slightly, palm up.

As we drove out of town on the single-lane, sand-swept road to Choya Bay, I leaned over to turn up the song “Superpower,” a doo-wop duet featuring Frank Ocean: “When the palm of my two hands, hold each other / That feels different / From when your hands are in mine.” In the music video Beyoncé walks through an industrial wasteland looking guerilla fabulous, amassing a protest march behind her and black celebrities on either side: Pharell, Frank Ocean, Kelly Rowland, Michelle Williams, and Luke James. The group eventually faces a stand off with riot police, but the conflict ends at the climax. The video cuts with the two groups lined up chin to chin. We drove by Sandy Beach, which is in between, the part of Rocky Point where the Sonoran Desert meets the sea.

Condo sky-scrapers with red, pink, blue, purple stucco blocked out the sky with empty sand on either side. The condos all had high security gates. Half of them only partially constructed. El MP bled out here at the Bella Sirena. The beautiful mermaid.

We only had $9 cash left. We stopped for fish tacos on the side of the road. The waiter spoke to us about the shooting in hushed Spanglish. He said that never happens here. You should come back, he said, during Spring Break, during the summer, when it’s better. Nobody wants to visit now, he said. Come back during Spring Break and I will find you two pretty girls some boyfriends, he smiled. We laughed. No, thanks. He tried to charge us a higher price than what we agreed. Oh yes, he said, yes. $9 is correct.

Sometimes, other times, the good times, our waitress at a roadside restaurant is a butch dyke with her hair slicked back into a ponytail and high-tops. When we sit down in the diner in that small town she smiles at us with a kind of smile, that knowing kind of smile and we smile back. She brings us extra soda and hangs around over-filling our water. She asks us where we are from and brings our check to the counter for us. She is shy but interested. She tells us the bars to check out, which bands to go see. She asks us about our favorite song on the new Beyoncé album. We give her a big tip.

-------------------

Jan Bindas-Tenney is a Tucson-based queer writer and organizer, trying hard to live the dyke desert dream in a pink adobe house with her girlfriend and dog. She is working on her MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Arizona. For the past decade, Jan was a labor and community organizer, going on strike with the hospital food service workers, spending years getting lost trying to find the lunch ladies of New Jersey to form a union. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Squalorly Journal, Cactus Heart Press, and the Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Prose from CutBank 81 by James Allen Hall

From CutBank 81

PROPHECY

There is no telling what I am, what I’ll do, so I lift the lighter to my hair. The thumb-sized flame crackles as it meets the hard ridge of my Aqua-Netted, Morrissey-inspired pompadour. My audience laughs, four boys like me who have endured the first week of college orientation, their faces smiling each beneath baseball caps. The odor of singed hair fills the room. I would burn my head bald for them. But I would singe every hair on my body to kiss Jamie, a constantly-grinning boy whose worldly ease I want to possess. He lays on his stomach on the bottom bunk of his bed, his pale face propped up by his hands, enthralled as my hair dissolves into smoke. He’s the one who has kidded me into doing this, into making my hair an effigy. “Dude,” he said, grinning at me the way boys do when they want to dare you, “your hair is so gay.”

Tony, a skinny twin who can’t dance and is thus always dancing, sprays the Aqua-Net into the lighter’s flame. My head ignites, an orange periphery surrounds me, and the laughter is harder to hear, beyond the quick ball of fire. Jamie rushes a recently-used shower-towel over my head, and I am dampened, smoldering, laughing, even though I know my hair, my pride, is a disaster. I laugh even though I feel the fire scorching down into the soft part of me, where I hate myself. Self-immolating fool, clown who tries to make boys love him—boys who would, without doubt, feel betrayed if they knew who I really am.

That night, I dream his face closer to mine, our heads making a tent underneath the wet blue cloth. He says, “I want to fire you.”

That year, at frat parties where guys unzip and wave their dicks around, at the urinals in the Student Union bathroom, in the showers where my dorm-mates pass out drunk in their underwear while the water streams down and over their innocent bodies, at times in the common rooms where jocks lounge in shorts that ride up when a leg is thrown casually over the arm of a lucky chair, I avert my eyes. I live in a double-occupancy room in Gordis Hall, on a Baptist campus, in the small town in which I grew up but left. I live a returned townie life. I live it in fear. If I don’t keep the flame of me buried, it will engulf me, send a signal into the dark sky of common brotherhood, dissolve me into so much putrid smoke.

What I am should be extinguished.

***

We know the morality of characters in our fairy tales by their hair. “Golden sunshine in her hair,” Merryweather opines, blessing the infant Princess Aurora before she is cursed to sleep. The same words fall from Malificient’s mouth, but are twisted into curse, as if she is pleased that all that sunshine will go to waste, as if by rendering the maiden unconscious the land itself is cured of sun and moral righteousness. All over peroxide and conditioner.

Think of the Little Mermaid, the sacrifices that were made for her form. Her devoted sisters, having heard through the underwater grapevine that Ariel forever forfeited her fins because her beloved wed another, offer their own hair to the Sea Witch. In exchange, the hag gives them a knife which Ariel must use to kill the Prince in order to regain her mermaid form. Of course, her heart breaks at the sight of her shorn sisters, their bald heads bobbing like jellyfish in the open blue water. But she cannot bring herself to kill; her sisters’ hair has taught her nothing if not self-sacrifice. Think of Rapunzel, letting that stud traipse up her trellis of locks. Think of the hero, lost in the glorious folds of her hair, exalting in the thick ropes of what he must tactilely come to think of as Rapunzel’s most private, lush self. So that when the witch, with her overprocessed permanent and wretched split ends, divests Rapunzel of her hair, the hero has no clue he is climbing into the clutches of evil.

Hair bewitches men. It is the currency of desire. Hair is the prophecy I listen to.

***

Once, I dyed my hair red, let the front of my hair grow out long, until the thick strand reached the nape of my neck. Unfurled, it was a little flame in the wind. I wanted hair I could let down.

Once, I car-flirted my way down to Key West with a man who sped up and smiled. The hair flew over my face, out the window, toward him. My hair, a bridge that beckoned, a line not strong enough to cross.

Once, I watched two South-American men play tennis on the courts outside a friend’s apartment. They played badly while I smoked. My lips left my Marlboros red-kissed. One of them hit the ball over the fence, and it bounced onto the concrete and landed on the second-floor level, where I caught it. The players stopped still. I held the ball out in my hand, Eve proffering an apple. The retriever soon came loping up the steps, the more athletic one with short hair and a liquid smile. I made one up when he asked my name. I asked if he wanted a drink, and he waited there on the terrace. He drank the water while looking into my eyes. The sweat made his skin shine through his shirt. I wanted more when the cup was empty.

Once there was no artifice, only a real body, a hand touching it, saying, You are my beloved, and that is how I know I am real. But that was just a fairy tale: no body is real.

I tried giving up desire. The prayer would start, Please let me wake up different.

Once, I was a man below, a woman on top, a palimpsest that made me less clear to the world and made the world clearer to me.

Once I was not a satyr, a eunuch. Once I was not trans- or bi- or uni-. I could not be prefixed.

Once I was afraid my roots were showing.

Then, I was afraid no one would see them.

***

Hours spent standing behind my mother, her hair unwashed and knotted, a cigarette smoldering down to its filter in the ashtray beside her chair. Hours taking the brush through the matted blond mess, my mother saying, “Brush it harder,” telling me how when she was a child her brother used to drag her through the yard, caveman-style, by her hair. Me raking the comb along her scalp. I grew up in front of the T.V. Behind my mother’s head, I watched Merv Griffin, Sally Jesse, reruns of Green Acres. I loved how the comb organized the hair, then reorganized it, again and again. My middle-parted, side-parted, zigzag-parted mother; feathered mother; faux-beehived mother; diagonal mother; mother waiting to be French-braided, pigtailed, side-ponied, a woman waiting to be made, unmade by my hands.

***

While manning the counter with two other African American women, my boyfriend overhears an older white woman say to his co-worker Yoli, “Why do you and that other woman have such different hair?”

Yoli is East African and wears her hair natural, while Charlotte, the coworker to whom Culturally Insensitive Crusty White Lady gestures, has her hair locked into long dreads. They are all working in a discount bookstore in Rice Village, in Houston, a semi-posh 16-block outdoor shopping center. For Brandon and Charlotte, time slows. They can sense that this old lady in her Anne Taylor powder-blue suit has morphed for Yoli into The Very Last Straw.

“Maybe because we’re two fucking different people,” Yoli snaps.

The manager, a white man who cheats on his black wife, reprimands her, says, “For Chrissakes, Yoli, it’s only hair!” He demands she apologize. She does. Then he fires her.

***

When I was a kid, my grandmother’s chief responsibility in life was to visit her sick elderly friends and gift them the potted, unflowering plants which she grew in her greenhouse. She is visiting one such a friend, a half-hearing woman whose muumuu looks plastic. Dustin and I pass the time in her large dark house by playing hide-and-seek, crawling behind the couches, hiding on the enclosed porch. When it was time to go, grandma’s friend remarked how nice it was to meet “Janie and Dotty.” Afterward, in the heavy car-ride silence, I could see in my grandmother’s tight-drawn mouth a plan forming.

My first haircut, then, took place in a barber shop, complete with Marvy barber pole and townsmen reading the paper, my grandmother standing by, her pocket-book cradled in the crook of her arm. The barber was rough. He’d grab a length of hair, pull it taut between two callused fingers, snip. His belly pressed against the back of my head while he cut the front of me, transforming me. “These boys look…different,” he said to my grandmother, who sent him an imploring look: yes, change them.

“…different” meant I looked like a little girl. A few weeks earlier at the park where my older brother played soccer, a man asked to photograph me on the monkey bars. I was flattered. He told me to “Ask your mommy first,” which I did. My mother met the man, and then retreated back to my brother’s soccer game. I posed on the bars, on the ground, smiling at and for the man, his quickening shutter finger. At the end of our session, he reached a trembling hand out. He stroked my hair and said, “You are such a pretty little girl.” Inside, my heart broke and quivered: I was pretty was true if I was a girl was true. He resheathed the camera, faded out to black.

My scalp throbbed under the barber’s hands, his long, flat black comb, which he pulled out of his cutter’s belt, where he kept scissors and razors and other instruments of torture. My hair was cut across my forehead, lifted above my ears, nearly flat in the back and on the sides. After he was done, my grandmother stooped to the ground, collecting a handful of hair that she then deposited in one of those opaque plastic envelopes she’d brought for the occasion. She paid the man, but did not tip him. She took me and my brother, my clean-cut twin, for ice-cream. I ordered a banana split because I’d never had one before. The white fruit cleaved by three scoops of chocolate. It was disgusting. I relished the maraschino on top but let the black-and-white dessert turn to soup. Sitting on a picnic bench along the town’s main drag, my grandmother beamed at the passersby. She ate her sugar cone expertly, saying more than once, “I’m so glad to be out on a date with my handsome young men.” We were her courtiers, minted heterosexuals, out for granny delights.

“What the fuck did you do to my kids,” my mother said, upon sight of us.

“Now, Marsha. Just gave them haircuts. It’s what grandmothers do.” She sniffled. “They needed it.”

They needed it was my grandmother’s motto, what she said after we unwrapped socks on Christmas, or after she’d refolded all the towels in my mother’s bathroom closet on the nights she babysat us. They needed it was also what my mother called “fightin’ words.”

My mother hugged us to her body, hands crisscrossed in front of my brother and me. We were little human shields in the yelling that passed over the trenches of our bodies. It ended when my grandmother slammed out, and my father opened the door and said to her retreating form, “This is how you slam a door.” It rattled the windows.

Later, Dustin and I would come home from grandma’s house with our nails painted and our cheeks rouged, our lips reddened by the thick-tasting lipstick my grandmother used. Dustin couldn’t stand to use the eyeliner or mascara. He preferred rooting in my grandmother’s closet for the finer of her costume dressinggowns while I sat at her powder-blotched vanity, pulling my eye open with a finger and running the pencil along the lid until it tickled and itched, perfected. My eyes darkened and sultry, a silverscreen film star’s smoky almonds. Finally, the eyes of a woman who looked into a camera and did not shy from its glassy stare.

***

When I told my Grandmother I wanted blue hair, she said, “Don’t ask your grandmother to go with you anywhere.” She was an oracle decrying the would-be embarrassed woman, guilty by bluehair association. At nine years old, I was her shame, threatened with excision.

My grandmother permed her hair every two weeks. At the beauty school. Where she paid ten dollars. And asked the woman to please clean her ears out. She was devoid of shame. And she let me waste reams of paper at her typewriter on rainy afternoons. I’d sit at the card table and hammer the keys just to hear the language strike home. Nothing was more satisfying than the zing and swoosh of the carriage return. Or replacing the miracle of corrective tape. Only at her typewriter did I want to be a mechanic, to understand machine parts moving in concert.

And she gave me Harlequin Romance novels to read for inspiration. Genuine bodice-rippers, with covers depicting cottonbosomed women swept into some Fabio’s embrace. Once, after loving one of those novels so much, I typed a fan letter to the author. My grandmother wrote the cover letter, explaining my young age, saying how I’d spend hours at her typewriter. “Budding writer,” she called me, and if she had said them aloud, I think her voice would have had an air of pride about it. I wanted hair that would be shocking, off-putting in a comely, bold way. I wanted words that way too.

***

My mother’s father had a full head of hair when he died in 1995, the summer after my freshman year of college. He was 70, living alone in one of those comfortable houses on a treeshaded street in Orange City, a few towns over from where I went to school. He called where he lived “Sun City,” erasing the gap between the two words. My mother hadn’t talked to her father in years before he went into the Volusia County Hospital. But I had.

My roommate, Sean, and I used to prank call my mother’s father. It started innocent enough, with Sean phoning as a lost pizza-delivery man. My grandfather, always polite to strangers, thought he was delivering to a neighbor: “If you pass Mano’s, well now you’ve gone too far,” my grandfather advised. When Sean repeated the address, Pa sputtered out, “But well that’s my house!” Sean concluded, “Old man, you are paying for this pizza.”

If Pa was proud of one thing, it was his virility. After all, as a senior citizen, he’d had two 17-year old girlfriends, and had been arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer in a park. (A male officer, at that). My grandfather was nothing if not a man of vim and vigor. And so Sean’s off-the-cuff taunt got Pa steaming mad. He informed Sean that he wasn’t, “Payin’ for no pizza from a little pussy.” Sean got real quiet, his face gained its Irish blush. “You’re paying for this pizza, asshole, or I’m going to kill you.” I muffled my guffaws with a pillow.

Pa didn’t see the humor. He screamed into the phone, “Bring it on! Bring it on, pizza man!” We could hear someone—a woman—in the background saying, “Clayton, honey, who IS it?” It was either Mentora, the woman he was seeing before my grandmother’s funeral, or Anne, who my aunts told me, worshipped Satan. Which means she was probably Presbyterian.

After that first prank call, my grandfather opened his front door to a dazzling array of pizza boxes strewn over his lawn. My dorm-mates called him weekly, hollering into the receiver, “Bring it ON!”

Two things surprised me. One, that he never called the cops. But, I guess a natural distrust develops between felons and “the fuzz.”

The other thing that surprised me: my grandfather kept his hair throughout this ordeal. “He looks like Hitler,” my cousin Shanda said, looking down into the coffin at his funeral. His head was propped up on a pillow, as if he were just about to lurch out of that box. He did look like Hitler—he had a thin mustache growing at the time of his death, and his hair was cut short and swept from the left side to the right. His forehead was pale and shiny, his hair dark and oily. But I don’t know if Shanda would have said that about Pa if the stories about him hadn’t been handed down, circulated now among the grandkids.

Shanda kept cracking jokes. My cousin Travis kept laughing, looking less awkward in a  borrowed suit now that he was throwing out jokes. I smirked my allegiance to my cousins and their irreverence but somehow my eyes kept wandering over to the dirty old man in the box. I kept thinking, I will inherit that receding hairline, I will inherit that head, the way the eyes recede, sink back into the skull. With one ear locked on the jokers’ world, I wanted to lock the other to the dead man, I wanted to hear him answer: what other parts of me will be like you?

***

I never saw my father cut his hair in my life. He never went to a barber, a salon. He cut it himself, with an electric razor. His hair is fine, black, and wavy. In pictures of a younger self, my dad is clean-cut, shaved beneath controlled locks of hair, which he parts on the side. Though I have my mother’s straight hair, it’s my father’s hairstyle I emulate. Parted on the side, brushed straight over, though now I flip mine up in the front, much to my boyfriend’s chagrin. I like this hairstyle, its forthrightness.

In a picture of my dad reading the newspaper, I am reading over his shoulder, hunched down next to him, nearly cheek-to-cheek. It’s a posed photograph, though I can’t remember what for. My dad is wearing a green shirt, and I’m dressed for school in a red Roman-collared shirt, my hands tucked into my jeans. But what is striking about the photograph is not the age of the people in it, nor the fact that I am seemingly interested in the Sports Page. From the downward angle of the lens, my dad and I look like hair-twins, the parts in our hair smiling identically for the camera.

My father can’t comb his hair anymore. He used to have a special brush with the extended handle that angled the brush back and away. It was designed for people who can’t lift their hands above their head, for people like my dad who have had cardiac surgery and can’t manage yet. Now, though, he can’t even use that.

He can’t shave.

He can’t wash his own laundry or cook his own meals.

He can’t brush his teeth.

Now he has no more teeth to brush.

Some days he doesn’t remember how to stand.

After it is washed and combed, his hair is smooth against his scalp, he is almost restored, nearly again the debonair and mischievous man my mother fell in love with.

Look at his hair. Even now, catching the light.

***

I go to Harmar, Pennsylvania to be changed.

The man is shaving my head in a hotel room that I have paid for. It has a Jacuzzi tub and a late check-out time. He brought electric clippers and a cache of blue Gillette razors, the disposable kind, which he opens with his teeth.

“Only real men have hair,” he says. The cuttings fall in clumps down my face. I lick my lips and stalks of hair lodge on my tongue.

I have given up my right to say when the sacrifice is enough. It is never enough.

My chest is next. He holds the razor to my lips. I look up at him, a twenty-something anyone with the hard edge of nowhere in his eyes. “Go on,” he says, and I do. Two blades, one laying over the other, a small gap between. I kiss the metal lips.

He slides the twin blades over my pectorals, over where I breathe and bleed. Then he shaves his name, three block letters, on my left thigh. My right leg goes completely. My groin.

I am hairless, powerless as Samson. I feel raw as silk. “Now,” he says, “kiss my hairy chest.”

After it is over, giving in, giving over, his body sated, gone, I, who will normally close his eyes in order to put on deodorant lest a glimpse of naked body be caught, gaze into the full-length mirror. I trace the flexed muscles of my smooth legs, my hairless chest, my soldier buzzcut. The stubble on my neck seems the hairiest part of me. What stares back from the mirror is ready for whatever comes next. I am stripped, vulnerable, and ready, world. Do your worst.

In the car, driving home, I roll down the windows. I turn up the radio. I sing along to the anthems at the top of my lungs all the way home.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

James Allen Hall's book of poetry, Now You're the Enemy, won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Texas Institute.  Recent nonfiction has appeared in Redivider, Cimarron Review, and The Bellingham Review and is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review.  He teaches creative writing at Washington College.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Interview with poet Bridget Carson

NOTES FROM BJ SOLOY:I met up with Bridget Carson at the Union Bar in Missoula and we spent about four hours passing a notebook back and forth in pursuit of an "All Accounts and Mixture" collaborative interview thing. We conducted the written interview and then made an erasure of the interview, which is at the bottom. 

***

BJ Soloy:

“We” seems to be almost as present as “I” throughout many of your poems. In “Procrastination,” you move from “we” to “I” to “you” pretty fluidly, and the “we” stars in such moments as, “Because we are an internalized system,” “Because we are by now accustomed to our invisibility,” and, “Because the revolution means first the death of precisely this contained instituted self….”

In the spirit of subverting the “contained instituted self,” maybe we can do a weird hybrid poem interview mess here. In theory, we’ll conduct this interview entirely in writing, then—after a couple of beers here at the very important Union Club—we’ll erase, edit, and cherry-pick each other’s lines, ending up with a collaborative lyrical clusterfuck.

Sound good? Check

[   ] Yes

[   ] No

[ x] I don’t like boxes

If “Yes,” or “I don’t like boxes,” could you tell me a bit about the function of the “we” in your poems?

Bridget Carson:

Why yes, I’d be happy to tell you a bit about the function of the “we.” First of all, not to be too reductive in an answer, but I contain multitudes. Also, the speaker of my poems—which I don’t really know in my ordinary carnal life, save for rare intersections—feels that she belongs to a community of others oppressed by the same system(s).

BS:

Would you consider the historical weight of canonical “male” poetry to be part of that system?

BC:

Such a good question. My short answer is yes. But to be honest, I spend little time thinking about that particular system in that way. I’ve found permission from other poets and poems to play with, fuck with, revise the canonical. It is material to use, similar to the way I can see (when I’m writing, not when I’m in my therapist’s office) my childhood as material from which to form my art.

BS:

“I Red” has two moments that I think are especially interesting, when you write, “And I am not male and half-bodied…” and, “I am not veiled by my own body.”

As the author of a poem that starts with an epigraph by Rimbaud and then strongly echoes his famous, “Je est un autre” (with lines like “I am an antonym of myself,” and “I am not me”) before referencing authority, “the author,” and Pavlov (all within four lines), I’m excited to hear (or read, really) your thoughts on embodiment, gender, and otherhood as relating to the lyric.

BC:

I found it interesting that I wrote those lines as well. My writing those lines, I think, indicates something about the difficulty of working in such a gendered language. In those particular lines, I seemed to have the impulse to more explicitly speak out from within the language.

I’m excited about what you noticed in that poem. I loved writing that poem, using some of Rimbaud’s alchemical process to “come out” of the language. A little like Mary came out of the Holy Trinity.

BS:

[I want to follow that up with another question, but choose to whisper in brackets as to let that last line linger and resonate just a trifle longer. It’s even resonating through the Union Club’s irresistibly dancingest dance tunes!]

BS:

I love how self-conscious your poems can be while still being awfully dang gutsy. For instance, you use the word “definition” as part of a definition of circular definitions. Also, you use “There is no way out of this pantoum” as a formally dictated, repeating line in a pantoum.

How do you use/wrestle with self-consciousness while writing?

BC:

I love how you notice things in my poems. I wouldn’t say that I wrestle with self-consciousness while writing. For some reason, I’m not even self-conscious about my self-consciousness when in the act of writing. So self-consciousness becomes this interesting phenomenon in the process that strikes me as belonging to the poem, as a further layering of the voice. I do edit as rigorously as the Surrealists actually edited their poems, but I’m not concerned, apparently, with editing out self-consciousness. I seem to even like it as editor of my own poems.

BS:

I hope that foregrounding the self-consciousness doesn’t fuck with the enabling, self-negating self-consciousless self-consciousness of your writing.

BC:

I do realize now, thinking of the self-consciousless self-consciousness, that we, as lesbians, do actually like boxes. In that other realm of boxless boxliness.

BS:

I should let the readers know that you just came back from the bathroom, looked at your most recent response, and said, “I had a self-conscious moment there.”

BS:

Queer Theory is, it seems, active and dynamic in the Lit. wings of Academia (population: future adjunct faculty).

I’m interested in your thoughts on “queer” being used in such an expansive theoretical way. Is there a danger in “queer” being too distanced from sexuality? Are there advantages in applying a sort of Kinsey spectrum to the disciplines?

BC:

I think Academia is a machine that appropriates the humanizing efforts of oppressed groups. It has a way of turning activism into still-life. This is not to say that the theory created by individuals in the academic machine is not valuable, or that individual professors cannot do meaningful work within Academia. But I do mean to call it a machine of oppression. But I haven’t really answered your question…

Who is queer theory for? The idea of queer is important to the idea of normal. It seems like an expansive sense of “queer” might be found all along to really be an expansive sense of Normal. What if through the blessings of Queer Theory, Normal people can know more about me than I know about myself? Will this lead to colonization of my Kinsey rating?

BS:

Can poetry, then, be an antidote to the still-life-ification of humanizing efforts? A lightning bolt into the static pond?

BC:

Yes! I can’t say it any better than you have.

BS:

“Formal Sentence Definition” suddenly wanders into Dan Savage’s precise definition of santorum (which, to be clear, is “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex”), but the poem seems to use a more conceptual, formal engagement to address ideas of definition (and self-definition) with more sustain than a more traditionally “political poem” (meaning a poem that uses a rather standard narrative lyric as a vehicle for explicit political sloganeering) might be able to.

What is the interplay of political and conceptual?

Are such dichotomies dumb?

The poem itself says, “Without you, I am nothing, because I am not you”… “I am where I am unsettled, neither masculine nor feminine”… “a correct definition will mark the subject’s boundaries, edges, or limits….” This sort of subjective reciprocity seems at home with the mysticism of Martin Buber while evoking androgyny and miming the diction and circularity of computer code. How do boundaries affect your writing?

BC:

Your question, “Are such dichotomies dumb?” is what I could consider a brilliant self-consciousness, which interrupts effectively the status quo. I despise definition because it hasn’t worked for me, so in some way I think I want to use the natural boundaries inherent in any form of writing to speak about the failure of definition. Poetry’s boundaries, and sometimes its disregard for boundaries, are very useful. As a poet, I almost love them. Like anyone loves their captor after awhile.

BS:

So, you’re OK with being defined by poetry’s boundaries as long as poetry’s OK with you not really being all that discouraged at dreams of escape any day now?

BC:

I feel like you’re writing the questions and my answers at this point of the interview.

[interview commits ritual suicide]

***

The Poem as Byproduct

In the spirit of subverting the “contained instituted self,” maybe we can erase. If yes,

can you tell me a bit about the function of a bit of the ordinary, the history

resultant in that way? From similar therapists, my form can say, “I am not, and half-bodied.” Also,

“I am not my own body.” I seemed explicitly out of the Holy Trinity. I want that in brackets.

I love how I wrestle with the Surrealists; the self

came back from the bathroom a machine. A machine has a way of meaningful danger, too distanced

from sexuality. I think the academics call it an antidote.

I can’t say. I am nothing.

Dumb because it hasn’t worked for the natural boundaries. After awhile, I feel like my suicide.

There seems to be, specifically, an internalized invisibility.

I think I am not male and I am famous. Come out a little like Mary, follow

that whisper and resonate, irresistibly circular.

-----------------------------------------------

Bridget Carson is a 2006 graduate of UM's MFA program.  Her poetry has made appearances in publications such as Kestrel,Pallaksch. Pallaksch., The American Poetry Review, and The Global Game: Words for Football (an international anthology of literature on soccer/football).  She currently teaches writing at Missoula College, works with the Montana Writing Project, and dabbles in the marginalized genre of science fiction.

B.J. Soloy plays guitar, banjo, washboard, and suitcase drumkit in the anachronistic prog-yawp outfit Dear Sister Killdeer, whose album,This Is My Hand was released in 2013. He has poems published or forthcoming in New American Writing, Horse Less Review, Colorado Review, Court Green, CutBank, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and DIAGRAM, among others.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Chase Berggrun

Self-portrait

In the woods he is a woman, & she sleeps in leaves, her mother’s hand warm in her pocket, his neck bruised from his own kiss. Autumn calms down into dying, a fleck of rain on her chest, in the dream he grows a petrel’s wing. Flight follows the sea, where the only fist or fixture is the contour of a wave. Her undulate breath. Afternoon & in the woods she is a man, full of fear, thirsting for nothing. Forever bound in change. Forever unwrapped & emptied. Nudged softly by doe’s antler.

From the couch

For Dr. K

A circle of change

catching rain with

eager tongue

a catalogue of

each insult into skin

I spill

you say moving on

will be easy but never

asked how

I manage morning

my mother’s fists

coming in through

my little window in one

hand a bottle

the other grips

a seagull by

the broken neck

-----------------------------

Chase Berggrun is a poet from Yarmouth, Massachusetts. They are the author of Discontent and Its Civilizations: Poems of Erasure, winner of the 2012 jubilat Chapbook Contest judged by Peter Gizzi, and their work has been published in Washington Square, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hanging Loose, Out of Our, among others; and in the anthology Time You Let Me In: 25 Under 25, edited and selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. Chase completed their undergraduate degree in English and Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where in 2013 they were the recipient of the Class of 1940 Creative Writing Prize. They are currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Shane Allison

Poem for Lee Ann Brown

I did not see you at the poetry reading or at the salad bar. I did not see you at the salad bar at the poetry reading Eating salad at the poetry reading where salad was served. Where were you? I did not see you at the poetry reading where salad was served, Eating salad. You were not at the reading, reading poetry or eating salad From the salad bar where salad was served at the poetry reading. I did not see you at the poetry reading or at the salad bar Where salad from the salad bar was served And poets, who read poetry, ate salad that was served at the salad bar. Were you there? If you were there I didn’t see you there. I could not find you at the reading where poetry was read, Where salad was served and eaten by poets who read poetry. I could not find you. I looked everywhere. I could not find you with the other poets eating salad from the salad bar At the poetry reading where salad and poetry was served. Critically acclaimed poets read poetry and salad was served From a critically acclaimed salad bar For critically acclaimed poets who read poetry that was critically acclaimed. I listened to all the critically acclaimed poets and you missed it. You were supposed to be there. I heard them read poetry and eat salad served from a critically acclaimed salad bar. The poetry was good. The poets were good and so was the salad. I thought of you while I ate salad and listened to poetry. I thought of you while I ate salad with Ron Padgett. You should have heard Ron Padgett read his poetry. You should have seen Ron Padgett eat salad. Ron Padgett had a big salad. I wish you could have been there to listen to poetry With me at the poetry reading. The poetry of the poets was as crisp as salad.

-------------------------------------

Shane Allison is a novelist, poet, anthologist and visual artist. His writings have appeared in West Wind Review, Gargoyle, Fence, Mississippi Review, New Delta Review, Spork, and others. His debut poetry collection Slut Machine is out from Queer Mojo and his second collection I Remember is out from Future Tense. His debut novelYou're The One That I Want is forthcoming from Strebor Books. Shane lives in Tallahassee, Florida. If you would like to purchase copies of his books, he can be reached at sdallison01@hotmail.com

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Prose by PD Mallamo

  HOMINID

pd mallamo

"Now the thing must take its course. It cannot be hurried. Dune"

Big-bellied Roscoe Larry is sole proprietor and chief operating officer of a company that exists in name only, and that name, “Mayfield Interiors,” is printed in six inch Constantia script across the sides and back of a white 1999 Chevy Astro minivan. Inside, amongst shoals and bumpers of fast-food detritus, pornography, and assorted impact-type tools, is a cardboard box containing glossy brochures which illustrate the wonders “Mayfield Interiors” will perform in Kansas kitchens and bathrooms: sleek new countertops; “cutting edge” high-velocity toilets; faucets that look like they were designed for spacecraft. This literature is the full extent of the company. There is nothing more

Today is the day Roscoe Larry’s sister, who works at ShamPoochie Dog Grooming Service in Lawrence, gives him the addresses of women who have made appointments for next week. Roscoe gives her one-hundred dollars for this information, which she attempts to produce in handwriting not her own lest such document fall into the wrong hands, namely, the sheriff’s

For said list is Exhibit A in a series of rural crimes common to a sixty-mile radius of Lawrence, i.e., burglaries in broad daylight

Q: What kind of day is a good day for a daylight B&E in rural Kansas?

A: Any day the dog gets groomed

Because if the dog’s not home it’s a good bet nobody else is either

¤

One of the targets Roscoe Larry has chosen is a residence ten miles north of Valley Falls on a road known as West Valentine Way, an area known for expansive, well-mowed manors. Among many possible accomplices, Roscoe taps Jesse Jessop, not necessarily because Jesse is a skilled burglar, but because Roscoe received a gram of coke from Jesse on verbal a month ago and has yet to reimburse him. Jesse is threatening to kill not only Roscoe but Roscoe’s dog, a pit bull named Rooster23. To settle the matter, Roscoe offers this juicy plum of a castle owned by a four-poodle family named Broadstone

¤

The plan is fabulously simple: drive up, drop off the accomplice, wait while he knocks on the door. If nobody answers, get him inside, then get the hell out of there; when he’s done, he’ll call. Pick him up

Today the mother ship is full, three other criminals besides Jesse, plus the pit bull Rooster23, all bound for rural households in the general vicinity of Valley Falls, up to and including Hiawatha, Nortonville and Oskaloosa. Roscoe has described a large county orbit in his plans for the day; everybody’s got just under thirty minutes to toss his house for cash, jewelry, handguns and drugs, especially benzos and Oxycontin, though Roscoe will sell (or snort) almost anything

One time an accomplice ran outside with a saddle and a new Stetson hat still in the box. This ain’t no horse trailer, Roscoe bawled, and you ain’t no fuckin’ cowboy. If you cain’t stuff it down your pants, I don’t wont it. Go put it back.

¤

A large gold non-denominational crucifix legitimately purchased in Kansas City for almost a thousand dollars hangs by a gold chain from the mother ship’s rearview. It reaches almost to the dashboard. Roscoe’s got Christian issues. He does not believe the Lord God minds if he liberates only lucre, weaponry, drugs and “the palace jewels,” as he puts it; in fact, it is entirely possible that, from a social justice perspective, the Lord, if not actually blessing his labors, might simply but on purpose look the other way. Lord’s got better things to do

One of those better things is thwarting the homosexual agenda. You see any dicks in here? he asks, rifling through the porn on the floor in response to a comment Jesse made regarding same-sex marriage in California to the effect that Who the fuck cares?

Little shit, I care, that’s who! Homos get their own goddamn van, ain’t gonna ride in mine

¤

Roscoe Larry is a career criminal from a family so bad it was less family than chain gang. Roscoe’s father was a one-night stand and his mother killed herself with meth and alcohol before he was six. He was raised by a grandmother who cooked everything in bacon and weighed four-hundred pounds. His grandfather was a caricature of every bad thing a man could become. One day in the shed behind the house Roscoe saw him rape a dog with a stick, then cut its throat with a buck folder and drag it out to a ditch where he soaked it with gasoline and set it on fire. Roscoe, who had also been violated by this creature, imagined himself similarly slit and immolated. Late that night while his grandparents and siblings slept he set the house on fire. He let it burn half down before dragging out a brother and two sisters. His siblings were placed into foster care and he never saw them again. Roscoe, presumed to have perished in the blaze like his grandparents, lived in the leafy copses and abandoned houses of rural Kansas for a full year till he set one of those on fire, too. He was eventually captured and placed in foster care himself. He bounced around almost twenty homes until he aged-out of the system at eighteen and drifted into a life of whatever

¤

Roscoe leans around and says, You got something to tell us, Jesse?

Wut?

Queer, that’s wut

Shut the fuck up, Roscoe. Only queer in this car your thievin’ ass. Don’t change the subject

Homos walk. Not in my van

I say “Who the fuck cares” and that makes me a cocksucker? YOU the cocksucker, Roscoe. I don’t kill you ‘cause you stole my blow, I kill you ‘cause you stupid. Stupid as my stupid ass

What you care about queer marriage?

What the fuck YOU care about queer marriage? YOU the one makin’ the noixe up there, white-trash mutherfucker. Jesse points a finger at him- I tell you something else, shitwad: You ain’t off the hook yet. Wait till I see the house, THEN I tell you. Fuckin’ crook

¤

Jesse Jessup is a career criminal who was raised as a fundamentalist (i.e., polygamous) Mormon on the Utah/Arizona line. When he was sixteen he was driven with five other sixteen-year-old boys to Las Vegas. They were given forty dollars each and told never to come back, the Lord has spoken

What happened? Jesse asked another boy when the van pulled away. What did we do?

Nothin’, the boy said, old guys want the girls. My sister Eliza gonna marry a man sixty years old from Parowan. She’ll be his ninth.

In Vegas, Jesse learned to hustle the hard way – the hard way because he was hustled himself and learned difficult lessons which usually began with his face in a couch cushion and his pants down. By age seventeen he was pimping six other boys, all outcasts from polygamous communities. By eighteen he’d killed two men and buried their bodies with quicklime in the desert north of Lake Meade. By twenty-five he’d developed a raging crack habit and was sentenced to eight years in Nevada corrections for manufacturing & distributing. By thirty-five he’d migrated to Kansas as a meth entrepreneur, developed and conquered a nasty crank habit, then settled down to relatively low-risk B&E’s and more or less recreational benzos

¤

I tell you something else, Jesse yells up to the front of the van: I hear you killin whores

I hear you a niggerlover, so what?

Better than killin whores

Who told you?

Reliable source, that’s who

Pulled it out a your asshole cause you’re mad, that’s all

What I seen, you do just about anything

Percentage in off’n some little girl?

Get your rocks off maybe old man

Put your stupid ass out RIGHT HERE I didn’t owe you. Talkin bout a man like that! Tell ya one thing: Least I LIKE bitches

Back to that, says Jesse

Then why you always talkin about queer marriage?

I aksed ONE GODDAMN TIME you make this issue!

Far as I’m concerned you aksed for a reason

Wut reason?

Queer as a three-dollar bill

Know why I don’t believe in god, Roscoe? Cause I don’t believe god would make somthin fuckin stupid as you. That’s how I feel.  Now we BOTH burn in hell cause you the one what made me doubt

¤

One of the perks of working with Roscoe is a little pick-me-up right before the job go down. He makes lines on a piece of broken window glass he keeps in the glove, does one and passes them back

DOWN PAYMENT! he shouts to no one in particular. Shittin’ in HIGH cotton! Today’s gonna be a GOOD day, feel it in my bones! He twists around in his seat. Gonna offer up a little prayer, he says - safety, riches, clean getaway. Take from the rich, etc. Gonna pray with me might be a extra line in it for you

Jesus Lord, says Jesse to those around him, my shit’s bad enough already without I start prayin with Roscoe Larry

¤

Rooster23 has chosen a victim in the center of the van, a young man with bad acne who lives in a trailer court in Topeka. He mounts the man head-on, paws on shoulders, slobbering his face and hard-humping his crotch

WooooEeeee! shouts Jesse, you got bigger proplems than California, asshole – your boyfriend’s cheatin on ya back here -

Roscoe turns in his seat and swats at Rooster23. Offa him, he shouts - Push him away gotdamit!

I cain’t, croaks the young man, well-pinned to his seat, trying to cover his face with his hands. Gonna bite hell out of me -

Roscoe reaches way back and grabs Rooster’s tail. He jerks it hard and the dog yelps. A turd pops out and the van begins to stink

Classy outfit you got here, yells Jesse, cracking a window. Very goddamn classy.

¤

They do a drive-by of the Broadstone house, three-car garage and all. What you think, yells Roscoe over his shoulder - Fireworks on the TV?

No one home we’re good, says Jesse. I’m happy

Roscoe u-turns and rolls briskly up the driveway. Jesse jumps out with a brochure and rings the doorbell. Stands there two minutes. Runs back to the van for a crowbar and, as the van rockets out the driveway and down Valentine Way, circles to the back of the house where he jimmies a door to a mudroom. He cracks an inside door to the kitchen and pokes his head; listens for another two minutes before deciding the place is, indeed, uninhabited, and strolls right in

¤

Jesse’s got a B&E routine he’s used for years, a protocol he follows unerringly after he’s unlawfully penetrated the dwelling of another human being: masturbate, eat, get high, steal

The first thing he looks for is a laundry hamper, which he empties on the floor and pokes through until he finds panties. As it so happens, la Broadstone’s are the size of a poncho and Jesse has a hard time keeping them on his face, the leg holes so big they keep slipping back down over his shoulders. He runs upstairs where he figures the master bedroom is and finds a bureau belonging to the man of the house. He jacks off over the sock drawer AHHHHHHHH then cleans himself up with the panties and hangs them over a lamp like he always does

Then down to the kitchen and into the refrigerator, hongry as hell! He finds roast beef and bread and makes himself several sandwiches, utilizing also uncommonly good (organic) brown mustard, lettuce and pre-sliced provolone. He has a beer or three

As he eats he wonders about, room by room, planning the house-toss. Last bite upstairs he breaks suddenly into action as if there’s not a second to spare, dumping drawers, sweeping shelves clean to discover what’s behind, throwing books off bookshelves – bathroom, bedroom, spare rooms, linen closets. He works furiously, methodically, and begins to find things: his and her Glocks, one in 9mm, the other .380; a small wad of cash ($635) hidden in an enormous black bra in the missus’ bureau; jewelry, including four nice diamond rings and an emerald brooch; prescriptions Lorazepam, Clonazepam and generic methylphenidate

He shakes out two Lorazepams, a methylphenidate and two Clonazepams. Using the end of a spoon he finds in a toothbrush cup, he grinds them to fine powder, mixes them up, lines it nice&clean on the counter, and, in one mighty snort, vacuums off the whole affair. The last thing he remembers is admiring a 1960-ish family photograph downstairs above a couch: mom, dad and nine grown children, four of them women, three quite attractive

¤

He wakes up someplace cold, dark and quiet. In a moment he understands he is naked; a moment later he also understands that he is shackled

Jesse Jessop blinks his eyes and sits up. He hears the sound of ignition, a whosh of gas-fire, and realizes he is affixed to the water heater, probably in the basement

He feels for the wall and leans back. Ho/hum, chained buck naked to a water heater in someone’s basement after he masturbated in a sock drawer, tossed all the closets, stole stuff, got high and passed out. In a life like Jesse Jessop’s nothing could be more natural. Where is god, he wonders lazily, in times like these? Where is the god of Roscoe Larry - or does He just sit up there on the rearview, swinging from that heavy gold cross, laughing at the fools? Still benzo-drowsy, he nods his head, closes his eyes and falls back asleep

¤

The lights are on. He’s suddenly looking at two huge Anglo-Saxons, a man and a woman he correctly identifies as the ruling class. They appear to be in their fifties; the man has a trim little mustache; the woman is wearing a flowery dress the size of a tent. They are sitting in folding lawnchairs in the middle of a room which, indeed, appears to be the basement. The man is reading the Wall Street Journal; she is knitting. Jesse Jessop blinks blinks blinks

The man drops the newspaper to his lap, smiles and says, Well good morning! The woman does the same with her knitting and also smiles. We’re the Broadstones, the man says, George and Mary – but you already know that. Brother Roscoe Larry and his merry band! Would you like to introduce yourself?

Jesse laughs. You catch Roscoe?

Sure did

Then you know who I am

Sure do. Just want to hear you say it

Roscoe make a deal?

God only knows

That’s interesting

Accident

I’ll bet

Terrible accident

No doubt

Won’t be the last

Good. Get it over with

Broadstone smiles. He reaches behind his seat and tosses a mop bucket, which bounces and slipslides till it hits his legs. Do your business in that, he says. If you mess on the floor I’ll make you eat it

¤

Next morning he hears them clomp down the stairs, George Broadstone carrying a thick green folder, Mary a tea service with cups. Before they seat themselves in the folding chairs Mrs. Broadstone asks if he’d like some tea. He nods his head and she brings him a cup, which he holds to his lips with cuffed hands

George lifts the folder. This is your dossier, Jesse. Do you know what that is?

Shakes his head

Your life as interpreted by various law enforcement agencies. You may wonder how I have come into possession of such a thing?

Nods his head

At one time I was a district attorney. Then I was judge

What you do now?

Whatever I please

Must be nice

Not when you come home and find what we found

I’m sorry

You’re sorry you got caught. However – he hoists the dossier to the level of his eyes – this certainly sheds light on the situation. May I ask a few questions?

Can I have another cup of tea?

Mary rises and pours

What’s the point?

It’s part of the process

What process?

The process by which I make decisions

Shit. Do what you’re gonna do

Why were you expelled from the community?

What community?

Southern Utah

Old men didn’t want the competition

For?

Girls, of course

How did you survive?

Any way I could

Did you kill people?

No

Obviously a “yes”

Take it any way you want. Wasn’t going to live like a roach

Which means you weren’t going to do honest work – and I say all this taking into account the odious circumstances under which you were raised. However, it‘s a character issue, Jesse. Character shines through no matter what

If by honest work you mean 5 bucks a hour, you damn right I wasn’t. How much you make a hour?

That’s not important

What your daddy do?

He laughs and looks at him for a moment. Why, he was a judge, too!

Shit, he says, and glares at him. You got some fuckin’ nerve aksing questions like those. You know that’s wrong

It’s not wrong, says George Broadstone, it’s the way the Redeemer made this world. Take it up with Him if you don’t like it. Tell Him he made a mistake

My father sent his wives out to work. He sat home and watched TV. Do the fukkin math before you start throwin shit around

¤

Some hours after the Broadstones returned upstairs Jesse hears a fight. There are slurs, slaps, shouting, curses, crashes. Some additional hours later Mrs. Broadstone descends barefoot in a white bathrobe carrying a pot of coffee and chocolate cake. You must be hungry, she says. How about some dessert? Her face is swollen and her eye sockets are going blue-green with highlights of black-red. Blood is visible in her nostrils. She smells of whisky

What’s goin on up there?

Mr. Broadstone has an alcohol problem, that’s what’s going on up there. She seats herself on the floor beside him, breaks off a piece of cake and lifts it to his mouth. I’ll feed you if that’s alright. Is that alright?

Don’t much care what you do

What you want to say is, “I don’t care if you shove it up my ass!” Isn’t that right, Jesse? You opened Pandora’s box, him coming home to a house like that. Do you know what that means, Pandora’s Box?

Not completely stupid, lady. Listen, you gonna shoot me or cut my throat why don’t you just go ahead and do it. Tell him you got raped or same damn thing

She breaks off another big chunk and slowly stuffs it into his gaping mouth. He lifts the coffee pot with both hands, drinking carefully in case it’s hot. When he’s done Mrs. Broadstone loosens the tie on her robe and lets it drop. Jesse gasps at breasts the dimensions of the mop bucket. She smears a bit of chocolate icing over her plate-sized nipples and shoves these also into his mouth

¤

Sometime after this encounter George Broadstone himself descends, similarly barefooted, wrapped in a bath towel, obviously drunk. He is carrying a belt

That whore come down here? There it is goddammmit! – he points to the remnant of the chocolate cake and the coffee pot. He lifts the belt: I’ll ask you the same thing I ask her: You want the buckle or the tongue?

¤

He gets the buckle, without first making his preference known. George goes at him with wild fury though he misses at least half the time and finally falls down and lies on the floor with Jesse. Mary, now fully dressed, appears a few minutes later, gently helping George to his feet and, without a glance at Jesse, assists him slowly up the stairs

¤

You people ain’t dis-functional or nothin’, Jesse observes when Mary pays him another visit, this time stripteasing just out of reach. Here I’m thinking your kind holds the world together

We DO hold the world together, she says, just not the way you think we do

What way, then?

Our way. Trust me

She moves to cover him with her bulk. I haven’t had sex in twenty years. This is like Easter and you’re the bunny. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

¤

When George and Mary again appear before him he wonders truly if he’s not losing his mind. They are dressed in Sunday best; George carries a Bible. Mary is heavily made-up and wears large round sunglasses. There are four little white poodles jumping around. They sit down in the lawn chairs and George says, Well it’s been quite a holiday, hasn’t it, Jesse?

Get them fuckin’ dogs away from me. I hate poodles

I’ve got a little something for you, George says. He pulls Roscoe’s crucifix from his jacket pocket and dangles it before him. He throws it on the floor just out of reach, its long heavy chain chiming as it tumbles across the concrete

Something to think about, he says, then offers a hand to his wife and assists her tenderly up the stairs

¤

The drinking starts right after church. George again descends the stairs with the belt, this time completely naked except for Nike runners, and beats Jesse for ten minutes. As before, most of his shots fall short or wide of the mark. When he’s done he falls heavily in a lawn chair which collapses with a loud snap. Help! he cries, Heeeellllllp! When Mary does not respond, George crawls up the stairs and out of the basement

A few minutes later Mary comes down still dressed in her church clothes. She hitches up her skirt, removes her queen-size panties, and straddles him as he leans against the wall

¤

Bang! This time George sneaks up while Jesse’s sleeping and lands a good one with the buckle. Stars and streaks explode across Jesse’s field of vision and he does his best to cover up

Where’s that cunt? shouts George. I can smell her. Tell me where that filthy cunt is or I’ll kill you

¤

Jesse is alone now for several days. No sounds issue from upstairs and Jesse figures they’re holed-up on the second floor. He is half sleeping when he hears the basement door creak open. George wears a white tennis outfit; his knees are scarred and swollen. He is hobbling, and does not appear fully ambulatory, much less a recent player of tennis. He stands before him for several minutes

Roscoe was a poor soul, says Jesse finally. He made my life look like a goddamn picnic no matter what you think or what you do

I know that

Then why’d you kill him?

Great men whom god hath consecrated for great purposes are subject to great passions.

What about the rest?

Off somewhere I guess. Old Roscoe never showed up

The dog?

He loved old Rooster23, didn’t he?

How’d you know that?

Old dog-fighter from way back. Named all his dogs Rooster

George takes the crucifix off the floor, wraps the end of the chain around his hand, and whirls it over Jesse’s head

Queer, he says. You don’t think I know what you are? Queer as a three-dollar bill

¤

There’s another fight upstairs, a bad one, and Jesse wonders if he’s killed her. An hour later, in the now blood-soaked bathrobe, she staggers downstairs

He’s going to strangle us both and burn the house down, she croaks, that’s what he said. He drowned my poodles in the bathtub

In the FUCK’s his problem?!

He’s Catholic, she says, but he likes men

What you mean he likes men?

Just like it sounds

Sex?

Yes

Then why’s he calling me queer?

Same reason he’s calling me whore

But I’m not queer

And I’m not a whore. He thinks you found his pictures

What pictures?

Man pictures

Queer pictures?

The ones with Roscoe Larry

What?

They go way back

Jesus god

That’s the truth

Why don’t you leave?

I’ve had abortions

And?

I don’t do what he says, George tells the bishop

So?

Bishop sends me to hell

This the same Bishop pokin’ little boys in the asshole?

Probably

Then why do you believe anything he says?

Can’t help it

God damn, he declares. God DAMN! He shakes his head. Fukkin SCARY world when I’m the normal one

¤

Shortly after Mary goes back up, George comes back down, wearing nothing but white socks and the crucifix

You fucking queer, he says. What have you done to my wife?

I was queer I wouldn’t do nothin with your wife

George goes at him with the crucifix, swinging it in wide arcs across the ceiling, smashing it down on Jesse’s hands which are covering his head, upon his legs and knees, upon the hot water heater, upon the wall, upon the floor. He gashes Jesse’s head and blood pours between his fingers and over his face. Xhausted, George falls to the concrete and stretches full length. In five minutes he’s snoring

Mary walks halfway down the stairs and surveys the scene. She goes right back up, snaps off the light and shuts the door

What a life, Jesse mumbles. I think this takes the cake

¤

When George wakes up, Jesse hears him crawl toward the stairs. Halfway there he falls heavily back to the floor and doesn’t make another sound

When the light comes on again George is gone. Jesse, who has been wide awake the whole time, has not heard him so much as breathe, much less climb back up the stairs

¤

There is another fight, the worst yet. The door flies open and Mary comes screaming through. George’s follows and kicks her off the landing. Mary’s great volume is briefly airborne, then collapses on outstretched arms halfway down, somersaulting the rest of the way to the floor. George shuts off the light and slams the door

Oh God, she finally groans. Oh God help me

Can you crawl?

Ooooooooooooooooh

Come over here

When she finally reaches him Jesse examines her head to foot. Right arm broken at the wrist, one kneecap obviously shattered, huge knot on her forehead, drowning in blood

He discovers a small bracelet on the wrist not broken. There is something attached and it feels like a key. He fits this into the keyhole of his manacles and they open right up

¤

Mary dies in his arms, which is to say as much of Mary as he can get in his arms

¤

George, outfitted in a crisp business suit and brandishing his Glock, descends the stairs. He sits in the undamaged lawn chair and crosses his legs

Do you know what I like best about myself?

No tellin’

Even after all this – he sweeps his Glock around – I still retain the capacity for disgust

By the way, your wife’s dead

Life is a paradox, he says. She was eating herself to death anyway. Were this a television show – George again sweeps the weapon, pausing momentarily at Mary’s body - how would it end? A cheap device, deus ex machina? Miraculously slip your bonds and clobber me with a pipe you’ve somehow loosed from the water heater? Reunite with your six-toed kin in Utah?

Jesus looks down on you and pukes. Me he just shakes his head; you, he pukes

Burning the house. Five minutes. It’s 2AM and I’m in St. Louis. He lumbers back up the steps and at the landing turns and says, Screaming in the flames makes a saint a saint. You’re in good company

He does not close the door. Fifteen minutes later Jesse smells smoke and makes his way upstairs

There are two cars left in the garage, both with keys in the ignition. Jesse checks each to see which has the most gas, a black Toyota. He runs upstairs to the bedroom and opens the drawer with the colossal brassieres; as he had hoped and expected, the wad of cash has been restored

The fire is really going now and he makes three tries through smoke & flame before he’s able to re-enter the garage. He starts the Toyota - it is indeed two AM, 2:18AM to be exact - and pulls out onto Valentine Road. He checks left, he checks right, and, as George correctly predicted, points it west, straight for Utah. He turns on the radio, tuned already to NPR and BBC World News: Continuing hostilities in Congo; simmering tensions in Bosnia Herzegovina; a plane crash in New York. All around him, across the dark and tumbling countryside, he knows people dream oceans, ice cream, sex, falling. He finds music, opens the sunroof, vows to quit Kansas before daylight. Bless your soul, he says aloud to dead Mary, now roasting like a pig in the basement of her own home. If there’s such a thing as Jesus, He will crush you to his heart

☼

--------------------------------------

PD Mallamo has appeared in, among other journals, Lana Turner, Granta, Barcelona Review, Sunstone, decomP, Eclectica, Conte, and the anthology Fire In The Pasture. He is a MacDowell fellow,  has degrees from BYU and the University of Kansas, and lives with his family in Lawrence.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Carina Yun

Reading Edna St. Vincent Millay,

I think about the mornings muezzin woke me at four forty, his song solemn, I’d stumble out of bed

and bend my knees on the soumak rug not knowing whether to repent for those mornings spent under

the fragrance of her umber hair, the Turkish paper sprawled over us as she read, or the mornings waking

to the smell of thick coffee poured into a ceramic mug painted with her celadon eyes; it seems

her eyes follow me by deserted walks over the Galata Bridge, the fisherman’s line pulling by the fence, a trapped fish,

I wouldn’t ever know why she threw her pearls into the sea, I should have forgotten her already, but her eyes,

I miss them, her breath I miss, how to think of those days, as now, when Millay describes the knots

that bound her beneath the earth’s soil, and sounds of renewed rainfall beating on the thatched roofs.

----------------------------

Carina Yun was born in San Francisco, California. She is a MFA candidate in poetry at George Mason University. Her poems have appeared at Fourteen Hills, Folio, The Feminist Wire, Poet Lore, Switchback, Verdad, and others. 

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by John Bonanni

  A door in a room half ajar

I found the format of his presentation difficult to understand. There were too many sparks of light flailing against the lantern sky, pretending so hard to be the firmament, too many ink blots to fondle.

Everyone huddled together in corner rooms to find themselves in mirrors so conveniently placed in the ribs of each other. I squinted hard at that light against my chest. And those rooms were so small.

I had to step away from the interior of Sammie's Toyota, it was giving me a migraine. The sky fell on me in brief pools of light. I'd rather smoke outside. I took the upholstery with me.

At the dance, I gyrate with the upholstery. I juggle the disco balls on a floor made from Sammie's Toyota, and each ray of light places pins in my pores. I look for allies.

There was nothing I couldn't do after I took the Ken doll back to his bedroom. The bedroom's walls expanded, the sky snuck in through the window. The afterlife is the Ken doll, back up and palms down shifting an iron grill stomach. The afterlife is short.

Dancing the Vandercook

I could stitch my name into your letterpressed eyes

I could take this table and cover it in ink

the color of your retired jersey drifting to the ground in reds

I found you standing on an open-mouthed face in the feathers of an old cockfight

your skin dripping the e-waste remains of my old computer

What was it you said when we first met? Your lips departed in a speech balloon

and all I remember was the exclamation point how I wanted to lick it, feel that lead protrusion against

my face, your machine

-----------------------------------

John Bonanni lives on Cape Cod. He is the recipient of a scholarship fron the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a residency from AS220 in Providence, RI. His work has appeared in Verse, Assaracus, monkeybicycle,  and Hayden's Ferry Review,  among others

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Poetry by Jory Mickelson

  Small Zeros

Nestled in a tractor tire, in that dark ovate cave, Cecile and I waited. Above us, boys bounced and chanted about what took place below with the girl

who drew invisible zeros as placeholders in math class, whose red hair hung nerveless in a braid. This girl I first kissed. Her lips, small circles

against my own. What I learned to do in that dusk: to mimic the shine in front of other boys, to pin the approximation of desire against my chest. I clutched that and other

girls as if a harder grasp was truer, as if after I pushed them to the wall and fixed them with certain kisses there would no longer be

a divisible zero in my chest, that hollow where desire was supposed to whorl.

After

His hesitation was years of kindness allowing desire to settle in

my body. Nothing more than this. Gentle as pulse he raised pleasure from

the fear of my skin until I hovered above the small horizon of his bed

and reached into that unknown for the first time with him. Momentarily

struck and fallen back into the gravity of bone but after, fledged.

---------------------------------

Jory Mickelson was born and raised in Montana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Carolina Quarterly, Superstition Review, Sundog Lit, Weave Magazine, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, The Adirondack Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, and other journals.  He received an Academy of American Poet’s Prize in 2011 and was a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry. He is the 2014 Guest Poetry Editor for Codex Journal.

ALL ACCOUNTS AND MIXTURE: Visual Art and Interview with Angela Jimenez

Angela Jimenez is visual storyteller based in New York City and Minneapolis, Minnesota. CutBank asked her to select work for "All Accounts and Mixture" from two photography projects: Welcome Home and Same-Sex Ballroom. She was also kind enough to answer a couple questions. Notes on the images follow the interview. Enjoy!  

Queen. 2008.

Ayla and Crew raising the Diana sculpture. 2006.

Night Stage raising crew, listening. 2006.

K.C. testing the Night Stage lights under a full moon. 2006.

Bros walking in Festieland: Andy and Dug. 2004.

***

The 5 Boro Dance Challenge

The 5 Boro Dance Challenge

Robbie & Gergely, Budapest.

Soren & Bradley, Chicago.

Petra & Caroline, Chicago.

***

CutBank: These two series are stunning. Can you say a little about how “Welcome Home,” and “Same-Sex Ballroom” each came about?

Angela Jimenez: Thank you. I started both these projects while working as a photographer/editor with VelvetparkMagazine, which my friend Grace Moon founded in Brooklyn. It is still online velvetparkmedia.com and the print version no longer exists. I was working as a newspaper intern, then professional freelancer, in New York City and Velvetpark was this amazing outlet where I could cover queer culture/subculture. I really credit Grace, and Velvetpark, for creating a space that valued this work that was too out there for mainstream newspapers.

Years later the New York Times published both these projects in some form. Things have come a long way.

Welcome Home: Building the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival started with me and Grace going to the Festival to do an article for the magazine. It took me awhile to understand how special it was, and how to approach it, and how to get access. But it turned into a book project that I did over the course of the next 6 years or so. It is a visual poem about the worker community that builds the Festival every summer. I self-published the book in 2009. The first edition is just about sold out.

“Same-Sex Ballroom” started with another Grace Moon road trip, this time out to Chicago where we were photographing athletes at the Gay Games in 2006. I had first seen this in Australia, because I went and competed in the Gay Games with my soccer team from Brooklyn and we saw there was gay ballroom dancing. I mean, how cool. So, I was curious.

CB: Can you discuss what “home” meant to you in the first project?

AJ: The title "Welcome Home" is not something I made up. It is something that the womyn at the Festival say to each other when they first greet each other on the Land of the Festival as they arrive each year. I found a home there too, a very beautiful and complicated community that is full of herstory. And that is what the book is about.

CB: In “Same-Sex Ballroom,” where did you travel to capture images? What captivated/surprised you most about the project?

AJ: That summer in Chicago, I decided to set up lights and shoot the same-sex ballroom the way I learned to shoot high school basketball games when I was interning at the Newark Star-Ledger in New Jersey. Which I find hilarious in retrospect. But, I felt really clear about it. I started shooting and I thought it was really breathtaking. The pageantry is sort of funny, but people are serious about it, and I respect that. They are doing something totally subversive. It is also really visually rich- there is emphasis on the sameness of the couples in the costumes and the dancers more fluidly change and switch gender roles. Dance, in all cultures, is such a powerful metaphor for gender roles and relationships. I was tired, I think, of the way gay relationships were visually depicted. Where was the fun? The passion? The character? This had it. And I found this pamphlet for the next world championships to be held in Budapest. I was like Budapest? Wow. That was the beginning of an obsession. I followed this subculture from Chicago to Budapest to New York to Antwerp...eventually I had to stop.  I shot it through like 2010 and it has been on the shelf for awhile. You never know, I might go back to it...I am still in touch with some of these wonderful dancers.

CB:What are your goals for yourself as an artist? What do you hope viewers of your photographs take away?

AJ: I really want to communicate something about the lives of my subjects that makes a viewer connect with that subject. I come from that school of thought (I studied photojournalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia) that all the small moments of people's lives have value and that you can change the world by telling stories so people understand each other better. I really do believe in that. I feel really overwhelmed and powerless about all that is wrong sometimes. Visual stories is what I have found as a way to put something out there, to contribute to change and evolution in some small way. I am really drawn to stories that can crack open some rusty, old door of thinking in someone's mind. Because that is what photographing them does for me.

CB: You designate yourself as a “visual storyteller.” Can you say a bit more about that?

AJ: I use photos and video and sound to tell stories, stories that you see. I work a lot as a photojournalist, but I am not always working in traditional journalism. So, storyteller is the title I am most comfortable with. I also write songs (which I am sort of closeted about) as a hobby and I think folk musicians and other storytellers are amazing. I am trying to associate myself with that tradition.

***

Image Notes

Welcome Home

All Photos: From the book project Welcome Home: Building the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, self-published First-Edition 2009. All Photos by Angela Jimenez. Copyright 2009 Angela Jimenez Photography.

Same-Sex Ballroom

1. Same-sex ballroom dancers Lee Sharmat, rear, and Melinda Kay, foreground, compete in the women's standard dance at the 5 Boro Dance Challenge on May 5, 2007...The locally produced 5 Boro Dance Challenge, New York City's first major same-sex dance competition, was held at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan from May 4-6, 2007.

2. Choregrapher and professional opposite sex dancer Tony Scheppler leads a same-sex Viennese Waltz segment Dance Times Square in Manhattan, during a rehearsal of "A Show Unlike Anything on Broadway!" on March 18, 2007. The show was the entertainment portion of 5 Boro Challenge event.

3. Defending World Champion same-sex ballroom dancers Robert Tristan Szelei, left, and Gergely Darabos, talk to Hungarian television journalists in their dressing room at the Korcsarnok arena in Budapest, Hungary, after a disappointing round in the Latin category during the 2nd annual World Championship Same-Sex Ballroom Dancing competition on October 21, 2006...Darabos was overcome with a leg cramp while trying to defend their title in the Latin event and the couple dropped into fourth place. The pair, however, went on to win the mens Standard division...Darabos and Szelei, known as the "Black Swans," have been training and preparing to host the 2nd annual World Championship and the Csardas Cup, the first-ever Eastern European same-sex ballroom competition. This is the pinnacle event of the blossoming same-sex ballroom scene...The event was organized by the US-based World Federation of Same-Sex Dancing, which hosted the first World Championship Same-Sex championships in 2005 in Sacramento, California. The Black Swans did a large amount of the coordination and planning in Budapest, a city that had never seen an event of this kind. When government funding fell through, they secured funding from patron Desire (accent on the “e”) Dubounet, owner of the local Club Bohemian Alibi drag club...The World Championship events are newly recognized, but same-sex dancers have been competing on a national and international circuit for a number of years, especially in Europe, including at the Eurogames, the Gay Games, the London Pink Jukebox Trophy and the Berlin Open, among others. Countries including the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and, now, Hungary, hold their own national same-sex championships. Hungary held its first national championships in April 2006...Szelei and Darabos spent three months at the Sacramento Dancesport same-sex dance school in California this summer, on the first scholarship offered by the World Federation.

4. Gay ballroom dancers Bradley Stauffer, left, and Soren (umlaut on the "o") Kruse, both of London, England, clap for the female dancers during the Dancesport (ballroom dancing) competition at the Hilton Hotel and Towers in downtown Chicago during Gay Games VII on July 19, 2006… Over 12,000 gay and lesbian athletes from 60 countries are in Chicago competing in 30 sports during the Games from July 15 through 22, 2006...Over 50,000 athletes have competed in the quadrennial Games since they were founded by Dr. Tom Wadell, a 1968 Olympic decathlete, and a group of friends in San Francisco in 1982, with the goal of using athletics to promote community building and social change...The Gay Games resemble the Olympics in structure, but the spirit is one of inclusion, rather than exclusivity. There are no qualifying events or minimum or maximum requirements...The Games have been held in Vancouver (1990), New York (1994), Amsterdam (1998), and Sydney (2002).

5. Lesbian ballroom dancers Petra Zimmermann, center left, and Caroline Privou, right, both of Cologne, Germany, compete during the Dancesport competition at the Hilton Hotel and Towers in downtown Chicago during Gay Games VII on July 20, 2006...The couple won the gold medal in the standard A division for women.

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A long-time regular contributor to The New York Times and a contract photographer with the Getty Images creative department, Angela Jimenez works on assignment and develops & produces short & long-term documentary projects. Her work has been honored by the Magenta Foundation as a Flash Forward Emerging Photographer in 2010, New York Press Photographer's Association, Review Santa Fe and the Communication Arts Photo Annual, supported by grants from The Alexia Foundation student award and The Puffin Foundation, and acquired into the permanent collection of the Leslie Lohman Museum for Gay & Lesbian Art.

Cover Photo by Angela's wife, Ashley Harness