Interiors
Outdoors in Eastwood & there’s all this
shady breeze on the lawn by Blessed Sacrament.
Everything now feels like clarity to you
/ remember smoking a bit from the back porch
watching Planet Earth then crying
to several hundred walruses leaping from
that cliff in the sub-Arctic all that
land haulout & melted sea ice they had
nowhere left to go.
From the moment you arrived the air
was changed / handsome organism
who needs a bucket to scrub
all the Massachusetts from himself,
/ that queer accent
—how driving sometimes, you see the sun
come up over tips of pines & it feels
surreal, reminds you of that November you
found yourself waking up
in someone else’s bed, standing
to look over the land / admiring
that new foreign kind of snow.
Ogunquit Painting Poem
So many changes upon this fresh arrival
—check out all those artists painting summer
on the outcropping or that bluff
which sees the offing—as if a new school
had formed in some general fashion & what is
this if not just another early-in-the-day poem
which I’ll try not to treat like some autobiography
/ a document or some flecks of dry skin.
On the gay beach there are men
who look like they want to be called daddy
& there are those who do the calling / now
back to Dover in the evening where the sun
sets kind of funny in a way that
just tells you what it is not what it’s like.
Riverside In West Forks
Two feet in the Kennebec
& slipping on little granite stones
for hours [smooth geology]
strawberry moon keeps
running water light enough
to see those skipped flatheads
against some shadowed
white mountain ridge
& more friends stumble down
the steep path to join us
[now twelve feet in the water]
& when the wind picks up
we huddle
closer modulated breathing.
If someone were to find us now
there’d be no sound.
Kevin Bertolero is the founding editor of Ghost City Press and is the associate director of the Kettle Pond Writers’ Conference. He holds degrees in literature from Potsdam College and the University of New Hampshire, as well as an MFA from New England College. Kevin is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Love Poems (Bottlecap Press, 2020), and a nonfiction book on gay cinema, Forever in Transition (Another New Calligraphy, 2021). Follow him on Twitter @KevinBertolero.
“up and down the ladder” by Robert Couse-Baker is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Sky, Ladder, Cow, Lantern, Lake, Flowers, Heaven
Shane Jones
From the novel Young Forest
The hotel PDC was found online for two hundred dollars off the original price. Melanie had celebrated with half a beer and then immediately felt guilty because she imagined the alcohol infusing with her breast milk and brain damaging Julian. In the room I stood looking at the massive sand colored tub before deciding to lay down in it to see how large it was compared to my body. I could easily fit seven of me inside it and I wondered at what size a bathtub becomes a hot tub, and laughed to myself, alone in the hotel room. It had no jets and finely detailed clawed feet, so technically it was a tub. The rest of the room was dark, eggshell white walls and maroon carpet with black diamond shapes along the edges. I couldn’t stop laughing at the size of the tub. Even when I checked in the hotel manager commented on the tubs, arrogantly stating they had the largest of any hotel on the East coast. But what about the West coast? I had asked. I stood with my bag in one hand and holding the card for Athena in the other. What about it? You said this hotel had the largest tubs on the East coast, which is an interesting thing to mention, you didn’t say it had the biggest tubs in the country, which I probably would have accepted, you said the East coast. I surprised myself by the way I was talking. Maybe Athena’s work was influencing me. Portland, Oregon, said the hotel manager. It’s called The Foxtrot, owned by my brother. He heard about the tubs here so he installed even bigger ones there. That’s crazy, I said. No it’s not. Brothers do that sort of thing. Any time we stayed in a hotel Melanie made sure the room had a tub. She would pay extra for one. I never used them until the hotel PDC, where I had to take a bath in the largest tub on the East coast, and besides, my legs hurt from walking all day; the stress of finding my brother and not hearing from Melanie was exhausting. The warmth of Athena’s sun was still in my stomach. After the tub was filled I climbed in and closed my eyes. Because of the size I kept sliding into the water. Even when I did go under my feet never touched the opposite side. Next to me were folded washcloths neatly stacked in a thick triangle labeled heaven cloths, and soaps labeled soothing stones, and a Velcro headrest labeled sky cloud that I attached behind me on the tub wall. I checked my phone and made sure the volume was on. Still nothing, and the worry I had earlier was surprisingly gone in the comfort of the tub. Since Julian’s birth I couldn’t remember the last time I slept more than an hour stretch—now my fatigue had maxed out. I thought I was going to fall asleep during the meditation, or maybe I had, I couldn’t remember. I had slept maybe twenty minutes on the train and had momentarily fallen asleep across the backseat of the cab. When I closed my eyes I immediately fell asleep and saw four treehouses in four trees, waking once because I thought I heard my phone vibrate. I reminded myself to call Melanie again when I woke up to tell her about my trip, how much stranger everything had become, but still no idea where Nick was. I would also call my father and let him talk about Horse, hoping he would talk about my brother or my mother and what she had done that day, but I knew he wouldn’t. He would discuss Horse and what he was fixing around the house. Finally, I let myself relax. I envisioned the field. I dreamt about the hotel I was currently inside of. Nothing was different in the dream, and I found myself inside the dream telling myself how boring the dream was with just me walking into the hotel, nodding to the manager in a BIG TUBS t-shirt, riding the elevator to the fourteenth floor, and walking into the room where I laughed uncontrollably at the tub. The dream didn’t feel like a dream because I could move around inside it, I knew it was a dream, I could experience it and I could make fun of it. I checked my phone again but still didn’t have any messages. An intense hunger—my stomach held an empty heat. In the hallway the lights were bright pink, the carpet sun yellow with skinny black stains, and every door to every room was open. Cats were passing between the rooms, and at the end of the hallway stood a horse, inferno red. As I walked, I looked into each room and found a new environment, a new setting. The cats similar to Horse moved around my legs and I sat down to pet them, letting their bodies slink under my hand before continuing on. In one room I stood at the doorway, the hallway light behind me bright pink, and viewed a wide field and a lake on the hotel window. In the lake was a floating cow and two people swimming with ropes, attempting to rescue it. They brought the cow to the shore under a sun seemingly made from construction paper, and the longer I watched, other details I realized were drawn, colored with crayon, cut from paper and childishly taped down at the corners. Someone had hole-punched the sky, making ovals of white light—it was more beautiful than real life. At the shore, a family of four walked into a dark transparent gas rising from the dead cow’s mouth. It formed a bag around them. Then the lake began to smear like brushed paint to the far right side over the trees outside the hotel window. The next room was much darker, but still held the appearance of something created from paper, pen, tape, crayon, and scissors—in the middle tree branches were mended in a triangular structure. The light in this room came from a pile of burning flowers at the top of the structure, and I was in there, climbing one side like a ladder. I stayed in this room until I reached the top where I began speaking at the fire. A man standing at the bottom of the structure, who had previously been motionless, turned and was sucked into the wall. The last room I had to get on my knees to be able to see what I was looking inside of it was so short, which was connected cabinets with children stuffed inside. I stuck my head in. I heard my mother and father in muted voices from above. Hunched over, my brother was in there, surrounded with papers he was furiously writing on, single words on pages reading: SKY, LADDER, COW, LANTERN, LAKE, FLOWERS, HEAVEN. When I crawled a little closer, I noticed the hiding cabinets were made of cardboard. How long I stayed in this room I’m not sure, easily much longer than the others, and as I stuck my head as far inside as possible, reading my brother’s papers, I tried to speak but what came out was an amphibian groan of hot air, and one of the cats, scared from the noise I had made, slipped past and over my brother’s lap who just kept writing the single words on entire pages, furiously flipping the pages. I continued down the hall with the cats following me, trying to see if one of them was Horse, they resembled her, but each time I looked closer a white spotted foot, clipped tail, one eye green the other blue would tell me it wasn’t her. I kept walking but it didn’t feel like I was walking, more like I was telling myself to walk, seeing myself walk, but not feeling it. At the end of the hallway the horse had been replaced by a man in hunting gear who wore a red hat low over his brow, a black flannel jacket thick with muscle, and from where his eyes sat in shadow two blue lines moved vertically off his jaw. A rifle was strapped to his back, but he wasn’t menacing, rather, I felt comfortable standing in front of him, so I asked if I could leave the dream and he said why, this is what you’ve always wanted, and I said what I wanted was to see Julian, I couldn’t remember his face, and the hunter raised his arms—I braced for him to hit me—and his fists came thrusting downward through a pool of water.
Shane Jonesis the author of six books, including Light Boxes (Penguin 2010), Daniel Fights a Hurricane (Penguin 2012), Crystal Eaters (Two Dollar Radio 2014) and Vincent and Alice and Alice (Tyrant 2019). He lives in upstate New York.
Three Stories
by Ashley Mayne
Scarsdale
Every time she rode the train from the city that winter, she saw the house in Scarsdale. Colonial white, a peaked roof. A backyard choked with trees. One in a row of similar houses, though less immaculate.
A black cellophane bag twisted on a branch. On windy days she’d see it inflate like a torn black lung, sunlight punching through it.
They were together in the house once. His paintings everywhere. Displayed and stored, leaned against walls. There was a portrait of his wife standing in front of a garden shed in calico. A face of sharpened innocence.
Another woman’s icebox. Another woman’s couch. An eiderdown like a cold snowdrift. A cat purring on the sill. The lace band of her underwear scratched her thigh.
It rained that time. Rain fell in the orange rinds in the ashtray, and in the champagne flutes they’d left on the porch, one half-full and the other empty, each with its own hollow chime.
That airless gasp. The pained sheen of his eye. A shudder in her brain, a hard, dark star.
He told her she’d made him feral. A crow out of a cage. Dear God.
When a stranger on the train spilled into a diabetic swoon, everyone tried to give him candy. He’d slumped in his seat across the aisle from her. She moved next to him and grabbed for his hand.
Pray, someone said.
The look the man gave her as he came out of it: something she’d never seen. Not even in her lover’s eyes, in the house. He would carry the sun in his mouth for her if she asked him. If she stayed by him through this.
Her roommate over drinks: How well do you know him really? The artist?
She said: Where do you think he was when I was a child?
A painting of the Williamsburg Bridge, not the girders but the spaces between, embryonic shapes of light. The sugary orange from his fingertips burns her mouth. In the skeleton trees behind the house, she sees him tall as her father.
One of her earrings went missing that time. She worried about it later, riding back on the train. Thought of his teeth against her ear, the click of gold on bone. Had it fallen in the eiderdown? She knows he’s capable of having stolen it.
Or maybe it dropped in the backyard. In the deepest leaves, in the black earth no one sees. Gold glistening like the seed of next year’s sun.
They’d put out the cat in the rain that day so it wouldn’t stare at them, laughing at themselves. The cat stalked off across the backyard to shelter in the garden shed. She saw it for a moment from the window, over the arm of the couch, before he pulled down the neck of her blouse.
It turned back once, betrayed, mewed from the far side of the yard. It had a child’s voice.
The Deep
Your mother calls you from Astoria and says: I was like this when I was waiting to have you. She says a lot of things. Nettles for iron. Blue for luck. Breathing exercises.
You look up nettles in a field manual. You tell her you’ll go cut some by the well in the woods behind your house. But really you want a cigarette.
You bought the house at auction for a prayer. Another woman, a girl, lived in the house before you did. You worked for a non-profit in the city, fighting the good fight. But now you need someplace no one can find you.
The postmistress in town likes to tell you about this girl. Long hair, sang like an angel in choir. The usual. Until she thinks she knows you, and it gets weird. A sad, lost girl with secrets. In trouble is what she says. Not crazy or knocked up.
She looks at you and waits to see what you’ll do. You stand there without speaking, holding your junk mail, grocery store coupons, keys, and thinking: It’s the country, maybe you really should have a gun.
Then the postmistress tells you the girl was alone for a long time, in the house that’s now yours. Where was her mother, anyway? Where were her kinfolk? For months, this woman tells you: She didn’t attend church, didn’t post any letters. No one suspected anything. It would have been rude to try the lock.
You think of the pale spot left by a rug at the foot of your bed, the place where the girl once said her prayers. Of the tap that leaks and probably always has. Of the dust on the baseboards, the cigarettes in your desk, the water stains making wolf tracks on the ceiling around that one light fixture. You wonder if the girl ever felt safe here.
The postmistress wants you to say something. So you say, When did you know she’d vanished?
She tells you a bird flew against one of the windows. Broke a pane. Ladies from church finally came by with lamb casserole and noticed how the air exhaling from the house was cold.
The house went up for auction. She had no family, bless her heart. Oh, honey. Would you like to sit down and rest your legs?
It’s a sad story. What did you expect? You imagine it: The house, the well, the dripping faucet. Darkness moving on the face of things.
The postmistress rings you up for stamps and packing tape.
Somewhere you heard Charles Darwin saw the word mother on a Scrabble board and said: There’s no such word. And you like sad stories, or at least you did. Before you left the city, a man went off the Brooklyn Bridge. He removed his shoes like he was getting into bed and left the sky and the air, escaped into the water. Disappeared the way men do. Left his shoes waiting like hopeful little dogs for him to come back up.
You really should call your mother.
You can see the well in the woods from the window of the old house, breathing damp air. The cell signal is always bad. Afternoon. You stand in the middle of your bed and stretch to hold the phone toward the ceiling. Her voice, so far, so small, sounds like the wind around your ears when you were a kid floating in her sight on Lake Winnipesaukee. Those floats they used to have when you were young, lungs on children’s arms, what were they called? Water wings? Something made for flight, for jumping the blue. Something an angel would have.
You pace in the house tonight and the baby kicks you. A foot against your hand under the skin. This presence, you and not you.
It’s only now you wonder what disappearing will be like. The way a girl can vanish. The way an animal’s breath fades slowly from a window. The way God doesn’t exist, all over everything.
When you were small you cried in your mother’s arms and she was the invisible world. Summer in the eighties. A Volvo 240 wagon, packed to the tops of its windows: fishing poles, sunscreen, jigsaw puzzles, Call Of The Wild. Ribs of the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson. Your family’s annual summer flight from the city. That cabin on the lake.
A meteor, a mockingbird. A yarn god’s eye hanging in a tree. She was God with a birthmark on her breast, and you cried in her arms, sunlight. The dust of your lashes left a mark on God’s blue dress. The white, ghost strike of a bird’s wings on glass.
Lake Winnipesaukee. Your mother held your head above the water. When you swam in her, she breathed for you.
The damn bathtub. Still that wire of rust locked in the porcelain. Baking soda isn’t going to cut it. In the leaves by the well there’s a lost shoe.
You’ll have to throw out the cigarettes in the morning. In the woods, where no one will find them. Not even you.
Song
You hear that car accident song in June, before you know. The refrain: Take me. You think it’s a love song. He thinks it’s about death.
White Wolf Tequila and an old Nikon. His head flung back against the night sky. Take me.
All summer a forest unspools in film ribbons from his eyes and mouth. You touch him, and his body shakes. You hold onto him ‘till you can see his dreams upside down on the dark grass, and you take in these images, all of them. Too many frames. Too fast to see.
Your body fills with old light and you hold him. You never imagined you could hold so much.
Wait, you say. Take me, too.
You know what your arms have been for all your life.
#
He leans down in September, jaw scraping the corner of your forehead. His body now a delicate, hard machine taking him somewhere else.
So you spool the ribbon back, play it again. Backward, forward, half speed, fast. You live in black and white now, the way an animal does. But there’s nothing in these frames you haven’t seen. Maybe that flicker right there. A ghost on the lens. His gorgeous eyes. The shadows of cars sliding upside down across the ceiling of a room where a man smokes in bed. Now a collared dog, tied up. Now a hypodermic needle. Now the rafters of a crawlspace. Now a child’s birthday party. A boy running his hand down the neck of a grey guitar.
Did he see time when his eye was on you?
Or have you been an old fear all summer, something wild in the house? What was he saying yes to, the times he told you yes? When he shook against your body and the two of you lived in colors, wanting the speed no one survives. When you became another kind of dying.
#
The summer’s over. October comes. You hear that song in your head on the back of a motorcycle, take me, and your arms around somebody’s waist say yes to death. Death doesn’t love you back now, though it will someday.
Grace presses in. You’ve never fallen faster. The engine is a wolf shaking. The trees on this country road flicker until they blur together, form a white tunnel of light, and you hold on, all your life. Hair slices behind, wind cuts across your throat between the helmet’s chinstrap and the broken leather collar of your jacket.
Just your arms holding time.
Ashley Mayne’s work has appeared in Fence, Post Road, Juked, Peripheries, Blight Podcast, Metambesen, and elsewhere. She is one of the founders of Crystal Radio and edits fiction at Fence.
The Rat Man
by Babak Lakghomi
The man who’d turned into a rat had the same sickness, Ali says. You have the sickness if you dream of boys and want to press against them.
This is something Ali has heard from the kids on the street.
My father has left me with Ali’s parents. He is staying with Mother who is hospitalized in the city. It was supposed to be only for days. But it has been weeks.
Ali and I go to different schools. He is two years older than me. Ali’s brother is younger than both of us. I sleep in their room on a futon on the floor between their beds.
At night, their mother comes to the room, kisses them both, then kneels down and kisses me.
You’re like my son too, she says.
Ali and his brother take off their pajamas when they go to bed.
Each time I call my father he says Mother can’t talk.
I don’t tell my father anything about being sick or the Rat man.
Before turning into a rat, the man had thrust an eggplant into his asshole. It was only after his wife left him that he turned into a rat.
Do you want to watch it for yourself? Ali asks me one night. They speak in French, he says.
His younger brother is sleeping. We check to make sure his parents’ bedroom door is shut.
Ali inserts the VHS tape in and turns on the TV, mutes it. I hear rustling as Ali takes off his underwear.
Back in the bedroom, I cover my head with the blanket and try to go to sleep.
I want to forget about the Rat man.
I want to forget about the sickness.
I want to sleep in my own bed again and kiss my own mother goodnight.
Babak Lakghomi is the author of Floating Notes (Tyrant Books, 2018). His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Ninth Letter, New York Tyrant, and Green Mountains Review, among others.
Tawny
by Lincoln Michel
Some of the colors of the dog shit were ochre, taupe, beaver, and burnt umber.
I was standing in the dog park with my girlfriend, Olivia Mantooth, and her dog, Claudius Mantooth. Claudius was normally white, but the brown dust of the park had already turned him tan. Olivia Mantooth’s face was bright red, or I guess I should say scarlet.
“These filthy animals.” Olivia looked at me with her lip curled all the way up to the nose. “Can you believe it? Disgusting.”
Olivia wasn’t talking about the dogs. She was talking about the owners. “Nobody gives a crap about anything but themselves. That’s the problem right there!”
Olivia walked around the park picking up pieces of trash. Some of the pieces of trash were coffee cups, bottle caps, broken glass, and one limp and translucent condom.
“Hey, let’s go home,” I said, meaning back to her apartment. The flushness of Olivia’s cheeks was making me awkwardly aroused. “I bet Claudius is tired.”
“Could you imagine what I could do with this dog park?” she said, waving a silver snack wrapper in my face. “I could put in a new fence, plant green grass, add a watering trough for all the dogs. If only I had the authority, I could turn this place into fricking Shangri-La!”
A large black dog ran by, kicking dirt into my face. I wiped the grit out of my lips. “Let’s go home, roll around ourselves.”
Olivia just shook her head. She was in one of those moods where she didn’t get in the mood.
“Goddamn animals.”
Some of the breeds in the park were bulldog, basset hound, shiba inu, chow chow, and wire fox terrier.
“Can you believe that?” Olivia pointed at a mutt who was pooping an inch away from her foot. “Tell me if you can believe that! Am I going crazy?”
The dog looked up at her with an inscrutable expression, then sprinted off to join the rest of the pack.
“They’re not even going to pick that up.” She moved her pointer finger to aim in the direction of a couple on the bench across the park. She shouted, “Hey, did your dog just poop?”
The woman pulled off her earphones. She was wearing a chartreuse blouse and had long nails painted tickle me pink. “Which dog?”
“That little brown dog,” Olivia said. “You need to clean up after your dog. There are such things as rules. This is a society.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “Which brown dog, bitch?”
Olivia turned her hands into tight little tennis balls. “Clean up after your dog. Have some self-respect.”
The woman waved her open hands, pink fingernails extending like the spikes of some deep-sea monster. “Oh, no,” the woman with the pink fingernails said. “Hell to the no.”
Olivia and the woman were a few inches away from each other, shouting and growling.
“This park is disgusting. People like you make it disgusting.”
“I asked which brown dog, bitch. They’re all brown.”
The two women looked like they were about to bite each other’s throats out.
“Tawny,” I said.
The woman with the pink fingernails and Olivia both whipped their necks around.
“What?”
“Tawny,” I said a little louder. “The dog that pooped was tawny. It was the tawny dog.”
“I don’t have a tiny dog,” the woman said, wiping her lips with the back of her hand.
“Not tiny. Tawny. Like yawn with t.” Then I added, “And also a y at the end.”
“What the fuck is tawny?”
“It’s like a brown,” I explained. “A light brown.”
“Don’t call my dog tawny, asshole.”
Olivia stepped in front of me, shielding me with her body. “Don’t call Franklin an asshole. Franklin is a sensitive and accurate man. And tawny is a sensitive and accurate word!”
The woman stepped to the side, and looked at me from head to toe, stopping and shaking her head halfway at the midway point.
“He looks like a tawny piece of shit to me,” she said.
Some of the dogs were starting to notice the excitement. They crowded around us, wagging their tails. Some of the owners were walking over too. The sun was bright and hot, and the dust was floating all around us.
“Step back,” Olivia said.
“Let’s all just calm down,” someone said. “It’s a nice day at the park.”
The tawny dog trotted up, a chocolate brown stick in its mouth. It dropped the stick at my feet, looked up with its tongue out.
“Hey, here’s the tawny dog.” I stuck out my hand and started tousling the dog. “See? The tawny dog. Right here!”
I smiled and looked at Olivia and the other woman, trying to get their attention.
I kept jiggling the dog’s face and saying, “See?”
I guess I was too busy trying to get Olivia and the woman to notice the tawny dog that I didn’t notice that it was growling. Didn’t notice that it was baring its bright white teeth.
We had to take a taxi to the hospital. They charged me extra for bleeding on the seats.
Later, the bite on my hand started to blossom with a variety of colors as the infection spread. Some of the colors around the wound were rose madder, eggplant, smoky topaz, and lemon chiffon.
Lincoln Michel is the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press 2015) and the forthcoming novel The Body Scout (Orbit 2021). His short stories appear in The Paris Review, Granta, NOON, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. His essays and criticism appear in journals such as The New York Times, GQ, BOMB, and The Guardian. You can find him online at @thelincoln and lincolnmichel.com.
