CL Bledsoe




He thought there were fish in the trees. He could see the sun glinting on their scales. He never smelled them, though, so he knew they weren’t dead.  All day at work, he stared out the window—he could just see them over the top of his cubicle—until Jen came and told him they needed for him to switch desks with Tim (since Tim was out) while maintenance repaired the air vent just over his desk. He sat in misery—really, it was worse than the other day when he’d typed something especially vitriolic on his blog and waited for the fallout. All week, he waited, until they finished the repairs. Then, he heard that Tim wasn’t coming back. He knew he couldn’t ask them to move him back. Besides, he had an actual office now. Wasn’t that a good thing?







--CL Bledsoe is the author of the young adult novel, Sunlight, two poetry collections, _____(Want/Need), and Anthem, and a short story collection called Naming the Animals. A poetry chapbook, Goodbye to Noise, is available online at www.righthandpointing.com/bledsoe. A minichap, Texas, was published by Mud Luscious Press. His story, "Leaving the Garden," was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for Story South's Million Writer's Award. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 3 times. He blogs at Murder Your Darlings, http://clbledsoe.blogspot.com Bledsoe has written reviews for The Hollins Critic, The Arkansas Review, American Book Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere.

Stephen V. Ramey


This is the book of the killing of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Isaac killed Abraham; and Jacob killed Isaac; and Judas and his brethren killed Jacob; And Phares and Zara of Thamar killed Judas; and Esrom killed Phares; and Aram killed Esrom; And Aminadab killed Aram; and Naasson killed Aminadab; and Salmon killed Naasson; And Booz of Rachab killed Salmon; and Obed of Ruth killed Booz; and Jesse killed Obed; And David the king killed Jesse; and Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias killed David the king; And Roboam killed Solomon; and Abia killed Roboam; and Asa killed Abia; And Josaphat killed Asa; and Joram killed Josaphat; and Ozias killed Joram; And Joatham killed Ozias; and Achaz killed Joatham; and Ezekias killed Achaz; And Manasses killed Ezekias; and Amon killed Manasses; and Josias killed Amon; And Jechonias and his brethren killed Josias. And after they were brought to Babylon, Salathiel killed Jechonias; and Zorobabel killed Salathiel; And Abiud killed Zorobabel; and Eliakim killed Abiud; and Azor killed Eliakim; And Sadoc killed Azor; and Achim killed Sadoc; and Eliud killed Achim; And Eleazar killed Eliud; and Matthan killed Eleazar; and Jacob killed Matthan; And Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ, killed Jacob.

And we said unto God, "Why hast thou created a world of such murderous nature, O Father?" And He said unto us, "You have eaten of the fruit of the tree that was in the midst of my garden. Thus shall it ever be, my children, that the son murders his father by inches, and the father gives life to his son. The husk must crack so that the seed may flourish."



---Stephen V. Ramey's work has appeared or is upcoming in Eclectic Fiction, Fiction Collective, Foliate Oak, Bartleby Snopes, Eschatology, and many others. He co-edits the annual Triangulation Anthology from Parsec Ink.

The Children of Charlemagne

    The day drew to a close, amber light from the sun blanketing the dead field. The grass was brown and grape trellises rose in a grid of points. A road ran by one side of the field and off the shoulder there was a ditch, a few feet deep and with a trickle of ice zigzagging along the bottom. A muddy red sedan was parked off the side of the road and on the opposite side of the ditch there sat two children, each with a cigarette pinched between their fingers. They were a boy and a girl, the boy with his shaggy head resting on his knees, the girl’s arm around his shoulders. The boy was shaking, crying, and the girl hugged him tight against her side.

    The boy, whose name was Mickey, wrestled control of himself and sighed. The girl stared at the top of his head.

    “Some Thanksgiving,” Mickey said.

    June exhaled a sympathetic laugh.

    “You did a great job on the stuffing.”

    “Grandma did the stuffing. I only mixed the salad.”

    His voice wavered, “I liked the salad too,” pathetic.

    June took a drag from her cigarette. She wanted to say something but couldn’t reach any of the words. She thought of something.

    “I’ll bet you had some headache this morning, didn’t you?”

    Mickey half-sobbed then nodded his head.

    “That’s what wine’ll do to you,” June said.

    “I had some beers too. She brought them.”

    “Mixing only leads to trouble.”  She regretted choosing the word trouble.

    Mickey picked up his head and took a drag from his cigarette. He blew the smoke out of his mouth just after he sucked it from the butt.

    “I don’t think you’re inhaling, Mickey.”

    “I know how to hit a cigarette.”

    “Let me see. No, you blow it out too early. Try taking a breath after you drag it.”

    Mickey pulled down the smoke, choked, and coughed it out.

    June laughed. “Now that’s how you hit a cigarette.” She patted Mickey on the back.
    “I feel it in my head,” Mickey said. He rolled his eyes back and forth and blinked hard.
    “That’s the buzz. I don’t think it’s so great. Makes you feel sick.”

    Mickey trained his eyes on the sun and smiled.

    They’d lived together now for three years. He’d seen June drinking before and she feared she got him into this whole mess. But this wasn’t about her. Regardless the leading-up-to, she just wanted to talk to him, keep him occupied.

    Mickey sniffled and rubbed his eyes. He took a deep breath, then forced it out.

    “It was so strange hearing Mom’s voice again.”

    “Was it how you remembered it?”

    Mickey shook his head.

    “It was deeper,” he paused. “It sounded raspier.”

    “She’s horrible to do what she did. I hate her.”

    “I don’t hate her.”

    “How can you say that?”

    “If she’s around or not, she’s still my mother. I can’t hate her.”

    June spit.

    “Well she’s not my mother and I hate her enough for the both of us. You have even more reason.”

    “Doesn’t take a reason.”

    Neither of them said anything. The trellises now extended upwards against the setting sun like fuzzy gray obelisks and the temperature dipped. June rubbed her shoulders.

    “I just want to know why she calls now,” Mickey said. In the twilight June could only see his silhouette hung with a few charcoal shapes. The outline of his hair wisped back and forth when he spoke.

    “My guess is the guilt,” June said. “If leaving wasn’t enough, there’s this.”

    “But how did she find out?”

    June shrugged.

    “Maybe your dad called her. Maybe her parents had the number. It doesn’t really matter.”

    Mickey’s hair sunk below the horizon. June pulled him in and he began to shake. She didn’t think George had called. After dinner, he retired shortly before her, footfalls on the stairwell like dead stones dropping into sand. June went back to her room while Mickey was on the phone with his mother. Her Uncle George’s room was right next to her own; his bed was on the opposite side of the wall from hers. And lying there on her bed, back pressed against the oak headboard, she had heard those same choked sobs pressing through the wall.

    June picked at the grass stalks and heaped them together between her thighs. She took a long drag of her cigarette and tossed it behind her into the ditch.

    “Mickey,” she said, turning his shoulders so to face her, “You know I have to ask you.”
    His crying settled and, although the two of them faced one another, they could not see each other’s eyes buried in the dark shades.

    “Did you do it?”

    He said nothing for a long time, his mouth twitching in the dark, sniffling, blinking heavily, remembering but faltering, and he crumpled into her arms, eyes tight shut.

    “I don’t know,” he said.

Josh Boardman has a BA in Creative Writing, Philosophy, and Latin from Western Michigan University and is currently attending the Post-Baccalaureate Program for Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He grew up in Southwestern Michigan's suburbia surrounding St. Joseph, a small tourist town on the coast of Lake Michigan, where there was a smattering of different social classes with the boundaries of each constantly shifting. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Laureate and Moonshot Magazine.

The Pianist at Sea
          
            The man named Isaac is far from home. He floats on the back of a grand piano and when he drums its keys, all life below him retreats. I see him, though he does not see me, when he peers into my face and mourns in wet expressions. The smallest pieces of his despair drop from his face to mine and disappear between the gills of fish. Do you know that we are almost the same, piano man—that there is life in you like there is life in me?

            You have been gone from home so long, Isaac. I can see your wife and your daughter by my shores. Your daughter, Mary she is called, hunts for your figure in the distance. She is sprawled on her stomach by the water’s edge until sunset, her tiny hands pressing letters deep into the sand as if to deter the tide.  She spells slowly her prayers for you. “I love you,” she says. “Come home soon.” I reach for her words and pull them into the deep, now whispering them to you. Mary is waiting and you must go home soon.

            The man named Isaac sleeps under the lid of his instrument by day and survives by drinking the blood of turtles. He is humiliated by his gaunt structure, the pungent body odors, the decay of his memory. He tries to sing a familiar song, to arrange a friend of the tunes he knows, but cannot find the words through the fog that is clouding his thinking.  Instead he begins to hum his songs, feeling for the words with his fingers and he finds the wet ivory. This is how it starts.

            It is one more week of no food and water that teaches the man Isaac to lose his words altogether. His tongue too split, his throat too parched, he now sings—begs—his untrained compositions. I wash my waves over the tops of his feet and tell him to think of Mary, the girl on the shore, but now the whales are following and they are asking for a concert.

            Piano man, I hear the whales sing songs of comfort and praise but you must stay strong. I see your daughter again past sunset. She is weeping but she barely breathes to the wake. Her mother, she whispers, has gone to her brothers and now her only love is addiction. Isaac, she says that all day long they carpet the floor with their cans and shards of glass.  They consume their meals with a bottle opener. “I will wait for you forever,” she says and I know you must go home now.

            The whales, I know, have plans to bring him under. They have conspired noisily to make him their own—to hear his songs forever. They are circling nearer and nearer and now Isaac can graze their backs with his fingers. He struggles to live and the whales’ skin is cool and saturated. They are plump and harmonious together in their pod. It is days until I detect the changes in his skin. The piano man keeps playing but in the dark I see he is grayer than ever.

            The man named Isaac is so far from home. Now his melodies are long and deep, unlike the words he played before. The whales never leave him anymore. He hears their happiness under the waves and watches them play. He stares at the young one and I believe he thinks of Mary. I rock him harder when I spy him thinking this way but his skin is too thick now to feel the sensations.

            On the night Isaac slips from the piano and falls into the water, his daughter is again at the shore. This time she just sits and waits, singing something I have heard before. Was it your song Isaac? It has been so long since I have heard your voice and now you are falling into the blue where I cannot see but I can only feel. Isaac, you must remember. You must swim to your instrument and play for her. Your wife may leave you, your brothers forget you, but a daughter waits forever for your shape on the horizon.

            Now your legs are all one and your arms are tough and wide, and the whales collect you. You have shut your eyes to listen to their voices—slower, longer, deeper—and you are ready to compose again but this time you have no fingers and no keys so you play the sounds as they do. Slower… longer… deeper… This is the end, you know. We are the same now; you, the part of the life that swims in me. Isaac the pianist is lost at sea.

Leona Abbott is a recent graduate of UNCW's Creative Writing program and am, so far, an unpublished author. She is enjoying herlife as a brand-newlywed in Southern Pines, NC and am exploring the joys of unemployment. She will be pursuing graduate studies at UNCG in the fall.

What’s love got to do with it?

            Eun-ah and Harry sat quietly in the subterranean, smoky coffeehouse sipping their last cup of coffee together. Frank and Ella played in the background, just an octave below the murmur of conversation. It had been decided by her mother and father, a fortuneteller, and her Confucian upbringing that come April she would marry the son of her father’s employer. The free-spirited Eun-ah, who had once danced naked on the beaches of Phi Phi, studied fashion in Tokyo, and backpacked in Europe, was no match for the powers that be; had been bought and paid for by her fiancé, with his promise of a Mercedes and a year in Paris. I will learn to love him she told Harry, who until just a moment ago, had been the love of her life.

Originally from LaSalle, Illinois, Jeffrey Miller has been living and teaching in Asia since 1989. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in A-Minor Magazine, The Artful Dodge, Bartleby Snopes, The Camel Saloon, Full of Crow, Grey Sparrow Journal, Magnolia’s Press, Negative Suck, and Orion headless.

In Name and Blood

            Daniel’s bowler hat lay atop the oak table beside his glass of whiskey, no ice. A man who drinks whiskey never drinks with ice. This, Daniel would often comment, was because ice is used only to destroy the flavor. He propped his legs up on the table, threw his head back and finished the last of the whiskey in his glass.

            The homestead was built by hand in 1878 by Daniel’s father and little more than broken boards were all Daniel could claim to be his own in the house. A black soot had settled into the thin cracks that ran along the veins of the wood until it deposited in the knots.

            The room was little more than a wicker basket, holding only the essentials of the cabin. The couch, with yellow padding bursting through broken seams, was set below the only window. It framed a bumbling summer-jaunt photograph that would surely find its way into future Libraries of Congress. Astride the couch was the bed, wooly and fully downed for the pressing fall.

            The sole chair in the cabin, with chipped feet, would tear into the floorboards as its occupant would stare through the window out into the wild. Daniel would long sit in this chair, wearing thin the heels of his boots writhing about to determine a sustainable level of comfort. His eyes would never stray from the hole in the wall, as it howled great winds that jeered his domesticity. He would often hear the cries of his father, passing lightly on tip toes through the walks of the wind. Daniel refused to board the window, even during fall’s cold night.

            Through the ash black window, poorly painted with chips of wood ever peeling back from the sill, Daniel noticed someone approaching with haste. He snatched his hat and made for the door.

            “Can I help you boy-o?” said Daniel, reaching the front steps of the porch before the young man. Daniel held in his hands a .22 caliper rifle that was stored next to the door.

            “Is this Daniel Evergreen’s house?” the boy wearily inquired. He couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, but the gun in Daniel’s hand shot the fear of God into the boy long before a bullet could ever be fired. He fanned his face for want of breath and to push aside the gathering flies.

            “Now, I suspect a lot of things out here in these woods. I suspect that any man dressed nicer than myself ain’t from around these parts. I suspect that the scarcity of rodents around here to be a direct result of this .22 in my hands. I suspect a man who reached first to be disrespecting anything I might offer him. What I don’t suspect, boy-o, is someone your size to give me any trouble. That right square?”

            “Right, of course, sir.”

            “Good, cause I am the man you’re looking for and this better be worth me leaving my chair.”

            “I only bring news from the Dudley household.”

            “Yes, that may be family, albeit from my wife’s side. Continue.”

            “Right, of course, well, they are concerned as to why they have not received any letters from their daughter in the past nine months and have filed a missing persons report with the sheriff. He has sent me here to call you to town when you have a moment.”

            “Did I hear you wrong when you said you only bring news from the Dudley household?”

            “Right, sorry, I meant word from the sheriff that he got from the Dudley family.”

            Daniel raised the barrel of the .22 to the boy’s eyes. “You’d be best to run, boy-o. Ain’t no room for a liar in this homestead of mine.” The boy double-clutched and nearly fell from his exertion towards whence he came. Daniel hollered, “And tell your sheriff if he has something to ask me he’d be wise to get off his ass, grab that copper badge of his and come ask me himself.”

            Daniel kicked the patch of dirt lying beneath the entryway, dipped the top of his cap and spit onto the browned leaves caught in the slowly dying grass. The roots had taken hold years ago and, as with each spring, would return to a crisp green. Daniel gained confidence from the neglect of turning to watch the boy run.

            The sun hung low in the sky, sinking lower with every second. After only a few weeks, Daniel had noticed the sky would blot a dark purple and orange blaze as the sun would streak to its nightly resting place. The moon would always follow, carrying with it its haunting blue and grey apparitions.

            He passed through the kitchen, resting the .22 back against the side of the door. Repetition and organization were traits of a successful man, his father once told him. When living in such confined quarters, every item had its place. The matches were stored on the bottom shelf of the kitchen counter, beside the rusted traps and deck of cards. Dry goods were stored at eye level, in anticipation of scurrying grey mice to be caught with greater ease. Pots were hung above the sink, in descending order of size and depth. No space was wasted, everything given purpose.

            He entered into the dim-lit bed corner of the cabin. The tall white stacks of candles would never throw enough light across the cabin to reach the bed. This, too, had reason. Daniel could lay waste to his liver at night, watching the wild from his chair while his wife slept soundly only feet away. He would scribe furiously into small notepads themes of emptiness, regiment and fear. These words were forever hidden from she that slept nearby.

            Daniel knelt down bedside, his knees stiff in their joints. Nancy Evergreen sat softly upon the floor, back perched against the center beam. Her mouth agape and eyes clouded over. He removed his bowler hat and hung it on the nail he had driven through his wife’s forehead.

            “Looks like they’re playing our song, love. Do you remember the outro or are you still stuck at the crescendo?” He danced wild dreams in his head, holding the hand of his wife who floated gracefully above the floor.

M. R. Brown, born 1987, is a writer from Massachusetts.

An Impossible Memory

            All you know is how dark it is—so dark you could hardly see your own hands before your eyes—and how this older woman is pressing her body against yours under the warm sheets that haven’t been washed in a while and smell familiar and moldy.  All you know is that you are 9 maybe 10 years old and that you recognize that sweet voice whispering in your ear that she loves you more than anything and anyone in the world.

            You are a grown up woman now but whenever this night comes back to you like this, you have this sinking feeling that it wasn’t just a single night and you catch yourself thinking about the purity of maternal love.  You—suddenly awaken in the middle of the night, your mother—fully awake after a visit to the bathroom—both of you in your bed even though you sleep in different beds a couple of feet apart from each other.  She must have mistaken your bed for hers but the beds have been in the same place for years--yours next to the door, hers next to the window—and this has never happened before.

            And what’s so wrong with a mother sneaking into her little girl’s bed, anyway? When you were about five or six, you used to love lying in bed next to her in the morning. You’d snug your wispy head in her chest, she’d embrace you with a head-to-toe hug that ended in intertwined legs—yours and hers. And you wanted all the clocks in the world to stop right there and then.  You held your breath afraid of moving, afraid on breaking the magic.

            But that night before you went to bed your mother said to you that not having a husband wasn’t so bad after all, that one little girl was worth a hundred husbands and you looked at each other in the mirror as you both brushed your teeth and smiled with white mouths full of foamy toothpaste and saliva. She kissed you good night and made the cross in the air with her right hand. You went to sleep feeling special, as if the kiss and the blessing had sealed a secret covenant between the two of you.

            All you remember is noises—the toilet being flushed, steps returning to your room, the rustling of her pajamas against your sheets, your mother’s unintelligible hushing sounds although you are not crying, her whispers that said not to worry, it’s her, your mom, it’s ok, it’s a dream, she has you, she has you. More rustling as if she were changing her clothes right there in your bed, then the warmth of her skin, the cotton of her flowery pajamas gone.

            All you remember is the softness of her night shoulders, her breath, that peculiar smell of her toothless mouth, her winter hands pressing yours in downward circles on her breasts. You are old enough to know that breasts are sacred places that married women use to feed their babies. But the voice comes to you and tells you that it’s ok, it’s a dream, just a dream. You hear your mother’s heavy breathing, but you are not sure. You are in a cloud of stupor.

            You also remember her dark lips and you think it was perhaps a tiny grin but you know that is an impossible memory because it was pitch dark.  You couldn’t see your own fingers had you wriggled them in your face.  So why is the memory of those dark lips close to yours so real, so disturbing, so wrong?

             And that’s why three decades later, when everything you knew back then is either dead, decaying or far away, you’re still not sure why your mother is in your bed. Three decades later you wonder, even now that you are a mother and the time to share a bed with your own daughter is long past, you still wonder. You tell yourself that it was nothing, probably a lonely mother cuddling with a lonely child in the middle of the night.

            But this little girl—you—never told anyone what happened, because maybe nothing happened at all. Maybe there is no reason for your mother’s breasts in your hands to keep returning to you like this, maybe you need to lay to rest the memory of that night or the distortion of it, maybe it was nothing at all; a figment of your imagination, one of those vivid dreams that mess with reality, an accident, the beginning of something tragic that died that very same night.


Adriana Paramo's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Waccamaw Journal, F-Magazine (f9), Saw Palm Journal, The Clever Title, Lips Service, and Latina Voices. She is a cultural anthropologist currently pursuing a graduate degree in Creative Writing at the University of South Florida. She work with the Seminole Tribe Department of Education and live in Florida with a Scotsman and two mutts.

Death Fugue

Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night
we drink and drink
we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie
There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing he whistles his dogs to draw near
whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand
he commands us to play for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at dawntime and noontime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie
He calls jab it deep in the soil you lot there you other men sing and play
he tugs at the sword in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you men you other men you others play up again for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite he cultivates snakes

He calls play that death thing more sweetly Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
he calls scrape that fiddle more darkly then hover like smoke in the air
then scoop out a grave in the clouds where it’s roomy to lie

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
we drink you at dusktime and dawntime we drink and drink
Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue
he shoots you with leaden bullets his aim is true
there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
he sets his dogs on our trail he gives us a grave in the sky
he cultivates snakes and he dreams Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland

your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite



Todesfugue


Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken
wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde
er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng

Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt
er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau
stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen
Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau
er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft
er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith
 

Reprinted, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001)

Betwixt

                        . . . for my body does not have the same ideas I do. 
                                                     Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, p. 17

The space between then and now, its crumpled, folded, damaged, rolled over qualities.  In my body with its crookedness, from all those breaks and woundings.  Mis-healings.  My shoulders rising protectively to hide me. 

I try to go to the space between and come up instead with anecdotes.  Histories.  Space between then and now, my word and their word, this word and another.  Between me and you.  Between me and the word.  Space between two people in a house with many rooms and many children.  A space in nowhere.


Wilderness.


I look through the indexes of books for the word memory.  In the index of the book called Hysteria I do not find memory, but find instead, mind-fucking, on p.149.  This is of course irresistible.  Anastasia’s mind is her sex object, the paragraph which contained mind-fucking begins.  This too is irresistible. 

I like to keep a kind of distance.  But I carry around with me a book I have never read entitled The Failing Distance.  It is about Ruskin.  It must be the title I cling to, as I have no particular interest in Ruskin. 

There was a book in my parents’ bookcase that fascinated me as a child.  It was called Memories of an Aphasiac.  But now I realize I remember the title wrong.  The correct one is Memories of an Amnesiac.  I never read it.

My grandparents, at my grandfather’s wish, wrote a book in which their respective memoirs were intertwined.  Its title was Damit Wir Nicht Vergessen.  Another book I never read.  The English title, which was not published, was to be Lest We Forget.

Later my grandfather got Alzheimers and remembered nothing.


(((((((((((remorse.  from re-mords.  to bite again.)))))))))))



Joan Harvey's fiction, poetry, and translations have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Otoliths, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Bomb, Another Chicago Magazine, Danse Macabre, Osiris, Global City Review, Mountain Gazette, A Trunk of Delirium, Noua Literatura, Pangolin Papers, Inkblot, Prism, Kindred Spirit, Blue Light Red Light, Mississippi Mud, To: A Journal of Poetry, Prose and The Visual Arts, Fiction Monthly, Between C & D (Penguin anthology), Worcester Review, and others. She has won prizes for both poetry and fiction, and has been read on the radio in Manhattan and Aspen, Colorado. She is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and has translated the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann.