July 2017 | poetry
The Narcissist Hears What You’re Trying to Do There
Grabs your argument in a certain hand, clenches
your words in a fist,
spits
them back at you before you’ve decided
what you were even trying
to say. Perhaps
there wasn’t a manipulative germ
or any exhumed dirty word,
maybe
what he can hear and see
is the extent of it,
transparent,
but he’s perspicacious with a straight spine,
drawn to full height,
tongue
slashing, that dripping dagger
to remind
every syllable matters
in the way
it could possibly relate
to him. Admit
he wasn’t part of the intended audience,
meandering sentence
still unspooling from your lips?
Unthinkable.
Unforgiveable sin.
He has to stop you before you can begin.
Swing Song
Squeak creak squeal
squeak creak squeal: across the street,
a couple in their twenties
pumps long legs into glassy sky, bodies
flung nearly perpendicular
to the top of the bar, so high. Individual
horizons. Now she knows those sounds
last week at sundown
did not mean she was going to break
something.
How silly to think the weight
of forty-seven years means anything
to a swing
ready to squeak all comers into the clouds
and back to thirteen,
sullen, holding a Walkman
turned up loud, back to seven,
screaming in delight, pushed
so hard she had to hold on
tight. All the way home,
their palms will thrum
with effort while their minds
fly, worries having fallen
from their pockets like pebbles
into sand,
the smell of salty steel
still kissing their hands.
Kasandra Larsen
Kasandra Larsen’s work has appeared in Best New Poets, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Into the Void Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, and others. Her manuscript CONSTRUCTION was a finalist for the 2016 Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry; her chapbook STELLAR TELEGRAM won the 2009 Sheltering Pines Press Chapbook Award. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee.
July 2017 | fiction
Who are you?
You don’t know?
No.
I’ll come closer.
Your face. What happened to your face?
You don’t remember?
No.
Are you sure? Look.
It’s horrible. The holes in your face. Your chest. Your stomach.
Yes. So many.
Why are you laughing?
Children laugh. Don’t you know children laugh?
Stop. Stop it, please. The sound. It hurts.
Yes. It’s supposed to hurt.
But why do you hurt me?
I asked you that, too.
Please. Please I am begging you. Don’t look at me.
I have to look at you.
The sound, the sound! But who are you? I don’t understand. They said there would be virgins.
Marc Simon
Marc Simon’s short fiction has appeared in several literary magazines, including The Wilderness House Review, Flashquake, Poetica Magazine, The Writing Disorder, Jewish Fiction.net, Slush Pile Magazine and most recently, Everyday Fiction. His debut novel, The Leap Year Boy was published in December, 2012.
July 2017 | fiction
Marco looked at the empty space that his sculpture was going to occupy. What the hell did he have to say that would be worth occupying this space with? His collection of found objects that were going to be used for the assemblage lay in boxes and sat in bags all around him. He had metal and wood and plastics of all sorts. No paper. He had given up on paper and on vocabulary because words had only ever gotten him into trouble in life. But even without words, his sculpture was supposed to mean something.
The empty space before him was more profound than anything he could fill it with. He could add pieces of his life: the slights, the insults, the bashings in the head he’d endured at the hands of so-called friends who’d only ever left landmines for him to be exploded by later. No, they did not deserve any acknowledgment in his work. He could talk about his great loves, the ones who sliced him open, threw him onto funeral pyres, and, even worse, ignored him when he needed them, especially when he’d dedicated entire weeks to their problems. It was always the same thing: I love you if you are helping me, but if you need anything in return, well, then you are just out of luck. Yep, that was it. He was out of luck. He was completely out of luck. And what can one do when one has no luck left at all? What is there left when all hope of anything ever going right again has completely gone?
That is what he needed to figure out. That was what the void before him needed from him. It was the artist’s job to stare into the gaping maw of nothingness and pull from it something. That was a profound obligation. But now that he stared into that gaping maw, all he found was nothing. His ability to pull anything out of nothing was gone.
He picked up the bags and boxes and carried them out to the dumpster. He had nothing left. Without the objects, perhaps the silence could finally overtake him. Perhaps the noises that kept hurting him would finally quit, quiet. Quite.
He had left nothing.
Eckhard Gerdes
Eckhard Gerdes has published books of poetry, drama, and fourteen books of fiction, including the novels “Hugh Moore” (for which he was awarded an &Now Award) and “My Landlady the Lobotomist” (a top five finisher in the 2009 Preditors and Editors Readers Poll and nominated for the 2009 Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel of the Year). His most recent books are a tongue-in-cheek work of creative nonfiction, “How to Read” (Guide Dog Books); a novel, White Bungalows (Dirt Heart Pharmacy Press); and a collection, “Three Plays” (Black Scat Books). He lives near Chicago and has three sons and three grandsons.
