by Kelly Link
Table of Contents
Sonnet Crown for Third Officer Ripley
A. B. Robinson
The Beast Unknown to Heraldry
Henry Wessells
The Blood Carousel
Alyc Helms
Marrying the Sea
Kodiak Julian
Everything Is Haunted
Joe. M. McDermott
The Shadow You Cast Is Me
Henry Lien
The Virgin Regiment
Gillian Daniels
Auburn
Joanna Ruocco
The Square of Mirrors
Dylan Horrocks
Sleek Fat Albinos in Spring
Nicole Kimberling
Sun Circles
Jade Sylvan
About these Authors
An excerpt from The Liminal War
Ayize Jama-Everett
Act 1: London, fourteen minutes from now
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
An excerpt from Prodigies
a novel by
Angélica Gorodischer
Translated by Sue Burke
Part One: Illusion
1. Nothing Will Be As It Was
2. In Black
3. Treasures
An excerpt from The Entropy of Bones
Ayize Jama-Everett
Chapter One: The Time I Choked Out a Hillbilly
An excerpt from Was: a novel
Geoff Ryman
Part One: The Winter Kitchen
Manhattan, Kansas
Manhattan, Kansas
An excerpt from Archivist Wasp
Nicole Kornher-Stace
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Lady Churchill’s
Rosebud Wristlet
June 2015 · Issue 32
Left Shoe: Gavin J. Grant.
Left Shoe: Kelly Link.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 32, June 2015.
Contents © 2015 the authors. All rights reserved.
Ebook ISBN: 9781618731166.
ISSN 1544-7782.
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Sonnet Crown for Third Officer Ripley
A. B. Robinson
I.
Song, not for air captains but militarization
of everyday life: in the far future, army melts
into market transaction. This is now, certainly,
in the past, in 1979. With a sulfurous hiss
the longshoremen spring to life! They are tender
and easily distinguishable by archetype.
The commedia of office work persists,
a different wormhole, ledger
casting into an ontological shade
the quick glimpse of a series of convergences,
not easily reversed but better undone,
long shadows through a Microsoft space—
but I’m projecting again, I think. This is not
yet WarGames, released in 1983.
II.
Yet WarGames, released in 1983,
shares with Alien, if not Soviets outright, then
fear of a sentience picked clean of watercolor
humanism. The creature in its arcane laboratory
attempts toothy baroque, simultaneously backwards
and too high-pitched to be picked up by human
ears. Its structural perfection is matched only
by its hostility. The beautiful body from which
another unrecognizable body explodes, covering
the wall in oblique eulogies, is (endearingly)
really about Fascism at the last second. Indiana
Jones can’t keep these straight, either.
Ripley strokes the lean white form of the cat,
recognizable among the compaction of many machines.
III.
Recognizable among the compaction of many machines,
here’s the vague hulk of late night slasher double features.
Press this button, receive some feeling from the crew,
continuum of buff to scrawny. One girl will come away whole.
Yes, the military, in your suburbia! Hurled into abstraction,
Ash provides the gentle, officious commentary of
a PA system echoing faultlessly through entire cities,
networks of dissolving and reappearing ghosts, world
this one, peeled-off, makes raw again. Across the moor,
genre wiggles herself into a catsuit, attaches the oxygen
helmet. It came to install your air conditioning, and then
its teeth shot out, like a cash drawer. The body is
appropriated, terrible, and flat, which is its whole appeal.
Out of the corner of your eye, you guess the size of it beneath the water.
IV.
Out of the corner of your eye, you guess the size of it beneath the water.
The trick here is absence.
As in Godzilla, the effect
is achieved by what can be looked
at but not seen directly.
The maggot you pick out of your hair
quickly develops a personality, then,
shortly, a pedigree; when you wake,
you make up the story that best justifies
a series of uncoordinated developments.
First on four legs, then two,
then three, storms the whole parade
of questions. Out, out, out! And in the dark,
camera light flirting with a rope of drool.
V.
Camera light flirting with a rope of drool
and then the white undershirt of Captain Ripley,
spattered with blood. What is clean remains clean.
Her hair is, after all, perfect. She has no choice
after the first movie but to become motherly.
I admit I have not watched Alien recently enough
to give a coherent reading of the film—only
daub a little at the most memorable sequences,
many of which entail little exposition, many of which
take place before or after it, so that I look at it,
also, from the corner of my eye. That’s Susan
Sarandon in The Hunger and not Sigourney Weaver.
In the second and third films, she is billed with a personal name.
Not Ripley, but Ellen Ripley.
VI.
Not Ripley, but Ellen Ripley.
The androgynous hero-name is tacked against a more
decisive warmth, for plot expedience. That undershirt
is every soft butch dream I’ve ever had realized
simultaneously, and it’s true that if there is always
something ero
tic (therefore terrible) about horror movies,
Ripley is more agential and thereby way gayer than most
final girls. The den of unnameable intimacy is not
the upstairs bedroom of a split-level house in Milwaukee,
but a cavern. In traversing it one becomes man-like.
In this gaudily offensive way, we proceed through the nineteenth century.
The mystery is, after all, what happens when the fun is over,
when the monsters stop circling the mulberry bush.
The answer, of course, is an immaculate conception.
VII.
The answer, of course, is an immaculate conception.
It goes without saying that Aliens and Alien3 follow
Rosemary’s Baby to the playground, now with more lasers!
I was taught to lower my standards and keep going, but not like this.
Preserve, then, the first and most properly Gothic movie as a motive unto itself, or at least as a small reverse stitch, and
let us never speak of the Joss Whedon iteration, not even in secret.
I’ve forgotten every detail of Prometheus except
the Teutonic face of Michael Fassbender, and a culmination
in the swollen body of a queen. The Other is a really big bug.
Prometheus is more apocalyptic than anything. Was
there tense off-roading in the desert in this 2012 adventure movie?
I remember the gestation, more literal, worse than ever.
What’s dumb only gets dumber as it reduplicates.
VIII.
What’s dumb only gets dumber as it reduplicates.
Sublimity is funny in any number of crystalline eyes,
as are the failures of aging puppetry. Remember that
incidental line in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Silicone
shot out of a cannon is still weird for any number of reasons.
If these poems strike you as bathetic, vague, limping,
lopsided, or circular, an effect has been achieved like
space that won’t quite map itself into an agreeable arrangement,
into a neighborhood worth throwing newspapers at doorsteps for.
It’s true that what I’m doing isn’t exactly criticism,
but who asked for it? I will keep walking in this crab-like way,
ass-first among the stars. My, what big teeth you have!
Mother! I’ve turned the cooling unit back on. Mother!
The ship will automatically destruct in “T” minus five minutes!
IX.
The ship will automatically destruct in “T” minus five minutes,
a ship we call “Mother”. My funereal drawing room can beat up
your crumbling buttresses! We are never quite sure where
the big estate begins and ends, nor its assortment of polyps,
windy corners, LEDs, and pinched faces, clicking
merrily together towards a conclusion described in reports as inevitable.
Mother doesn’t care for you but has achieved legal personhood
and donates endlessly to subterranean political campaigns.
A feeling of soothing fugue floats over us. The ship,
now splintered to accommodate a few Marimekko prints,
several lampshades, floats toward the edge of the German wood.
We have eaten the dark candy and somehow lived. It ends
where it began, in our underwear, confused but titillated.
A voice-over nudges us against the thingness of our experience.
X.
A voice-over nudges us against the thingness of our experience.
Alien is framed by log entries, and so in total becomes nearly anecdotal.
Ripley is her own Nelly Dean, but who has been killing the dogs?
It scuttles away before we notice it, too small and then much too large,
always offstage. (Outside in Belchertown, MA, the dogs begin
to howl, no reason except the end of the weekend or a stray firework).
There’s a suggestion that Ripley has been alone the entire time,
isolated first by manners (money, an ambivalent position as minor officer)
and gender, and then, finally, by her own body, or her terrible double.
We will see the edge of the frontier in six weeks, if we are lucky.
The story is retold, and retold, and then retold—first of thrown bodies,
and then their replacements. Impossible to see the center.
Things don’t so much fall apart as fly into installments.
One gets the sense that everyone but the android is interchangeable.
XI.
One gets the sense that everyone but the android is interchangeable.
Even Ripley, with the rearrangement of her personality
to suit narrative contingencies, is infinitely malleable.
I love the affectation of characters said to “argue” with authors,
coax, deny, applaud, or love. The illusory interiority of realism
roars to life and it has too many mouths and can only do pratfalls.
We like this interplay of surfaces and the flicker of fish in it!
I am speaking extremely figurally—extremely figurally. If you take away
all the metaphors there’s nothing but weird flesh and some wire hangers.
With nothing to do but gnaw pointlessly at my own tail, we begin
to chart a course away from the intended one. Fumbling with
charm or pleasure so accidental it only redoubles. As when
everybody begins to wake up and is hungry for space breakfast.
They all begin to eat, brushing off “personality” with coarse efficiency.
XII.
They all begin to eat, brushing off “personality” with coarse efficiency.
In fact, it is impossible to remember any of them, not even a little!
Perhaps this kind of work is better suited to a more obsessive fan,
somebody with all the minutiae in a Rolodex. On the other hand,
I’ve always hated the wiki as a form, and don’t you?
Glazed over, it takes on a different cast. Like, how does
nobody really know what they’re out in space to do? Ash
is singularly the real middle management, but is that how power works?
With a bang and a flash, a point contracted into visible sharpness before
dispersing? And little orange dots left in your closed eyes afterwards.
My bosses have always been slow burners, but I keep both
my feet on the ground. The whole thing’s a little sinister!
They trade jokes and I forget all of them immediately;
that’s more like the working day I’m familiar with.
XIII.
That’s more like the working day I’m familiar with—
the slow voiding or bleaching of order. Which
part of the creature did I really see? I don’t know
what I did all day, except in an abstract sense.
Someone wields the light, someone looks directly
into the camera and is carried off. Someone is
scornful of another one’s fear. Ripley is not
suitable for vanity mirror figuring of one’s self and
is, in fact, always someone else except
a young Judith Butler. The work, however,
is an inescapable fact, the absence of which
is merely waiting. The poems go on in order
to go on, to be enough. Aliens of all kinds tend
to fall a little by the wayside.
XIV.
To fall a little by the wayside
is, in its way, a reward. The camera pans wider
to show us the roominess, the preposterous scale
of the natural spaceship—only to vanish again.
There is a glimpse of a mechanism. The shadow
of a boom mic duly noted. Ripley
herself
begins the voyage, only to begin it again, or to
return—but the fact is that she can’t stay anywhere.
She achieves these traversals by endings, meals,
diminishments, apocalypses, resurrections,
brokerages, or third-party mediation.
A series of Ripleys gesture towards
a blank field, caught in the roll of it.
Song, not for air captains but militarization.
The Beast Unknown to Heraldry
Henry Wessells
One does not always know the consequences of research in an archive, nor even what form the research will take. Thornton had a small income from his mother, which had once been sufficient for the modest entertainments of a private scholar living modestly in London. Now the competency ran to about ten months of the year in a sunny Cornish village he had come to love. His book on the supernatural in Britain was in the sixth edition but the royalties had been spent to renew his wardrobe. When his landlady began to talk of summer tenants for his rooms, Thornton told her he would be away for September, too, and wrote a letter to Digger. The fourteenth Duke of Wyland was a distant cousin of precisely his age; at six, Thornton had been presented to the twelfth Duke, Digger’s grandfather, at Delvoir Castle. The two boys had attended the same crammer, and for several summers had run wild and fought together through the castle demesne, until their public school careers diverged. The heir went off to Eton and Balliol, and Thornton to a bursary at Harrow, a pass degree in old English at Cambridge, and brief appointments as assistant master at a string of lesser public schools (he was never invited back). Thornton had sent the Duke copies of all of his books but had not seen him for a decade; he was almost certainly the only person who called the Duke by his school nickname. His letter proposed research into the early thirteenth-century rent rolls and forestry records in the castle archives. His cousin could scarcely refuse him, and the prospect of two of three months’ lodging in an upstairs room in the castle, with all found, was a welcome one.