The body, like a map, bears these significances.
Crease them, see where they cross: in the glens and glades and most secret shrines, at all of the roadsides and waysides,
I listen.
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The Kiss by Konrad Kruszewski
(art)
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Longs to Run by David Bulley
Imagine hurling yourself across January crust, skimming on top, reckless and loud. The bright full moon, slung low over the trees; the ruby blood spread across unbroken brilliant white snow. Think of gorging and fullness and contentment and the steam from your nose sending breath into the heavens, you a part of everything. Dream of life.
Think, next time at the grade-school mixer, when you realize that your child's teacher has spoken only to fourth-graders for so long she seems weirdly retarded, and the principal is instituting yet another “Peace Plan” for negotiating and “envisioning” and group problem-solving and anything, anything but fucking goddamned motherfucking stinking reading and writing! Look at cute Susie's mom all smarmy and stupid, lapping it up. Think, wouldn't it be nice to smell her fear? Just for a minute?
Maybe there is a long walk along the canal, dirt road and high grass where, desperate and depressed, you can run and pretend. Pretend you are the wolfman, transformed into something strong and powerful, physical and vital. The world dissolves into smell and touch and clean sharp air. You and the dog—"I'm going for a little walk, honey,” and then “Yip Yip Yow!"—run, run in the dark, hidden and dangerous.
Or like that checkout weirdo at the gas station who thinks it is his job to save the world from crime, so when you get there and fill the tank—all this is totally normal except you have to use your spouse's card instead of your own, because the magnetic strip got ruined in the wash. So you spring it out and this little minimum-wage punk calls the cops and everything; he's got his lips turned down at you but is curled up around the cop's ankle waiting for a pat on the head or something, and filling up the tank takes two hours, oh baby oh baby just to run, please god let me change. Please god let me change.
So you're running with the dog inside the freedom of darkness—wolfman. And at the end of the trail is little Susie's mom, whatshername? Teri or Mary or some kind of ary you think, and she's calling for her dog, but can't find him.
"Oh, um, hello,” she says, straightening up, fixing herself. “I didn't realize...."
And you are the wolf and you so, so want to taste her fear, just a tiny bit, just a taste. “I want to fuck you."
"Um,” she says, looking around, checking the exits, nervous and shivery. “Um, are you threatening me?"
And she is scared, just a little, and it does taste good. It tastes better than you ever thought it could. It is exquisite. You walk towards her, slow and strutting, powerful, and the power lets you play. She freezes up. You whisper in her ear. “I would never harm you. Don't worry. But I am serious. Me and you. Let's run naked in the dark and then fall down in the wet grass and fuck like we might die."
You are the wolfman. You are. You are free and powerful and intimidating and unbound. “I've forgotten your name,” you say while touching her cheek with your knuckle, stroking it. “Are you Mary or Teri or what?” And you laugh at it. Only the wolfman could forget a name and ask to fuck and be totally at ease, so totally right with everything.
"It's Teri,” she says, and she is naked before you.
And you are naked. She looks at you and you her. You see her stretch marks and sagging, nursed-a-few breasts and her cellulite thighs and goose pimples everywhere, and naked in the darkness outdoors she is not smarmy at all. Not at all. “RUN!"
Teri yelps before she can hold it in, just “YIE!” like that, and she turns and bolts, giggling and shiny white in the dim glow from a streetlight across the canal.
You lope along behind her, smelling her smell, growling your breath in and out of your mouth. You are in far better shape. It is easy to catch her. Easy to bring her down into the grass and easy—easy because she is so ready—to penetrate her. “YIP YIP YOW!” to the stars. She hangs on with all of her limbs, as if for her very life she clings and clings and grinds up against you, biting.
And then you are behind her, holding her breasts and humping until you cannot breathe.
She is on top of you now, you on your back in the wet grass, cold and slippery like swimming through earth and the smells are exploding and she lays her palms on your chest and leans forward hard and grinds until you know you have disappeared and in that darkness is freedom as well. She shivers hard and arches her back and then collapses on top of you, spent and satisfied.
But you aren't done. You turn her over and begin again, slowly, controlled, holding your own tension as tightly as you can, feeling every tiny pressure until you also collapse, spent and full. You roll off of her and then laugh when her dog tries to lick a mess he shouldn't. She shoos him off and then you walk her back to her clothes, back to your clothes.
You were the wolfman.
And when you see her next, smarmy and prim, at the bake sale, think about bright air and goose pimples.
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Ah Those Letters in the or Modern Lit by Lida Broadhurst
Come these women at some crossroads, not of boards. Flesh sags like melting ice cream as they drag upstairs to attics. Believing they wish to clear away ripped lampshades, clothes rotting like buried shrouds, chairs with arms or legs snapped in two, they refuse to remember lovers dancing in unfamiliar patterns.
Somehow their hands find letters bundled with ribbons, which they decide were torn from dark hair which now falls in chaos. Envelopes, not so much stamped as embroidered, conceal manycolored skeletons—grandmothers, aunts, occasionally cousins—all dead, even to memory.
Strange fluids dripped to form maps of unknown worlds.
Begins then the reading, by the women, and we feel gratitude they lend us their eyes. Like symbionts we crouch, gasping at misery in dusty tents, flapping on sands with exotic names. Tears flow into every crevice, as they move swaddled in ancestral grief, caged in centuries of cruelty. even when lost in ecstasy. We enjoy feeling our own wetness form rivulets down the pages.
Life flourishes in these waters, they believe, their own anyway, as the past woes sustain them. Their eyes radiate delight with the mysteries revealed by the dark elbowed priestesses of the past, stirring cauldrons with stained hands, into which our heroines leap, joyfully, chanting of new roots sprouting, Beads clink like instruments untuned, as they dance unaware they are bound to eternal dark spirits.
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Pepé in Critical Condition by Tomi Shaw
The Movie: Bang Bang Shoot ‘Em Up
—Life would be so much easier if I were a cartoon character.
—Why'd you try to kill him, Rachel?
—Yosemite Sam.
—Excuse me?
—You know. Huckleberry Hound, Speedy Gonzales, Pepé Le Pew.
—Right. Yosemite was the gunslinger.
—My name's Penelope.
—Ah, the victimized cat?
—Odysseus's wife, silly.
—You attempted murder because you're Odysseus's wife?
—He should have come home.
—He was home. His wife found him in his kitchen, the cookie jar by his bleeding head.
—It was the crossroads in Albuquerque. Siren-call.
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The Sequel: Cell Block University
It's like Math. If she has four more dollars than Eric, and together they have twenty-two dollars, how much does each person have? The first step is to subtract.
It's like punishment.
Write it 100 times:
I will not talk in class.
I will not talk in class.
It's like fighting on the telephone. One yells, the other waits for just the wrong thing to be said, p
ounces on it, and then screams overtop the first. Eventually, someone hangs up.
If you were a cookie, what cookie would you be?
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Redux: Vanilla Wafer
"Life would be so much easier if I were a cartoon character."
He heard it in line at Starbucks that morning, pouring out of the sour mouth of a stickly old lady with frosty-purple-icing hair. Betty Boop popped into his head, his chuckle derisive. He ordered his coffee and stomped his loafers out the door without even bothering to listen to which cartoon character she figured would improve her life. She was the antithesis of Betty Boop, and that was all he needed to know.
At the stoplight to Breckinridge Lane, he sipped his coffee, watching the Lexus SUV and Beemer moms behind the wheels of their shiny, someone-else washed, waxed, and polished gas hogs. A stringy woman in smart glasses, with leather hands at ten o'clock two, was singing. Sally Brown, he said aloud. To the one with teeth sunk into her bottom lip and high-sheen polished nails the tiniest of cell phones, he said, Wilma Flintstone. The bitch who honked trying to move from the right-hand turn lane to his he named Lucy, forgetting for a moment to dub her in the opposite, but with a wave of his hand and a quick rename he let Blondie over. Finally, the light changed and he gunned the car's engine, coming a pig's snout short of edging underneath Blondie's bumper. He'd thrown back his head to laugh.
All the way to work, he chuckled whenever he thought about it, all the way up in the elevator, picking his mail up from the mailroom, and straight into that moment, in front of his executive assistant with her bright orange hair and white-bread skin—the Penelope to his Pepé.
"Women make no sense, you know?” he says, by way of good morning.
"Absolutely,” she says.
"If you were a cartoon character,” he asks, putting his coffee on her desk and opening the door to his office, “who would you be?"
"I love games. My girlfriends and I used to do this. Like if you were a cookie or an animal,” she says, scooting under his arm and into his office. “Comic strip, animated, what?"
"Whatever.” He steps in behind her and slips a hand down the front of her V-necked cashmere sweater, pinching her nipple through the silk of her bra.
Bending over his desk, she says, “Cinderella. Pretty gowns."
He slides her skirt up over her hips, bunching it in his hands around her waist, exposing the tops of her thigh-highs, lacy and black. “And me?"
"Silly. You are Prince Charming, of course,” she says. “So if you were a cookie—"
He laughs. “I wouldn't be soft, for damn sure."
"Ah, so true, but I am.” Putting one foot clad in a skinny-heeled black pump on the desk, she wiggles onto him, finds the right way to grab him and suck him inside, deeper. “Now bite me!"
He does, and they carry on.
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Having Fun at the Party by Fran
(art)
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The first day of the last day my face fell off by Rohith Sundararaman
my mother woke me up one day
with my face in her hand it fell off, she said, holding it like garbage i looked at it and then i looked at mother she blushed so freud was right i ran and hid in the closet mother slid my face from under the door if it helps, she said, your father feels the same about his
how she knew it i don't know i held it against my chest it felt clammy like some dusting cloth i thought of my dog, the buddhist counselor and i detached myself from the thought then i thought about the mailman, the president and my friends they didn't deserve to know the truth i didn't deserve to know the truth
it was over my life was over i sneaked out of the closet dad was waiting in the living room i stared at him with my face in my hands he stared at me with his face in his hands some have jewels, some have antiques this is our legacy
be a man and face yourself, he said as he glued his face back and i wept till shame became my face
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Sown Seeds by Errid Farland
Mr. Popperoy dispensed his wacky-old-man wisdom in a jumble of disconnected words, a Vedic sort of chicken-scratch that sometimes annoyed and sometimes entertained Trace, depending on his mood.
That day, they rolled out and on like tumbleweeds set loose by thirst and heat and time, and they vexed Trace more than anything else, preoccupied as he was with his wife's latest discontent.
"Vishnu!” Mr. Popperoy said, like a sneeze, then he followed it with, “God bless you!” Then he chuckled.
"Real funny, there, Mr. Popperoy,” Trace said.
It was Emmy who'd made Trace start taking care of Mr. Popperoy in the first place. She'd seen him out their bay window that January day when he had tried to get to the store in his golf cart, but instead ended up in the ditch out in front of the house.
Mr. Popperoy could be lucid and make perfect sense when he wanted to, which was why his philosophical musings could be so aggravating. That day, he had climbed out of the golf cart, and by the time Trace got his coat and gloves on, he was tying a rope around the hapless vehicle. He wore brown boots, on the wrong feet—the left on the right, the right on the left—and when Trace had pointed it out, he'd said, “Even wear this way."
Trace had gotten his truck and pulled the cart free, and Mr. Popperoy meant to get back in the cart and continue on his icy way to the grocery, and Trace meant to let him, but Emmy came out and insisted that Trace take him in the truck. Mr. Popperoy sensed Trace's hesitation, so he said, “Tomorrow's as yesterday as next year.” Trace had looked at him, and he'd winked and worked his mouth, slapping his cracked lips together and licking now and then with a darting tongue.
Three years later, thanks to Emmy's compassion, Trace was still carting the old man to the store three times a week. Mr. Popperoy didn't believe in buying anything in mass quantities, or rashly. He'd get a basket and push it, shuffle-step by shuffle-step, half the time with his shoes on the wrong feet, down each and every aisle, then end up at the cashier with five or seven items. He'd flirt with the cashiers, all of them, smiling broadly and sticking his tongue out of the gap left by his four missing front teeth.
"Ever had one a them prostitutes?” Mr. Popperoy asked Trace on the way home that day.
"I'm married, remember?” Trace said, using a tone of voice that indicated he didn't want to remember that at the moment.
"That's right, that's right. Real sweet, that gal a yours."
Yeah, real sweet, Trace thought to himself.
"Ever had one a them prostitutes?"
"Nah. I never had to pay for it before."
"Oh, paying's nice, real nice."
"Hmph,” Trace said, and a smile crept to his lips. As it stood between him and Emmy, he hadn't had sex in two weeks, and he didn't expect to have sex anytime soon.
"Let's get us some,” Mr. Popperoy said.
"Let's not."
Mr. Popperoy locked his big hand, with its swollen knuckles and its thin skin draped over bones and sinews, onto Trace's upper arm. “Boy, I need to get me a prostitute."
Trace chuckled.
"I know, I know. A prune can't be a plum again, but I got to get me a prostitute, and I got to get me one right now, today."
Trace looked at Mr. Popperoy, at his white stubble and his missing teeth, and he said, “How much you think you'll have to pay her?"
"Hunnert."
"Okay, Mr. Popperoy. We'll go see if we can find you a prostitute for a hundred dollars.” At that point, it was a joke. Trace didn't think he'd actually get one. After all, prostitutes or not, they had to have their standards.
They found two women together, two sassy women with long legs and big, watery mouths, and Mr. Popperoy bought one for himself and one for Trace, and Trace had a real bad feeling about it, but he didn't say no. Mr. Popperoy didn't want to take them home, so they went to a motel.
"You have fun, now, boy.
Take your time, because time's already done, as you know."
Trace tried to take his time, but he and Emmy hadn't done it in so long—and this girl did things to him Emmy never thought of doing—it didn't take much. After she left, he got dressed and sat on the bed, waiting for Mr. Popperoy. He heard a door shut and looked out the window to see Mr. Popperoy's whore strolling away, so he sat on the bed again and waited a decent amount of time for Mr. Popperoy to get dressed, then went and knocked on his door.
Trace knocked again. And again. And again.
The manager had to open the door, and there he lay, his white skin lapping over itself like ripples on a lake, his mouth opened wide, and his pecker still shimmering wet. The manager called the police to report the death, and Trace ran his fingers through his hair.
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She Dreams in Colors, She Dreams in Hope by F. John Sharp
Pasha removes bread and dried fruit from a canvas lunch bag and lays them on a napkin, arranging the pieces until the composition pleases her. She usually places the bread on the left and the fruit on the right, but she reverses it whenever she is about to work on Goran, like today.
"Look at Pasha,” says Goran, who dumps his food onto the square metal table. “See how content she is that again she has no meat for her lunch."
Raisa frowns. “Goran, you should spend more time worrying about meeting your quota and putting meat on your own table. Leave Pasha alone for a change."
"I think Goran is jealous of Pasha always making quota,” says Niki. “How long since Goran made quota? A month?"
"I made it a week ago Thursday."
"So twice in a month then?” Raisa says. A threadbare blue babushka exaggerates the movement of her head as she nods to make her point. The dim light makes her graying hair look rusty.
Goran grumbles and bites off a chunk of day-old bread, which crunches and resists his efforts. Pasha continues to eat as though the conversation hasn't been about her, her mouth turned slightly upward, giving her the appearance either of being satisfied with her circumstances or of waiting patiently for an opening.
GUD Magazine Issue 0 :: Spring 2007 Page 16