by Rebecca van Laer

This is how it begins–wind

whisking hats, what’s left of the roofs

of grayed barns and hurling them into hayfields.

Stalks bent, roads scored like games of tic-tac-toe.

My husband and the dog perched

on the seam between the two husks

of our double wide, the velvet

sofa stained with ashes and stale piss.

I–applying band-aids, strip-searching

pubescent riff-raff for Robitussin capsules, but then

we all had to hunker, keep our mouths between our knees.

The walls hissed.  In the movies

cows rise up, sigh, float down safe and I think

this city has that same dumb-eyed grace.

Motoring back across the tracks I didn’t fear I’d find bodies—

worse, all my housework scattered on some field.

When I was young and white-skirted I wanted

more, more than plains rolling out like pie crust.

Cities with cranes in the sky, steel

boned buildings rising.

I wanted my  lips

to stand out like the brick courthouse

too strong to suffer from the kiss of any gust.

To come out in full-color, red

shoes, blue dress, none of that cropped

hair glamour—Lulu Brooks all ash

and black, her tap-dance silenced

by the whine of the film reel. And I came

home today to the whole house tipping to the still

ground, sofa slammed into the vanity.

by Rebecca van Laer

*”Dorothy Comes Home From Work” was the 1st runner up in the 2010 Flatmancrooked Poetry Prize. It appears in Flatmancrooked’s Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetics, available for pre-order soon. Cover design by Michael Fusco.

by Aaron Burch

Frank stood on my porch, beer in one hand and clapping the front door with the open palm of his other. Behind him, his truck jerked and hiccupped but he never looked back; I’d heard that old junkyard of a truck growling through the neighborhood so knew he was coming, had watched from the garage window as he pulled up, jumped out of the truck and barreled to where he stood now. I waited with slight amusement as he pounded and got frustrated at my absence until, finally, I pressed the remote and let the wall rise in front of me.

“Shit, man. I was starting to think you weren’t home.”

I’d just finished dinner, sitting alone in my car while Karen watched a movie in hers. Frank looked ready to go and I followed, was ready to leave before I even saw him turn into the driveway. I didn’t look back at my wife but could picture her curled up in her reclined passenger seat, her laptop balanced in her lap.

“The range, man. Let’s go hit the fucking range.”

I went back, grabbed my old clubs from the back corner and could hear Karen turning up the volume on her movie, trying to drown us out. I slowed down, waited for her to look up at me. Kept waiting all the way out the garage.

I threw my clubs in the back and Frank yelled to be careful, to be sure I didn’t scratch his clubs or anything. Mine weren’t anything special, an old mismatched set I found at a garage sale, but Frank thought the world of his. He treated them like his babies. I liked that I could throw mine around without worry, didn’t understand why Frank spent so much money.

I clicked the garage shut, snapped the remote to my side like to a utility belt.

“You in there working or something?” Frank asked, but didn’t look at me or wait for an answer. I hadn’t told him, hadn’t yet told anyone, that we’d all but moved into the garage, that this was how we were trying to work shit out. “There’s beer in the back. Grab one before they’re gone.”

I watched the garage close as we backed out and wondered if, while we were gone, Karen would go into the house or stay put. She hadn’t brought anything from inside the house to the garage, least nothing I’d noticed. I wondered if it was because she spent her time in the house whenever I was gone, or if she just didn’t need any of it. If she was making an effort to rough it just to be stubborn or what. Read the rest of this entry »

by bl pawelek

photo by Gena Mowish

(an FMC original)

In 10 words (no more, no less), describe The National Virginity Pledge.

BG: Enjoys snowflakes, Indian food, cartoons, long walks on the beach.

Five Questions Here

1. Tell me how this book is like a poker hand.

BG: Is this where I declare my philosophy of life and disguise it as a poker metaphor? I knew there was a reason I liked you. I don’t know. I think I tried to construct these tales in such a way that every detail is important and meaningful in any number of ways, depending on the reader and what they are bringing to the table at any given minute. Hopefully a reader can read the same story two or three or fifty different times and have a different reaction to it and it’s details every time they read it. So I guess the comparison is. You can be dealt any hand at any given time, hell you can get the same two shitty hold cards three or four times in a row, but if you know what you’re doing, there’s a better than 74% chance you’re gonna play those cards different every time you get them. It all depends what you’re bringing to the table before you sit down.

2. I have got to ask, what is the Tic Tac Toe thing?

BG: I wish I had some cool story to make up but I don’t. In K-12 I went to thirteen different schools, so I spent much of my childhood (and well into adulthood, depends who you ask), the stereotypical fat, awkward, poor, pimply, picked-on, friendless, new kid in school. Come sixth grade I was starting my sixth school and I just happened to get seated next to the kid who was “that kid” before I showed up. Well, this kid happened to be a sort of genius, so he never needed to pay attention. I didn’t bother because I knew I’d be heading off in a few months to a different school, so we kind of made a good pair. So he spent about three months kicking my ass every day at Tic-Tac-Toe, until the week before I moved. He taught me the secret to life, the sure fire way never to lose, and I haven’t lost since.

3. What is the history of the cover graphic?

BG: Kris Young, the editor at Another Sky Press, is pretty bad ass. When he asked me if I had any ideas for the book cover I said yeah, let’s have a blank cover, nothing on it anywhere. He said, let me think on it. Two weeks later he sent me an email and said, how bout this. The image he sent was pretty much the image you see on the cover. He didn’t tell me how he got it and I didn’t ask. We spent a week tweaking it, and that was that.

4. ‘Cats and Dogs; Like Rain’ – damn. How much of Barry Graham is in these stories?

BG: One of the best literary events I ever experienced was when Davy Rothbart gave a reading and Found Magazine presentation at Eastern Michigan University. I was teaching his short story collection (my favorite short story collection of all time), The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, in my writing classes and I was taking questions from the class to ask him. One of the students noticed that all of the stories had a first person narrator, but only one of them went unnamed. It was the last story of the collection, Elena, about a young drifter who finds himself involved in a scam to rob truck drivers near the Mexico-California border and ends up falling in love with a fourteen-year-old prostitute, Elena. So after the reading I ask him some of the questions from the students and when we get to the unnamed narrator, I was hoping to relay some existential metaphor to the class, something funny and heartbreaking, maybe the clue to figuring out the Mayan calendar, so Davy laughs and says, oh, I didn’t even notice. So I guess just tell them, without a doubt, it’s always Davy. So yeah, apply that little story to your question any way you choose.

5. How would you describe ‘All His Chips’ (other than brutally sad)?

BG: I see All His Chips the same way I see all my writing, as a love story—with all the intricacies and complexities and contradictions that you’d expect to find if you hid in the closet of any given house on any given road in any given town and observed two people attempting to find happily ever after.

Five Questions There

6. What was the best poker hand you lost with?

BG: I’d like to tell you about the most heartbreaking hand I ever lost, but I’ll do that in person when you come to Jersey. But the best hand I ever lost with. I was playing a home game with some country boys, which is never an easy way to make money, country boys are born with a poker gene passed on by their daddies and granddaddies. So I’m holding on to a full house, kings over aces, and two people were still in it. I figured they both had flushes which made me smile, because when you have an ace or king high flush you never see the full house coming if there aren’t two pairs on the board. Well come to find out one of them had the big dog, the royal flush, clubs, and that was that.

7. What is your favorite line of the book?

BG: “I love you.”

8. I told you this reminded me of Bukowski. What do you think of comparisons?

BG: Comparisons to me and Bukowski or comparisons in general? I’m indifferent. Let talkers talk and comparers compare. But I will tell you this, if anyone tries comparing any of the new Legend of Zelda games to the old school shit on the Super NES, they are just plain fucked in the head.

9. Part of the title of this book is “short stories and other lies.” What is one true fact in this book?

BG: My father is dead.

10. What is the first sentence of the pledge?

BG: In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth.

In ten words (no more or less), what are you working on now?

BG: A plan to pay back everybody everything I owe them.

Cover designed by Michael Fusco. Presale begins August 27th.

by Emily Pulfer-Terino

Scent of rotting vegetation back behind the gas station
swelled to a heavy twang. Hick spies, my brother and I

brought binoculars and canteens and broke into
cattail, bramble, back to the tracks where our family

roar grew fainter, married to the groans of distant trains.
We’d perch along those flanks of steel for hours, days,

not talking, straining to see something going on
behind the neighbors’ blinded windows. Whole seasons

seemed to go that way— our having left the house a stealth escape;
our watch a hunch that others’ homes were wracked.

Houses sagged along the rail; wet wash hung down one long line.
What could happen there, where kids swung sticks and watched the sky,

where men bought nails and women widened in the glow of afternoon tv?
We stared down tracks ‘til they shrunk to a point beyond our understanding.

Back by the pump, the dumpster teemed with beer cans, bags and shoes.
This was our best game then, what staked our separate selves together.

Trying other views, my brother traipsed off down the tracks;
his voice over the walkie-talkie, dense with urgency and static,

grew vague the farther on he got, the more he saw of other peoples’ lives.

by Emily Pulfer-Terino

*“Tracks” was the winner of the 2010 Flatmancrooked Poetry Prize

by Rebekah Hall

We only just caught wind of this. Lucky for you, too, because it’s not too late; this is the greatest writer’s retreat you probably don’t know about: Kate Braverman is currently accepting applicants for a rare writer’s workshop—Writing as a Criminal Act—at her estate in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The darkly lyrical Braverman has the enchanting ability to slip her entire fist into the very center of human life and drag from it all that is deep and shallow. She captures the simultaneous emptiness and fullness of existence in a language that is at once raw and poetic, accessible and immersive, a perfect synthesis of rhetoric and image. She’s a longtime favorite of the Flatmancrooked crew, and I’m super excited to head out to Santa Fe with Kate and smear coyote blood all over my manuscript while howling at the stars and full moon with twelve other writer-criminals.  Come lie and steal with me!

From Kate’s website:

Writing as a Criminal Act

Santa Fe Workshop, September 25, 2010 Kate Braverman will teach a rare total immersion one-week writing workshop. Participants will stay at her retreat, write, howl with the coyotes, write, watch the sunset like a massacre across their faces, write, eat, write, witness the promiscuous moon leave her greasy streaks across the innocent sky, write, have nightmares and write.

Ms. Braverman is interested in the concept of Writing as a Criminal Act. As writers, we employ the methods of professional criminals. We break and enter, we rob, we assume aliases and false identities, engage in fraud, lie, omit, impersonate, autopsy the living, exhume the dead for interrogation and deny everything. Recognizing the full extent of one’s writing tools should be liberating. We will use them with the ruthless conviction of people willing to be incarcerated for their acts.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Sam Decker

It didn’t die right away, the duck. It waddled in circles for a while and then fell over on its head, pumping its little webbed feet like it was trying to swim away in an upside-down river. When they were convinced that it no longer had any life in it, the two of them sat against a pine tree and passed the warm body back and forth until they had removed all the feathers. By then it was dark and they followed the river back to camp. When they came into the light of the fire Conrad was holding the animal by the neck, its small pink body swinging just above the ground.

Conrad and Ben were assigned to the same tent and they always paddled together, but it wasn’t until the seventh day of the canoe trip that the two of them chased down the duck and beat it over the head with a canoe paddle that they thought of themselves as friends.

Everyone at camp was at the very least impressed. Some—the girls—were horrified, though most appreciated the touch of savage ambiance it lent to the evening. The campers removed their sticks holding hotdogs and marshmallows so that Conrad could ceremoniously place the duck over the fire. The two boys cooked the duck until it was charred as black as the river and then they took turns gnawing at it, spitting the crispy skin on to the ground. They didn’t share any of their kill, but admittedly, no one had asked.

Read the rest of this entry »

Myfanwy Collins

In December the snow was so deep that deer knocked over the birdfeeder and denuded the shrubs at the front of Eve’s house, eating even the rhododendron leaves, all other forms of nourishment lost to them, covered over with white.

Hesitant sun poked through the evergreens and spiked the snowy yard that morning. It was mild. In the 30s. Earlier she heard footsteps squeaking up the snow covered drive—a man come to invade her house and kill her. But when she got up to check she found the dog in the hallway, his nails scratching against the tile from his dreaming movement.

Outside there was no man, but trees. Beyond the trees there were roofs, which throughout the region had fallen prey to ice dams. The eaves, heavy with ice and snow from rapid thaws and freezes and snows, were dammed so that behind them icy water backed up onto the roof and threatened to seep through into the house proper.

Ceilings caved in. Walls leaked. Nasty business.

Eve noticed the first drips in the window casings in the upstairs bedrooms. Soon the walls beaded and splotched. Her house was sweating on the inside.

She pawed through the tiny local phone book and settled on Fixit General Contractors. A man answered. “Talbot,” he said. She understood this was his name. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is the second-of-two previews giving you a brief look at what is to come from the Zero Emission Book Project Documentary. If you have not purchased a copy of this amazing book yet, now is the time to support this author and this project. If you haven’t made it to an event yet, James is reading this coming Monday in Davis, CA at Avid Reader, at 730pm. Then, a huge homecoming bash in Sacramento, Ca, Tuesday, Pangaea Cafe, from 730-1130pm. Come on out. Show your support!

by Kirsty Logan

Renfield lives down a narrow alley above the bar where he works. The bar is called Stereo. Renfield has a theory that every city in the world has a bar called Stereo. He doesn’t travel much, but he has Googled it. Montreal, Alicante, Frankfurt, and Saint-Petersburg all have bars called Stereo. Renfield still eats bugs.

On his morning off, Renfield walks through Glasgow. He orders fish and chips with a mug of sugary tea. He picks at the food, moving it around so it looks like he has eaten some. He suspects that hunters are watching and the appearance of normality means survival. He goes to Argos and flips through the catalogue. He browses the classics section in Waterstones. He watches the pigeons fight over shreds of battered sausage and the tourists photographing them. His destination is the Necropolis, but it is important for this to seem accidental because of the hunters. Renfield knows that the dead must have their hearts burned. He is not sure whether this counts as a crime. He knows that hearts sing through the flames.

In the bar, Renfield is a fixed point. The customers in the bar swarm and buzz, but Renfield keeps his place behind the counter. He pulls pints quickly and cleanly. After closing, Renfield locks the bar and climbs the stairs to his flat. It has three rooms including the bathroom. This is where he eats the birds. His kitchen window is small but has no blinds, and his neighbours can see in. The bathroom window is dimpled glass and shows only blurs of dark and light. He is no longer sure whether the birds are helping his life force to grow. He thought they might heal his broken neck, but their small bones catching in his throat just made it feel worse. To hide his neck Renfield wears high-collared shirts and sometimes even a neck brace. He says this is because he fell off his motorcycle. None of Renfield’s customers or fellow bartenders can imagine Renfield on a motorcycle. He does not look like he could be trusted with an object traveling at 100mph.

Read the rest of this entry »