Tag Archives: Issue 9

WHAT BOTTICELLI DID NOT PORTRAY

What if Venus had risen not from the froth of the sea

but from a pool on a farm in Iowa or Minnesota

with tower silos of grain as her backdrop as visible

from the kitchen window as in the camera lens

at the very moment wind sweeps her auburn hair

to stream like a banderole from her body’s masthead

and her right knee bends inward protectively in counterpoise

to the slight tilt of her head and the jutting out

of the elbow as her hand takes rest on the slim hip,

 

To continue reading this selection you can purchase Issue 9 http://www.qulitmag.com/shop/

Black Bear

                                         once a woman went to the mountain alone

  1. NEVER say its name aloud, or you will wake the     from                                                                                                                                                            hibernation.
  2. Never feed              intentionally or accidentally.
    1. DO NOT leave prickly pear jams, fireweed honeys, or                                                                                                                                                                         bushels of berries unattended at the picnic ground.
  3. DO NOT walk into the woods alone carrying a bouquet of                                                                                                                                                                    dainty coral bells, wild mountain iris, or even common                                                                                                                                                                          daisies.
  4. Look for a juniper branch at least ten feet off the ground to                                                                                                                                                                    store fragrant items.

                                                                          to gather chokecherries

 

To continue reading this selection you can purchase Issue 9 http://www.qulitmag.com/shop/

Zen

Sherman Larson has eighty-seven bear traps buried in his front yard. Every few weeks he changes them–different patterns for different moods.

Pensive: Neat rows exactly a foot apart. Carefully measured to promote tranquility. Balanced. Zen.

Anxious: Haphazard clumps. Only some are set to activate, their mouths held open in silent screams. The rest keep their mouths shut.

Grieved: As close to porch as possible, layered almost one on top of the other. Protection against the cancer that reduced the woman he both feared and worshiped into a hollow husk.
This week: Zen.

Sherman rises from his twin bed and stretches. His tan arms, brushed with almost imperceivably light red hairs, are thin, but toned. He keeps in shape by cutting firewood and the thirty-seven pushups he does every afternoon after lunch. It is important to stay healthy.

He takes a deep breath, filling and filling, until the pressure hurts. He allows it to linger. This pushes the black Bugs away from his lungs. As long as he’s lived, so have they. Crawling inside of his chest, wiggling through his liver, in and out of the thick valves in his heart. He tried to dig them out, once. On that night, they burrowed deep into his core, past his organs, into his blood, infusing themselves in every platelet and cell. His only achievement was a bright red stain on the floor and a trip to the hospital. The doctors kept him under observation for seventy-two hours. They did not understand that he dug the carving knife into his chest, not to die, but to allow himself to keep living.

Bedroom: Fifteen steps from bed to doorway. Sherman avoids the landmine concealed under the grey-green carpet. A faded red flannel shirt, four white socks, and pair of light blue boxers cover the lump the mine creates. They are the only pieces of clothing on the floor. They have never been worn.

Hallway: Eight steps to the bathroom. He walks along the left side, one foot carefully placed in front of the other. This avoids the small pressure plates laid into the floorboards. If pressed, an electrical current triggers the arrows hidden in family photos lining the right wall. The photos are all share the same dark brown wooden frame. They are not of his family.

He does not remember when he started booby-trapping the inner rooms of his house. He just knows it is needed. Just as the Bugs have always been there, so has the feeling of looming, imposing dread. That something was watching him, waiting for him to let down his guard. Waiting to strike. The bear traps outside, the landmines indoors, all were necessary to keep it at bay.

Bathroom: Two steps into the doorway. He ignores the light switch on the wall. It is rewired to create an electric shock if touched. Sherman instead flicks the small metal lever on the side of the vanity mirror. Stepping out of his white Jockeys, he turns the hot water nozzle in the tub, not bothering with the cold. He steps into the stream, closing the dark green curtain around him.

To continue reading this selection you can purchase Issue 9 http://www.qulitmag.com/shop/

JB in Detox

CAST

JOHN BERRYMAN (JB):  Professor, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, alcoholic

MR. BONES: Dream Songs protagonist Henry’s alter ego; a minstrel

NURSE

BERRYMAN SENIOR (JB’s father)

RODERICK MARSH: A counselor to alcoholics; former student of JB

 

SCENE

The detox ward of a hospital in Minneapolis, circa. 1970

Bare stage, except for a stool

 

AT RISE

JB, wearing a hospital gown, enters; he is trying to keep his balance.

After a moment, the NURSE enters and gently takes JB by the arm and walks him back toward the wings. He complies at first, then pulls away and turns to the audience

 

JB

Henry Pussycat, the anti-hero of my Dream Songs, knows, like me, what it’s like to suffer the DTs—but Henry is traumatized by them utterly, whereas I—whereas I—whereas—whereas—

            (He opens his arms beseechingly to the audience.)

–whereas I remain . . . intact.

 

NURSE

Mr. Berryman—

 

JB

Not now!

(The NURSE retreats to the wings, but doesn’t exit.)

Our current therapist here in detox  is a walking cliché: he starts us off with breathing exercises:

(Mockingly)

Okay everybody, relaxxx…. Just relaxxx….That’s it! Now breathe in….That’s it! And breathe ouut…That’s it! And breathe in again….That’s it!” (It’s enough to make you want to stop breathing.) “Very, very good! And now let us recite the first three steps from AA’s Twelve Steps to permanent sobriety. Are you ready? All righty! The First Step! “We admit—”

     (Gesturing frantically)

C’mon, c’mon. ‘We admit—?”

     (Coaxing)

 

VOICES (Off Stage)

“We admit that we are powerless—

–“that we are powerless over alcohol, and that—”

 

JB

Yes, yes, keep going!

 

VOICES

“—and that our lives have become—”

 

 

JB

Yes? Yes? Become what??

 

VOICES

“—become UNMANAGEABLE.”

 

JB

Ah, yes, we must learn to manage our lives. And to do that?

(A pause)

Step Two! Let me hear Step Two!

 

VOICES

“We must come to believe—”

 

JB

Yes? Believe what?

 

VOICES

“. . . that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to—”

 

JB

“Yes?? Restore us? I’m all ears! Restore us to what??”

VOICES

‘To sanity!’

 

JB

Sanity!! Is there anything more overrated in the history of Western civilization? Well, I say to hell with sanity. Let us instead pray for passion. Passion and the divine madness of poets! Repatriate the poets from their two-millennia-long exile, Socrates be damned . . .

     (A pause)

Now then, ladies and gentlemen, it is time for me to introduce you to two new philosophes: Henry Pussycat and his alter ego, alias inner court-jester, alias first-rate pesterer, Mr. Bones!

 

NURSE

Are you finished, sir?

 

JB

Finished? Alas. I am washed up. No–dried up.

 

To continue reading this selection you can purchase Issue 9 http://www.qulitmag.com/shop/

Turtle’s Reunion Tour

Turtle, Senator and I sat at a table at the Beachcomber on Wollaston Beach while the redheaded guitar player, billed as The President of Rock ‘n’ Roll, roared:

There’s a riot goin’ on!

Down in cellblock number nine.

I was in the slammer with Albert DiSalvo, shouted Senator over the music. He nodded his head at the bandleader. And Myles too. This didn’t sound right. Albert DiSalvo, known as the Boston Strangler, confessed to raping and killing a dozen women. I couldn’t picture Senator, real name Jim White, doing anything that might land him in prison. In Cu Chi he had kept a low profile. A college graduate, he was about 26 to our 19 or 20. Balding. He looked like a Senator so we called him Senator. Turned out he wasn’t actually locked up in Walpole, just a teacher. Now he worked as a security guard at a construction site, making good money reading dirty magazines in a trailer on the overnight shift. Turtle, chubby, slow talking, slow moving, pink skinned, blond crewcut Turtle, hailed from Thomaston, Georgia. After Vietnam he worked a shit job in T-Town for three years, bought a new car cash, and headed north. Stopped to see Hagey in North Carolina. Hagey was doin’ awright. Got hisself enrolled in college. In Philadelphia, Dave Winton was doing awright too. He was an exec-u-tive now, drivin’ a Mazda RX-7. In New York State Spanky was fixin’ to reenlist and head for Germany where the frauleins were waiting with open arms. Me? I was killing time in the post office and going to school now and then. While we waited for the grand reunion, the reunion came to us. A reunion on wheels: Turtle. Myles Connor, the fiery rock ‘n’ roller, stopped by our table between sets. Senator told him I played piano and Myles urged me to try out with his band. We need a keyboard player, he said making it sound like a done deal. An exciting opportunity, but I could barely play so the tryout never happened. A good thing, perhaps. Myles was said to have a genius level IQ but was a notorious criminal who once wounded a cop in a shootout with police on a Back Bay rooftop and later beat a double murder charge. Less than a year after the Beachcomber gig he stole a Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts in broad daylight. A fucking Rembrandt!

To continue reading this selection you can purchase Issue 9 http://www.qulitmag.com/shop/

After the Diagnosis

I stopped planting annuals—no more petunias

or geraniums or zinnias I longed to have come back

without my bidding. I planted Lenten roses, daffodils,

daylilies whose color I forgot so they would surprise me in summer:

orange persimmon, showlight, mystic amulet, wispy morn.

To continue reading this selection you can purchase Issue 9 http://www.qulitmag.com/shop/

Sara Backer

Sara Backer, an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts, has two chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press) and Bicycle Lotus (Left Fork). Her writing has been honored with eight Pushcart nominations and residency fellowships from the Norton Island and Djerassi programs. Recent publications include Valparaiso Poetry Review, Unbroken, Non-Binary Review, Amaryllis, and Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. Her website is sarabacker.com.

Jordan Bendall

Jordan Bendall is an author of fiction hailing from Victoria, British Columbia. He has been previously published in ANGLES literary magazine, which featured his related short story Jet Black Bath Water.

M L Casteel

American born, M L Casteel (@mlcasteel) is an award-winning photographer and educator whose work focuses on the perils and triumphs of the human condition. He attended the Hartford Art School International Limited Residency Photography Program and gained an MFA in Photography. His work has been featured in TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, CNN, and the Guardian, amongst other publications. Casteel’s first book, AMERICAN INTERIORS, was published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2018. Featuring essays by Jörg Colberg and Ken MacLeish, the book is available at www. dewilewis.com.

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood is the author of The Going and Goodbye: a memoir and 52 Things I Wish I Could Have Told Myself When I Was 17. Her writing has been published in Brevity, The Rumpus, Zone 3, Santa Clara Review, New Madrid Journal, and Cider Press Review, among others. Her website is shulycawood.com.