Everyday Genius: June 2012

6/29/12

Sommer Browning

WE’RE CALLING

our bar Fingerbang, we say.

One atom carbon, one oxygen, the tailpipe says.

This is the day of the expanding man, you hear Donald Fagan say

and ask the Food Lion cashier, How much for the dead mums?

Finger her … like in a line-up? says the comedian, you say.

...

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For the month of June, Everyday Genius has become a print journal. The 110-page magazine features work from 21 writers and four artists. Full content will be made available online in June 2013; until then, copies can be purchased with the link above. Here's the issue on Goodreads.

6/28/12

Paula Bomer

Breasts

Lola Spencer had the sort of breasts that define a woman; they were big and she was small; they were gorgeous perfect things, pink-nippled, shaped like cantaloupes, firm and white. The rest of her seemed to exist to accentuate her breasts; her hips were narrow, her waist a tiny circle, her little pale legs ended in feet not much bigger than a child’s. Her head was small and heart shaped, her features pale and slightly receding. It’s as though every other part of her got out of the way to make way for her breasts. Yes, Lola’s breasts were the sort of breasts that made a girl feel special, feel as if she were not destined for an ordinary life. So when she dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen and took a bus from Detroit to New York City, she had high hopes. Vague hopes, but high hopes.

**

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6/27/12

Sampson Starkweather

Some General Instructions

When faced with a moral or ethical dilemma

always use your imagination,

do not be alarmed by asparagus pee

or it’s cousin, beet-pee, there is no guide to being alive

just a lot of electrons and time, unfortunately

it’s true, people cannot be trusted,

but do it anyway. It’s great! Trust me.

I have proof. If you encounter a beached whale do not call

the authorities, at least not right away, take some time

to walk around the large mammal, you should not waste

the opportunity to touch one of mother nature’s most astonishing creatures,

look it in the eye, and if the feeling comes over you, say something

to the whale, for far too long we have neglected whale-human communication,

and after it all, it’s beached, and could use some company, they travel in pods

and are not accustomed to being alone, so I imagine it would be very scared,

and maybe for a few seconds, exhilarated to be on land, an entirely different

surface, surrounding, and set of rules, I won’t say world, but we can agree

on “otherworldly,” as if one is suddenly flung onto an un-understood materiel

or profane sphere, but of course it can’t breathe, so about now you should probably

be calling the nearest whaling authorities, assuming you have a cell-phone ...

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6/26/12

Noah Eli Gordon

Why I Am Not an Academic

There's the sun

And there—the culture of sun

The first word spoken in its shadow was a verb

The first spoken in the shadow of its shadow, an adjective

One dances to decorous music

The other hardly moves at all

**

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6/25/12

Rachel B. Glaser

The Clumber Spaniel

Two boys played under the top bunk, grabbing for the pocketknife. Al got cut, but laughing licked up the blood. Way past David Letterman, Cub coughed, tasting the soft-serve caught in his throat. Al had the cut dream. All boys that are cut later drop to dream, folding into a typical variation of the cut dream. In the dream, the staircase is longer or shorter, depending how big the cut.

The boys ran down the highway and the day wagged on after. Al wasn’t mad about the cut. During laser tag, the future sang Tom Petty “Freefallin’” into open ears. The boys found themselves in front of an old pinball game and felt the private feeling of manning a machine. The metal balls felt wet and smart, jumping among the gleaming junk of the machine’s irrelevant theme. The FBI, the major leagues, everything evened out to the same. All pinball machines endure a shadowy wait. It seems like ages until the next warm quarters.

A Fat Cat happened by when nothing else was happening. Fat Cat wasn’t fat. He was eighteen and like a big cartoon cat, unshaven and mooning on his sax. There was much to moon about. It kept coming to their heads in montage form. The mooning was about the moon and how it looked up there whole, like a balloon stuck on the ceiling.

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6/22/12

Chris Toll

THE CELLULAR CHOIR
(TWO POEMS AND A FLASH FICTION)

WHY ISN’T TRY IN DIVINITY?

An inventor
hires an orphan girl
to maintain the robots
on his isolated estate.
I make my heart an open book.
Her only qualification for the job
is her skill with a raygun.
Why is a diary in incendiary?
The domestic staff is a coven
of lesbian vampire witches.
Two lifelines race side by side.
Trust me – in an alternate universe,
you’re truly loved.
The nun who writes plays in the locked attic
died on the surface of Mars.
Now she has a cheetah’s heart.
Your heart is a seed.
Let it break.

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6/21/12

Virgil W. Brower

THE RHYME THAT REMAINS: TOWARDS A POPULIST POETICS
(WITH CONTINUAL REFERENCE TO PAUL OF TARSUS)

§1

Element & Herb: Lacan’s Backhanded Pauls

In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” one finds a critical remark on the shortcoming of the horizontal linearity that Ferdinand de Saussure associates with the chain of discourse. It is on this note that Jacques Lacan moves into a discussion of poetry. The Saussurian horizontality assumes the mode of writing rather than speaking—Westerners do not write vertically, but horizontally—and this is a remnant of discourse’s one direction in time. On his way to verticality, Lacan wonders if, perhaps, Saussure did not listen to enough poetry. (2) For one has to listen to poetry,

for a polyphony to be heard and for it to become clear that all discourse is aligned along the several staves of a musical score.

Indeed, there is no signifying chain that does not sustain—as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units—all attested contexts that are, so to speak, “vertically” linked to that point. (3)

Breaking with the unilateral and the monophonic has something to do with the verticality of a poem. This is a mode by which we are to understand the “incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier.”

Most significant is the example Lacan gives for this shortcoming of horizontal diachronics. The horizontal fixation “applies only in the direction in which it is oriented in time” by which “the time of ‘Peter hits Paul’ is reversed when the terms are inverted.” (5) A horizontality deprived of poetry allows always already that ‘Peter hits Paul.’ Paul’s response—which need not, necessarily, be considered as a kind of revenge or ressentiment—could never come about in such a system unless that time be rewritten and restated; a crime of revisionist history. Yet! Lacan insinuates that parting ways with such a horizontal understanding to a vertical one of poetry opens the possibility for ‘Peter hits Paul’ to somehow speak as to a complex way by which Paul hits back, yet, Peter never ‘gets hit,’ since a vertical synchronicity demands no simplistic inversion to a ‘Paul hits Peter.’

Lacan’s discussion continues into a paragraph of associations regarding Saussure’s famous tree; ranging from the Hebrew Bible’s tree of knowledge, to the cross of the New Testament, to the letter ‘Y’, and the image of a tree struck by lightning. This is followed by four lines of poetry by Paul Valéry:

No! says the Tree, it says No! in the scintillating
Of its superb head
Which the storm treats universally
As it does a blade of grass. (6)

But translation does not do justice to the stream of Lacan’s discussion. The key to the enigmatic Section I (The Meaning of the Letter) in this essay is that, here, Valéry’s lines rhyme, which one only hears in the French:

Non! Dit l’Arbre, il dit: Non! Dans l’étincellement
De sa tête superbe
Que la tempête traite universellement
Comme elle fait une herbe. (7)

Throughout the essay, Lacan does not speak, directly, of rhyme. Yet the culmination of his critique of the horizontal and his alternative suggestion of poetry as a way to the vertical is not simply a poem, but a poem with rhyming end sounds. It is the ‘–ellement’ and ‘–erbe’ of Valéry that coalesce Lacan’s enthymeme. Regardless that the word ‘rhyme’ lays unsaid, when Lacan says ‘poem’ throughout “The Instance of the Letter,” we can discern that its referent, Valéry, is at the same time the signified, rhyme.

(2) Lacan amends this comment in 1966 after learning of Saussure’s study of Saturnine verse and Cicero.
(3) Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Part I, in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 146.

(4) Ibid., 145.

(5) Ibid., 146.
(6) Quoted in Lacan, ibid.
(7) Quoted in Lacan, Écrits 1, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 261; emphasis added.

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6/20/12

Lesley Yalen

HOPSCOTCH

Terrifying, to wake before light, before eyes worked. Makela lay under the covers trying to discern how she was oriented in the bed, and how the bed was oriented in the room, and where the door was. Her eyes opened. Saw nothing. She tried hard to recall where her head was by flexing her feet. Feet were at a constant distance from the brain. Eyes can sometimes see in the dark if they wait a while. Makela waited. But still. On this night, she could not even make out a lighter dark within the dark of her room. Dresser, chair, floorboards, door: everything was similarly dark. Makela knew that dying would be like this. That she would live a while more and then her eyes would cease to work. She would no longer see. Everything would be evenly gone.

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6/19/12

R. M. O'Brien

FIRST DATE

The city is wartorn—

Birds cycle thro’ their songs like car alarms.

We eat pollen w/ insectoid silverware

& vomit EASTERN EUROPE in botanic gardens.

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6/18/12

Matt Cook

MY WIFE’S CAR

I was out for a walk one afternoon

When I saw my wife’s car parked across from the film department.

You feel a kind of existential panic when you see your wife’s car parked somewhere.

My grandfather said death is like looking at your house from across the street.

It’s probably something like that.

...

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6/15/12

Stephanie Barber

DISHONEST

The summer nights were ending. They weren’t yet ending but the fact that they would end clearly suggested they were ending. The process of ending had begun when the summer had. Nothing of any consequence had been done with any of the nights, still they didn’t want them to end. What ending meant to both of them was years in the future—into a death beyond space and into a thought experiment so without merit that the very thinking of it seemed to race them more speedily towards it. And it was it. And this mid August, barely mid-August, really early-mid August evening, meant “summer will end” and “summer will end” meant life will end—though even that they didn’t do much with.

Marjorie said, “I think Mark M is really dishonest.”

Bill said, “Why do you say ‘Mark M’ when we don’t know any other Marks anyway?”

Marjorie said she didn’t know and how him saying that was kind of a dishonest reply in a way. “The dishonesty called evasion, though the kind of ‘dishonest’ I am thinking about is a lot more damaging and a lot less obvious.”

Bill said how he thought Marjorie’s need of honesty or fear of dishonesty was a little childish, like she couldn’t stand the fact that she couldn’t know other people in any real meaningful way anyway and dishonesty is just a big flag showing as much, a big sign saying, SEE YOU ARE TOTALLY ALONE.

This made Marjorie feel hot and she got up from the table and went to sit in the half-full kiddie pool.

...

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6/14/12

Tasha Cotter

I AM THE WICK AND YOU ARE THE MATCH

I was thinking about the deer

When the fence went up. I made

Sure to leave a narrow passage

...

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6/13/12

Tyler Smith

THIS IS A QUESTION

So much since we last spoke –

a proper pot of coffee,

a bowl with two rotten avocados

atop the windowsill,

the teen punk breathing

on my space suit’s face mask

and fingering an A with a circle

around it while I’m trying to drive

to the city,

...

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6/12/12

Frances Sultan

World Cup 2010

When watching the soccer you like it best when . . .

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6/11/12

Michael Kimball

"The Sleeping Father"
from Big Ray

I think a lot about my father falling asleep on the couch in the living room, which happened nearly every night when I was growing up. The recurring image I have is my father watching the television and reading the newspaper at the same time—all spread out on the couch, his head tipped back, his mouth hanging open and snoring, a section of the newspaper opened up over his chest and stomach, the other sections of the newspaper scattered next to him on the cushions.

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6/8/12

Steven Karl

& I DRAGGED MY SISTER’S FEEBLE BODY UP THE MOUNTAIN

sometimes crawling on fours like a pig

pushing through the weeds & waste &

when she went mad & oh, when sister went

mad we tied her hands & feet & he took

her tied hands & feet & slung that body

filled with bird bones over the back

of my brother &

...

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6/7/12

Aaron Burch

The Brothers

The brothers do not know they are brothers. They do not look alike, do not share any traits that may seem brotherly. No one else knows they are brothers.

They do not share the same birthday. The brothers are not twins; they never pretended to be the other, never played make believe and switched roles to trick anyone. They do not refer to one another as “brother.”

The brothers take a road trip together.

...

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6/6/12

Catherine Lacey

Tell Me Something Funny

He said, Maybe it has something to do with knowing I’ll be dead by the spring, but all of a sudden I want to have sex with a woman.

Theo was looking squarely at me, his eyebrows raised and his head tilted slightly. Usually I took that to mean, I am a sensitive man who understands you, but this time it meant, I am a man, understand me. I knew this was my last chance to get up and leave or else that woman was going to be me. But I didn’t move. I let it be me. Though now I am hourly regretting.

...

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6/5/12

Bryan Beck

from "Best Friends"

I have this out-of-control windmill arm

so the townspeople all voted

to kick me out and tie me

to this old maypole

in a field like where a real windmill might be

so I couldn’t get too close to the kids.

...

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6/4/12

Molly Brodak

from "Jolt, Jolt"

...

A phone might call or a door might knock

and the heft in me slumps up, this minute

opens and tigers upon tigers talk and roll

in the hall, their clear pond, my black bed,

a torso in tigers.

...

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6/1/12

Jeffrey Snowbarger

Winter on the Choppings

Snap Jaw Small had a tavern act, a foolproof way to win free shots of squirrel whiskey. Think of anything alive—frogs, snakes, snow-white weasels—if it fit in Snap Jaw’s mouth, he’d chewed the head off one. He saved earnings that way. He mailed his wife bolts of linen and sacks of salt. He sent her letters about how cold it was among the choppings. How soon the rivers would rise and the logs would start running. How he’d be home by the time the oaks leafed out.

But Snap Jaw made a misstep in camp one night. He bit the head off Old Dudley’s pet owl. This owl had the most beautiful lay of feathers—flecks of deep black spotting the purest white you’ve ever seen. It was like the everlong beard of God Himself. Dudley cradled his bird ‘till it flapped its last then went at Snap Jaw’s ankles with a spade. After Snap Jaw skipped into the moonlit slash, we never saw trace more of the fella. Word swung round that he’d hired on with a lousy camp south of Spooner. One weekend he went knuckles with a shanty boy out of Hayward. The bout closed with poor Snap Jaw getting his own nose nibbled off for a change.

“He was one dumb kraut,” I said to Muscle Head Moe. Every day we swapped stories, sang all the ones we knew.

“No dumber than any other,” said Moe, referring to Snap Jaw. “I can’t spell justice, but I know it when I hear it.”

“Now, if that ain’t the truth.”

We were skidders then, Moe and me . . .

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Pages

6/29/12

6/28/12

6/27/12

6/26/12

6/25/12

6/22/12

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6/15/12

6/14/12

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6/11/12

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6/6/12

6/5/12

6/4/12

6/1/12