Interrobang Magazine!?: How long have you been doing comics?

Jess Smart Smiley: I started drawing as a way of communicating the inventions I came up with at four years old My dad was into superhero comics and I got into them when I was 6 or so, until 12 and then I discovered indie comics – Jeff Smith’s Bone. Maus came out around the same time and I really liked it. It was refreshing and felt important.

I can see that. I also get a Nate Powell vibe in the tone of your work, if not the linework specifically.

Yeah, I’ve heard him mentioned before, but I don’t know his work. I would draw the pictures from Bone with a pen and try to make it look like brush work. I always wanted to draw for a living

In looking at A Map In The Dirt, it’s very rooted in folklore, Native American imagery, and oral tradition. What was the inspiration for that?

Yeah, it is. It came out of my love for the land and for the ways we all support each other.

So not part of your personal cultural template then.

Nothing directly Native American or anything like that. It was a combination of a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about for years – they all kind of came together at once. Like the role of the storyteller and how it goes so much deeper than just entertaining a crowd. The role of the storyteller is to inspire and preserve, to nourish and to strengthen.

Deer speaks almost as if a prayer for that reason. It’s a sacred role, I think.

“The stories are your calling,” right? That’s pretty meta, in a way.

Yeah. And it’s nothing really deep or anything. I’ve just given the idea a different face. It was new to me at the time and still is. Plus, the other roles are sacred, too. This just focuses more on the storyteller, because I feel it’s me trying to give a voice to what I feel I’m supposed to do.

Speaking of faces, why anthropomorphize the main characters? They’re humans (or some shape thereof) wearing animal masks.

In the story, as in life, the animals are an extension of people. They are a part of us and we are a part of them. That’s how the story portrays the issue and that’s how I feel about it.

When we destroy a species, we destroy a part of ourselves. When we support a species, we support a part of ourselves. They are both alive in each other.

The sense of cyclicalism runs deep. Especially with the ending.

Yeah, and the cycle gets stronger when both parts help each other. If I had just made it people versus people, it would have been a different story. By giving the animals human bodies, it hopefully shows a connection between the people and the animals.

That last page seems so heedless and brutal. It also returns to something Deer says in the beginning about “those creatures” [the hunters] “holding nothing sacred.” Would you draw a distinction between the “masked animals” representing the “essential” part of people, while the hunters representing the technological/disconnected? Or is that too much of a stretch?

Yeah, that’s a good connection. It’s representative of my view that the majority of the world thinks a certain way and uses logic to trump all other reasoning, when there are, in fact, millions of other valid ways to solve problems and to think through things.

By cutting off one part, you limit the whole. It’s like a heart without a body.

One thing I liked a lot, but didn’t completely get, is what happens to Bear at the end.

Cool. Which part are you wondering about? Just where he takes on a smaller and different form?

Yes. He unravels and becomes a tiny bear, no longer a man-in-a-mask, but a pet-sized ursine.

That’s actually where the story started for me, when I was brainstorming.

It started with this dialog of a great bear that shrunk and become the size of a rat. It’s supposed to be a little ambiguous, but it just refers to something breaking within the bear, because of the humans’ actions. Because he now fears or doubts the humans, he becomes less than what he once was.

A Map In The Sky is your first published short story, and it seems like you’re off to a good start. I saw you raised quite a few funds through kickstarter.com [an internet service that allows readers to pledge money to fund art projects – Eds.]. What was that experience like?

Yeah! Crazy, huh? It was a really good experience and I learned a lot about the influence of social media and the impact that images and words really have. I mean, no one saw more than a few pages from the story, yet a mere description and a few pictures sealed the deal for 49 backers!

It makes me really wonder about the power of words and images. If I had put up different pictures, or altered what I used, the response might have been completely different.

In another era, you might have been self-financing and running off Xeroxes until you got lucky.

Yes! I’m extremely grateful for everyone’s efforts. This is case in point, where the whole wouldn’t have happened without all the right parts working together.

That’s a nice bit of synergy – sequential art narrative mirroring your personal narrative.

JSS: Well, honestly, I don’t have any other story to tell. If I can tell the story, it means I’ve experienced it to some degree. Not that this story is anything deep, but most of my stuff is just fun and playful. It’s quite a bit different from anything else I’ve done.

It has a point to make, but not over-bluntly, which is impressive considering the third-person narration. You could have fallen into that trap pretty easily.

JSS: Oh, good. That’s a relief! I keep looking back, worried that it comes off as propaganda. I wanted to make something important, even if it was small. Something with a message, but not preachy.

See more of Jess’s work at jess-smiley.com, and look for his graphic novel “Upside Down,” coming from Top Shelf Comics in 2011.

Drinking wine all day some
drinkers said was sacrilege
for an Irishman.
Plus there was a pool table
with red felt instead of green
which was always amazing
drunk or sober
as if all the grass on earth
had turned scarlet too.
Old men watched MTV
with the same sense of wonder.
The Man of Wine
had an Ivy League degree
but his old man told him
booking horses and sports
was more secure
than Wall Street,
besides he was the only son left.
A photo of the true heir
an elder brother killed
at the Battle of Anzio shared
a spot over the cigarette machine
with Jack and Bobby
and William Butler Yeats.
There was a curvy blonde regular
with a kinky reputation.
Often when the TV music grabbed
her, she’d kick off her shoes, jump up
on the pool table and dance never
upsetting a ball.
There were wagers on how long
before her damp footprints
would evaporate.
The Man of Wine was known
to gulp a tumbler of port after one
of her performances then sadly
lament he’d be on the other
side of the bar had his big
brother moved like her.

It wasn’t the best part of town that I was walking through. It wasn’t the worst either, but it was definitely sliding into such a state of disrepair that it would, soonish, become the bad side, until my grandkids’ kids — if I have grandkids, God willing — take up the torch of humanitarianism and gentrify the place. I don’t know what that means for the bad side of town, the current one, if it will get badder, or stay the same. Assuming it remains “bad,” then the city will be walled in by two bad sides, leaving a good middle. A happy median. I have to remain positive about the future.

And as I was walking through the not-so-bad-but-still-unsavory part of town I noticed a phone, a pay phone receiver, dangling by the cord, dancing in the chilly breeze. The phone booth — not really a booth, more of a pole. I don’t know what else to call it, but a phone poll is a different thing altogether, and it was not housed within a booth — it was situated on a concrete slab in between what may or may not have been a crack house — such assumptions just fling themselves at you, you know, and I try to ignore them, or at least suppress them, question them, but I go with crack house. It was almost certainly a crack house — and a severely overgrown lot that might have been the site of a house buried deep back there in the thick of the vegetation, probably with dubious vines coming out of the toilets and a young pine tree shooting up through the baseboards. It doesn’t matter if the one was a crack house and if the other was a house at all, but that dangling phone, bookended by those two sort of ominous and distinct habitudes, caused some serious feelings of apprehension and disquietude to well up inside of me in regard to the otherwise innocuous payphone receiver. So much so that I didn’t want to set foot on the slab. So much so that the slab, which was probably, in reality, no more than twenty feet long, stretched and elongated in my eye like one of those pan-in-zoom-out maneuvers you see in movies when a character realizes something really, really terrible and irreversible has happened, or is about to happen, and it’s important to the plot and/or character development.

I don’t want to give the impression that the phone was somehow calling to me. For one, it’s a terrible pun. For two, when somebody says that someone or something was calling to them, it’s usually in response to an overwhelming stimulus that comes with 1) regret or 2) something inexplicable. Like coincidence. Sometimes it’s both. Things don’t just call. The phone certainly didn’t. Not in that sense, anyway. Nor did it ring. But, and I say this now at the risk of sounding hypocritical, there was something in the pull of the dangling phone that outweighed the foreboding of the setting which made me walk to it and touch it. “Something” is too vague. I’ll explain.

In general, and by that I mean society and culture and that neighborhood and that slab and what-have-you, the phone was out of place. This is because nobody uses a payphone. And nobody uses payphones because nobody carries quarters anymore, unless, of course, you’re sixteen and going to the arcade, or you’re 27 and going to the Laundromat with the pocket of your dressy slacks full of quarters because all your good pants or your regular pants — your nonlaundry day pants — are soiled to the point of repugnance and you’re not going home to visit your parents for another week and a half, where your crazy mother will dutifully wash not just your pants but all of your clothes for you, and your “girlfriend,” who you’ve yet to commit to for nigh-on a year has been bitching your ear off all week about said repugnance of normal pants, so now you’re loaded down with quarters for the Laundromat for fear of not getting a nice, slow blowjob on Friday night after the homecoming dance, which is, coincidentally, the same night as the “anniversary” of the “relationship” you’re in with your “girlfriend.” These are the only reasons people carry quarters around. Arcades and blowjobs.

And so, the anachronistic quality of the phone pole piqued my interest immediately. That, coupled with the even more out-of-placedness of the dangling, unused telephone receiver set it in my mind that this was a wrong in drastic need of being righted. It is wrong that a telephone receiver be out of its cradle. Justice, order, peace and posterity hinged on that receiver being in its place, just as a crying baby must be made to stop crying, immediately. In the name of everything good, I sallied forth across the vastness of the slab and apprehended the dangling receiver with the thrust of a jack-hammer and the wanton grip of a novice masterbateur.

“Hello,” I said, and I said it in a tone which implying that everything was all right. Hello, like we hope God might say it. Hello, I’m here for real and you just rest your silly little noggin about the whole damn business. A hello’s all we need really. It justifies the questions. You can use hello as a question, yes, but when you say it like I said it, like, not as a question, it really solidifies all that haze you were so flustered over in the first place and makes it make sense.

And I can’t say that I was completely surprised when a voice came through from the other end. This is, after all, the reason we speak into phones. There’s a phone off its hook? There must be somebody on the other end of that line somewhere. Otherwise we’re just shouting into the dankness like a bunch of mental patients.

“Hello?” came through on the other end. But it wasn’t a question, nor was it a real statement. It was… I’ll put it like this. Imagine you’ve been going to a therapist for months and months now, and you thought you knew the answer to your problem of never being able to reach orgasm, and also, maybe, why you have some trust issues. You’re just looking for a second opinion, even though you know the
answer. Your answer is: “I was molested when I was very young,” because you’ve seen that diagnosis on television a million billion times over. “You were molested when you were very young,” which solves the problem, and “I’ve repressed it” is your explanation for why you can’t remember it. You’ve gone into this whole therapy rigmarole with some quack who was recommended to you by your lunatic brother, paying exorbitant amounts of money just to have her confirm for you that you were, in fact, molested by some adult or another when you were very young, only to have the shrink — after several months of expensive therapy, mind you — say, “This is all rooted to that experience you had in your fourth grade biology class that you told me about on our first day together,” — she uses the term “together” in a way that makes you slightly uncomfortable, to the point that you don’t expect there to be a bill every month and you’re kind of offended when it arrives — to which you reply, “So I wasn’t molested when I was very young?” And it’s with that tone, that still-uncertain certainty, that the “Hello?” came through on the other end, which was extremely satisfying for me, considering the gusto I’d put into my initial hello. I really felt like I’d accomplished something.

The voice belonged to a girl, a youngish girl, and the voice carried a horribly familiar timbre — and I use “horribly” here in the best and most nostalgically erotic way possible — that reminded me of the girl on the radio, Katie Heath, who used to run the classical music show on Mississippi Public Radio back when I was in college.

With Katie it had been something in her Rs that just really hit me deep. The letter L, for example, is liquid, pronounced with the breath at the back of the tongue, then the tongue to the teeth. The R, on the other hand, is typically pronounced with a primitive gnashing. But, Katie Heath formed the R way down there at the back of the tongue where the L comes from, just above the belly, and didn’t involve a single tooth, molar or otherwise, in the whole business. It rolled up, slithering, like an opium puff, then gathered audibly, somehow, in the bottom of the cheeks and crook of the mandible, and she had no idea about the grandiose sexuality that that R promoted. There was something clumsy about it, and something cutely inelegant about her on the whole, like she didn’t really have her life together, like she didn’t prepare at all for the 4-hour show, but she made it through anyway, every weekday from noon to three, clumsily. And it was this innocent daredevil way of going about things yoked with the girl-next-dooryness that made me want her. That R,
however it happened to ease up her slender, fragile throat, was dripping with sex by the time it came out. Good sex. Sweet sex. The kind that lasts. The kind you sing songs about when you’re sixty and your wife just left you. I never saw Katie Heath, but I knew that throat of hers was as paper white as a Beluga. And, although this person, this youngish girl on the other end of the line, did not let a single R fall from her lips or drip from her cheeks, that timbre, as I mentioned, that waver, indicated to me the potential for a soggy, sultry R that would shoot me back to those Katie Heath, radio-induced erections set to Bartok and Schumann.

With that Hello — and I wouldn’t have thought that this would happen — even now, writing it, it seems odd — I was immediately aware of the cold, dead, glass-littered slab upon which I stood, framed by crack and vegetation, and the fetid pile of human shit next to the phone pole that I hadn’t noticed until right then. You’d think I would have been lost in the moment, waiting on an R, but, really, I became miserably self-conscious and I felt just as out of place as a public telephone in the 21st century. I fought off the immediacy of my locale.

“Hello,” I said again, but this time with assurance rather than that Superman all-is-well bullshit, and immediately followed that with, “The phone was off the hook.”

“I know,” said the youngish girl.

“Well. Were you on the phone with someone?” I asked. “Did they leave you hanging?”

What concerned me about my question was that an acceptable answer would have been “yes,” and, if that were the case, this young woman had been on the phone with a native of this sketchy part of town and, to my mind, it had to — if the answer was yes — involve some shady dealings, like drugs. Bad drugs. In the short span of time between my question and her retort I had managed to convince myself that this was most certainly the case and, just as I was about to slam the phone back into its cradle and head for the hills because I was sure the drug dealer or the person to whom the drugs were being dealt was coming stealthily up behind me from the bowels of the crack house with a dirty needle in hand ready to shove it through my lungs for no reason but black-hearted malice, the girl responded. “No,” she said. Thank God.

“Oh,” I said.

“I’m an operator,” said the girl.

“I didn’t know they had those anymore,” I said. I’d never met a telephone operator before, and assumed all the operating was done by computers.

I had also, until right then, assumed that I knew what a telephone operator — if computers weren’t running the show — looked and sounded like: Grandma-ish and slightly gruff, busy and monotonous and generally pleased in a very professional and distant way, perhaps with a cigarette forever burning unsmoked in an overflowing ashtray or balancing upon a lip, and never, not ever, sharing a singular feature with Katie Heath. This girl was not, unless my ears deceived me, a gruffish grandma.

“You never know we’re here until moments like these. We
don’t get out much,” said the girl, “us operators.”

“Probably for the best,” I said. “This whole side of town’s overgrown and decaying. I’m uncomfortable where I stand. My skin crawls. It isn’t pleasant out here in the world. You telephone operators have the right idea, by gum.”

“By gum?” she asked.

It was a cognitive slip that I’d said “by gum,” just then. A little phrase I use often with my family and, occasionally, my coworkers down at the bottling company, people who know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t use “by gum” seriously, ever. When I say it, I slip my thumbs through my belt loops and rock up onto my toes and then back on my heels like an old Appalachian on an old country porch. I say things like, “And that’s the way it is, by gum,” or “You kids’ll never get nowheres actin’ like that, by gum.” It gets a laugh.

But apparently, I’d managed to subconsciously dupe myself into thinking there was enough familiarity between the girl and me for me to be comfortable slipping a by-gum in there, as if she could possibly know I was being ironic.

“How old are you, man?” she asked.

Man. Christ, because “by gum” is an oldism, a relic from days-gone-by that only grandfathers and dead-peckers hold on to and actually utilize from time to time, like “nifty” or “gadzooks.” And no, I’m not old. I’m 37, to tell the truth, but it got slippery here because I didn’t want to tell this girl I was 37, and I didn’t want to tell this girl I was 37 because she was, at the very least, a decade younger than 37, and somewhere in the back of my mind, beneath Katie Heath’s Rs and the thought of the broken glass upon which I was standing — which really summed up for me the whole miserable ambiance of the crumbling neighborhood and life in general — I was considering striking up an affair with the operator, because nobody would ever have to know about it, and it would only last as long as I could tolerate standing there.

“I’m thirty-one,” I said. “My birthday was last month. I’m a Virgo.”

The thought of a brief affair with the operator sprung up from the same naughty place in my brain that makes me look for open curtains each and every time I pass a hotel, hoping that I might get to see the naked, nimble thigh of a newlywed bride or the silky curve of a mistress’ breast, a shock of lovers’ hair flitting past on the way to the bathroom. A habit I picked up around the age of 15 after seeing some porn that only showed scenes through foggy windows. It’s called Peeping Thom 6: Bay Windows and Boobs, and a VHS copy is currently sitting in a storage unit that my wife doesn’t know about, in a box labeled “Nostalgix,” under a photograph of me and my mother beneath the Eiffel Tower wearing coats and scarves up to our eyeballs. I will give the picture to my oldest son, Robbie, on his wedding day. I will point at the picture and say, “This is the sort of mother your wife needs to be,” which will be completely unfair of me, considering that Robbie will almost definitely not marry a woman like my mother, who turned into a total nut-job about three years after the picture was taken. Robbie doesn’t know the woman in the picture. He only knows the nut. I bought the VHS when I was 19, after winning about two hundred bucks at a casino. I also bought a gold chain with a golden Nike Swoosh pendant and a dozen chocolate éclairs in cellophane wrap, because I was stoned. Two hundred bucks, gone like that.

And so, the whole idea of the affair, mostly because of the voice, and the fact that that voice carried the same value of eroticism as a boob in a window, made me really just want to go for it, so there was no way I was going to volunteer the information regarding those thirty-seven years I had under my belt.

“Really?”

“Really,” I said. “Thirty-one. September eighth.”

“What’s an educated-sounding thirty-one-year-old doing at the corner of Jefferson and Third at half past midnight on a Tuesday?”

It was spectacular the way she said “thirty.” It wasn’t the usual grinding of an R she had. It was more like she pampered it, powder that turns into even finer and sweeter powder when it leaves the tongue, and it was a good question to boot, by gum. A tough question. A question that, had I answered it as the actual me, the thirty-seven-year-old me who was out for a walk in the shitty part of town trying to score some pot because of a minor, non-physical scrape with his spouse over finances, an inability to “really” listen and something about narcissism, it would have sounded much less interesting and much more pitiful than what the thirty-one-year-old me was doing, which was:

“Taking pictures,” I said. First thing that came to mind. “I’m a photographer.”

“Really?” said the girl. I’m sure the other granny operators shushed her and cut her dirty looks at that, what with it being a violent outburst of emotion and intrigue in an otherwise droning and mildly disinterested conversation. “I’m a model,” she said. “I love having my picture taken.”

And I knew I was in. She might as well have put down her little headset right then and dropped her panties I was so in. I considered telling her to meet me at a hotel where we could do it on the third floor with the curtains slightly parted. I considered sprinting to the secret storage unit and pulling out all the classic, immaculate baseball cards I was saving for my second son, Rusty, and selling them online to fund a little one-bedroom flat downtown somewhere where me and the operator girl would meet on lunch breaks and take pictures of one another in wildly suggestive poses, but, instead, I played it cool.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “That’s interesting,” like I stuck it to wannabe models every day.

“What kind of stuff do you do?” she asked, all breathy.

“I’m doing a series on urban life,” I said. “Trying to get some grant money, you know? It’s not what I like to do, but that’s what the bourgeoisie want, you know? Offset their white guilt by quoteunquote supporting the underprivileged. I mean, all they’re doing is exploiting them, you know? Anyway… My first love,” and I knew this would get her, “is noir.”

“Oh-my-God-I-love-noir!” she said. She said it like a machine gun. Rat-tat-tat-a-tat-tat-tat.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s great. Do you know Jean-Paul Viviere?” I asked, as if that were an actual person.

“Ummm…” she said. “I know I’ve heard the name. It definitely rings a bell. Did he do, uh…that thing with the, uh…”

“Life, Pelican, Death’? You’ve heard of it?” I said. That’s not
real either, by the way.

“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s brilliant.”

“I never knew blood could be so thick,” I said.

“Wow,” said the operator girl. “You really get it.”

“No,” I said. “It gets me. He does his job well, Viviere…”

“You’re so real,” she said. “Who are you?”

“I am what I am,” I said.

I heard a rustle over my shoulder and almost squealed. I’d been so wrapped up in the conversation, pretending to be some youngish arty dude that I’d forgotten I was standing on what was, for all I knew, the most dangerous abandoned slab in the city. It was a tiny jolt of reality that I didn’t really want or need just at that moment. It put a bad taste in my mouth, the reality of it. Reality meant wife. Reality meant kids, a loony mother, a secret storage unit you feel sort of ashamed of, a decently paying job down at the bottling company where you’re well-respected but, by gum, you spend the better part of your day mindlessly pecking at spreadsheets, wishing you’d reconsidered going straight into that MBA program at Loyola where, incidentally, you met Connie, your wife, whose father owned a bottling company, that maybe you should have gone off to Colorado or someplace and worked on a ranch for a while like that Seth guy you were acquaintances with who’s now a lawyer for little crippled kids who are the products of industrial accidents. He’s a fucking saint. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. I didn’t mean to say it aloud. It was only
meant for me.

“What was that?” said the girl on the other end. Owing to the fact that she was quite obviously taken with me, she was sincerely and desperately concerned over my well-being, worried that I was about to be stabbed through the neck by a crackhead’s dirty needle.

It took me a moment to get my bearings, to remember the masquerade.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just a cat.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I should probably check on it. I think it’s sick.”

“Well, okay,” said the girl.

“It was nice speaking with you,” I said. I said it like a man
pushing forty.

RUSSELL HEHN is a landscaper in South Mississippi. Some of his other work can be seen in The Barcelona Review, pindeldyboz, and McSweeney’s.

        “Only in the summery middle of the nineteenth century, only
under its sun, can one conceive of [this] fantasy materialized.”
                -Walther Benjamin, Die Passagenwerk

i.
Economist Charles Fourier postulated that
After however many years of peaceable anarchist communes
Bunched into phalanxes the planet would enter into a new
And confusing epoch of fantastic fucking beauty.

Animals would learn to sing music and stars would wheel
Around the sky copulating flicking their cosmic sweat
Down on earth, where, meanwhile

We all would have evolved third “harmony arms” with eyes on the
        ends
And moved past the trivial need for food and sleep.

Everyone would be having sex with everyone.

It would be ok. No, argues Fourier, It would be more than ok.

All of this is true.

“There are an infinite number of parallel universes
varying in subtle or enormous degrees, all locked off
by some curtain or caul or horrific blank wall,”
writes the experimental physicist in the suicide note
addressed to his autistic daughter,
“and many of them are better than this.”

All of which is completely baffling to the modern reader.

None of which is true.
I am eating and sleeping on Earth.

ii.
There is a village outside Paris where all the clothes
Button up the back. To get up and get dressed
Is to put yourself at the service of another,
To turn your naked body and say
Help me with this for a second.
The small white horn buttons and even whiter
Loops of silk are ideas, are a suggestion made
By the fingers of any other citizen working something
Into something else, working slow
But with a heavy tenderness.
Like a lover, I’d almost say, but let’s not
Get melodramatic.

They wear masks and cardboard signs
Advertising their likes and dislikes.
They are strangers but they like it this way.
They love all of their strange faceless neighbors.
Their buttons are perfect.

Meanwhile in the next room my girlfriend
Vomits into a toilet while I think and go hmm
And replace “carried away” with “melodramatic”.

Sometimes we think the guy downstairs is hitting his wife
But who knows and who can be bothered to know.
If you turn up the radio you can barely hear it anyway.
Sometimes my fly will be down for hours and oh well.

I am eating and sleeping on earth.
None of this is true.

iii.
William Dorrell was impervious to pain
Until beaten to death by unbelievers.

America’s first vegans were, like so many to come,
Frantic millenarians. My favorites own “New Harmony”
Which in Indiana closed for good in 1827,
Leaving 20,000 acres of earthly paradise empty,
And now broods in Philadelphia making mock-General Tso’s.

And anyway I lied when I said he was beaten to death.
After the first punch to the chin he rose
With blood on his white collar
And only after a half-dozen more blows,
Pinned to the chapel’s rough floor,
Did he relent, three teeth knocked into
The mouth’s flooded cathedral,
Did he say, yes,

I feel it.

The Dorrellites, they believed
That in the new garden of eden no flesh
Would be harmed. They settled in Vermont.
In my earlier drafts rose-water flowed
From their skeptical wounds.

William Dorrell ate and slept on earth.
He lied when he said “I feel it.”

CHRIS SCHAEFFER is a biographical blurb designed to break all of your hearts.

St. John says that understanding
Is a deliberate lifting up of one’s self
And comes by slow and steady effort,
As if you are climbing a tall ladder
Ring by rung, hand over hand and
Step by step, where ascent is a
Vertical exercise of beating down vice
And stepping on them, one by one,
To raise yourself up.

In his cell, a lone penitent kneels
Head bowed deep in prayer,
As virtues move beneath his garment
And fly like white and tan pigeons,
A rapid flurry of wings flapping
Against the fabric of his hair shirt
As they escape, one by one,
To the window ledge and out
To the open air.

For me, insight comes all at once
Like a multi-vehicle crash on the interstate
Where cars pile up on each other,
One by one, at high speed
To the bang of metal on metal,
The boom of exploding airbags,
As red brake lights silently pulse
On and off bleeding out all my wrong
And mistaken notions.

What I remember are the losses that were given to me
after they had been scrutinized for their furious depth.
What I remember is the way I tried to look at them
first by holding my hands in front of my face
and then by sinking to my knees
and pretending that everyone else was striking out
for a new territory that I wouldn’t be able to name.
What I remember are the losses that should have had ribbons on
        them
or maybe little bells that I was able to tune
when I came back from a long needed vacation;
when I came back from seeking justice for the people
into whose eyes I peered at the push of my lightning
and at the plebian cost of the metal I named
for the discrepancy- of the ages that died in my heart.

LEE STERN lives in Los Angeles. Not much to brag about. Likes dogs. Maybe about 130 published poems. Many on the internet. Tries to write one a day. Adores the music of G. F. Handel.

Night fingers the sky, purple and red
ribboning the blue. The world tilts.

Thoughts no longer wedge beneath busy-ness.
Outside my door crickets scour the night,

an owl screaks. Inside all is quiet.
Clocks stopped, mirrors shrouded.

Darkness crawls closer. The street light
buzzes and pops on. Fog pearls the windows,

erases the moon.

KB BALLENTINE has attended writing academies in both America and Britain. Published in Bent Pin, MO: Writings from the River, Apocalypse, Touchstone, and others, she shares her work in various poetry groups. A finalist for the 2007 Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry and the 2006 Joy Harjo Poetry Award, she was awarded monies from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund in 2006 and 2007. In February 2008, Celtic Cat Publishing debuted KB’s first collection of poetry Gathering Stones and in 2009 released her second collection Fragments of Light.

i.
Orpheus, on widowed wings,
careens wildly through blank air.
He is kiting toward retrograde orbits.
They are all named Eurydice.
There he finds amorphous blights in his solar plexus.
Once this was love, now the place is named lost.
they evolve, these masks, jumbling:

Icarus, (also winged)
        a desire to fly which bred only a fall—
Faust
        who can love only science
Persephone
whose hunger pangs sealed her fate
Delved into hell, all of them.
Xeroxed zodiacs cannot foresee what’s really in the stars.
Copies are always flawed because they’re copied.
Violent quaking, which gets hollower
spasm by spasm: a cast of the doomed,
lost yes’s spiking underneath

ii.
My face, a collection of oblique curvatures,
masks, behind which to hide, with knitted tornadoes
in places where there should be only eyes.
Rectilinear forms thrown like awkward potteries.
I call this my expression.
Jaundice is not natural; nor the fleet duplicities
turning the corners of my lips upward.
To achieve this is to lasso a zephyr.
I am quietly vigilant in these endeavors.

A maze of identities to choose from,
all gaseous. They float, weightless,
Yawns can all be defined by the chasms
they hide. Even in the canyons flowers twist
to see the sun. They grow in picture jasper.
In common speech, heliotropes of both varieties are called
        bloodstones.
I wear them in my choker and that artless ceramic I call my face

iii.
…which hearkens to Cassandra’s window.
mesmerized by the centrifugal motion of ketamine typhoons,
I try on all the masks of mythology, history, mystery, and lore.
You cannot know yourself unless you fully experiment with the
        possibilities.
I’ve not only seen you become a widower, love,
I’ve also seen you torn to bits by whores. I’ve seen
your head singing downstream. I’ve seen the vampire quintet finish
        you off,
and your golden throat ripped out. That’s my hell.
(It’s like zymurgy, the way it bubbles and ferments upon itself.)
I know, without eyes, what the stars foretell.
I know it without the stars.
Underneath masks with tornado eyes,
and thyphooning synergies: myth and truth,
all these figures are simply gradations of me.

I know this like x-rays know there are bones beneath

ALLIE MARINI first started kicking ass in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. She is a 2001 alumna of New College of Florida, which means she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform simple math. Her work has appeared in Goulash! (1996), Pan’ Ku (1999), New CollAge (2001), Scratch (2008), Penumbra (2009), Crash (2010), Shaking Like A Mountain (2010), Multi-Culti Mixerations (2010), A Daughter’s Story Anthology, (2010) and Eyrie, (2010). She has lived all over Florida and Washington State. She calls Tallahassee home and is a hairdresser when she isn’t writing. She will start her MFA degree in 2010 and is waiting to see where life will take her.

Northeast wind. Smoke from distant domes.
A few stars break their tangled arch of sky.
Dark wings are moving near me, calling out
to others, drifting offshore. They answer back.

Dreaming of early sun and desert wind
I sleep through these harsh days. The night is mine.
Walking the tidal riverbank, rip-rap
settles beneath my feet. Its salt flows in.

She’s somewhere south of here. I know those wings
will settle near her marshes, on their way
to Roanoke or Amazonia.
Dense willows cage Orion in their twigs:

birdsong from cages can’t remake her voice.
These waves reflect a withered crust of moon.
Nights become hers. I speak to shadow. Tides
heap our floating wreckage back to shore.

I can’t follow those voices, pulling south.
Lashed stars pursue the order of their rounds.
I lean back west. Stone burns in leveled cold.
Smoke from distant domes. Northeast wind.

W.F. LANTRY works inside the Beltway, but drives every night to the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River where his wife sometimes makes him take his five year old to Mass: “Victimae Paschali Laudes” actually happened exactly as described. During the present academic year his poems have been published in 11 separate and unique countries, including Texas, both in print and online. He currently serves as the Director of Academic Technology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

        His voices knew the magic words. They spoke them without provocation, unsealing Bennett’s lips so the incantation could fly audibly from them. Once it did, Bennett would begin to vanish, then reappear somewhere else. A reluctant drifter leaving one life for another. It was contrary to all he believed in. Science
had been for him the last word concerning what was and what could not possibly be. How often had he drummed that into the heads of his high school science students? “If it cannot be empirically proven, what do we have, class? That’s correct. Nothing but hypothesis, pure conjecture. If you can’t take it to the lab and study it, you’re holding in your hand lots of nada, zip, nothing at all!”
        The first time Bennett drifted away, he was in the faculty room finishing a hasty lunch before fifth period. The only other teacher there sat across the table from him, his colleague Dave Rossi, English teacher and poet, with whom he enjoyed arguing about the existence
of God and an afterlife, scoffing at such “infantile preoccupations,” while at the same time defending the superiority of science.
        Suddenly, in mid-sentence, Bennett constricted his throat, locked shut his jaw, all the while screwing up his face in reaction to the burning sensation inside his mouth.
        “What’s wrong, Nat? You don’t look right.”
        Rossi stood up, walked around Bennett’s chair so that he stood behind him. “Are you choking?” he asked, but Bennett wouldn’t speak. He shook his head. Then it was Rossi yelling, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” because Nat Bennett was disappearing limb by limb, his head and torso floating above his seat, his mouth gaping in a soundless scream.
        Rossi’s screams brought the principal, a few of the faculty and even several students barging into the faculty, but by the time they got there, Bennett had completely vanished. Rossi stood there babbling and pointing at the place where moments ago Bennett sat telling him there was neither Heaven nor Hell. Now it seemed to Rossi that Bennett, in one place or the other, was recanting.
        Mrs. Carlin, the Sacramento High School principal, draped her arm around Rossi’s shoulder, trying to console him. In her decades of academic life she had seen two other teachers break down like this. Pressures build up and need to find release. She liked Rossi. She had always considered him level-headed, life-loving, in control, but now she had her doubts.
        “What happened here?” she asked.
        “He was sitting right there. We were talking. Then all at once his face turned blood-red.
        His eyes started to tear. I figured, he’s choking, having a heart attack maybe, but when I got up to offer help, I saw his arm disappear!”
        The principal, the other teachers, and the students glanced at one another, eyebrows raised.
        “I blinked. Okay, it’s a blind spot. This can’t be happening, but by then, Bennett’s head and torso –– no arms or legs! –– were floating in air. I screamed. What else could I do? Either Bennett was disappearing or I was losing my mind. The last to vanish were his eyes.”
        Now the principal was directing the boys to Room 112. “Find Mr. Bennett, boys.”
        “You won’t find him there,” said Rossi. “Not there or anywhere. He’s gone.”

SALVATORE BUTTACI is an obsessive-compulsive writer whose work has appeared widely here and abroad. He was the 2007 recipient of the $500 Cyber-wit Poetry Award.