I cry anytime Springsteen speaks about his father, duh, because our fathers were so alike, because we as children of broken men were so alike. I cry at both the intro and the outro to ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,’ the intro because it means Clarence has come to the party, the outro because it means it’s time for Clarence to leave.
We danced anyway. The wedding band played our favorite songs and we danced the cha-cha, the boog-a-loo, the chicken dance, and the rhumba. Our feet, so heavy and still frozen all the way through made clanking noises on the wooden dance floor.
The night after the gold nail photo shoot, he came to the door of my room. He didn’t talk to me the way Scott had. He just walked over and held out his hand. I was wearing the plastic gloves he had given me for nighttime, and started to slip them off. “No,” he said. So I left them on.
Carry yourself now to a room with no windows.
These are your instructions. You must wait
in the dark. You were not prepared before;
what could they tell you?
Blood is only a metaphor
for other blood. Estimate
the platelets on the earth, count
the plasma. You think you can turn
this talk into stars or sand, but blood
is at hand, sir, do not waver.
I refused to let myself think for too long. Instead, I touched myself as cars sped by, the darkness calm and heavy. I felt endless in the most limiting way possible. What I was was afraid. Like most everyone, I saw a lonely person when I looked in the mirror. So what I did was paint my mirrors blue. Blue is calming, I’d been told. Blue will make everything better.
You believe that it is stealing to spend more time than allotted at lunch or on a break.
You believe that it is stealing to spend a few moments goofing off at the desk.
You believe that it is stealing to be a little octopus dawdling beneath the waves of the ocean.
You believe—wholeheartedly!—in the saxophone solo in Bruce Springsteen’s “Bobby Jean.”
Welcome to our 8th anniversary issue. This year we thought we'd give a new home to works that have been previously published in journals that are now defunct, or works that were pulled from venues that proved less than trustworthy. I'm so glad to be able to give these pieces a second chance, and I hope you love reading them.
Witches do not decorate in Danish Modern. Some witchy design ideas to consider are: antique furniture, New Englandy houses, overstuffed kitchens, a truly insane number of candles, and an entire greenhouse full of plants. Once you have all these items in place, compound them by several orders of magnitude. There will be no Konmari-ing of anything.
You're dropping bombs on a bridge to stop
the Russians from following your friend, Art Malik,
the Oxford educated resistance leader who has far
more screen presence and sex appeal than
droopy-eyed you.
Your memory said that rusted fragments preserve
the wholes of our shattered lives.
When you addressed Hamlet’s skull, returning
to the Berlin battlements that sheltered your childhood,
the whole was emptying out, entire populations lost.
I tell her, and she looks up, pleased and
serious, and I think of our first glimpse
of her: the grainy sonogram, the only
clear things one white, spread-fingered hand
Unsunned
boys with their serious
boy films. More important
than ours, their toys: NYU
film school, CBGB, Harvey
Weinstein’s money.
I continue driving along Route 50 toward Arlington, knowing Dad is right: it’s not a sacred place. I can come here alone or in my new SUV without fear that bad luck is indigenous to this spot and will somehow taint my journey every time I return.
Marginalized people. Despair on the street. She knew what she was talking about. I grew dizzy as our crazed driver swerved left and right, cutting off cars. Ms. Raincoat’s fervour rose. “You’ve got to work on transitions. You need to help people get treatment or find jobs. It’s the only way ...”
I’ve known my brother all of my life and I have no idea what he sounds like when he sings. Not even “Happy Birthday.” When you have three older siblings, they all sing “Happy Birthday” and they all blend together around the table because all you can focus on is the cake in front of you.
pretender to an animal kingdom, this small throne,
this small peace. The sighs of animals,
waiting.
I obeyed you for a decade as you bade me not to feed on them, your exes, their living breathing families. But you kept summoning those same half-dozen women to our farmhouse, which was supposed to appear abandoned. People were getting suspicious. So I picked them off, one by one. I ate the flesh of those women you loved before me, who were still alive after I was dead.
100 WORD FILM REVIEWS / Parasite
It’s best to go into Parasite, the latest piece of mind-fuckery from Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, knowing as little as possible about the plot, a hilariously escalating series of con-jobs. The film excels as black comedy, and dares to say something darker and more personal about class than either Snowpiercer or Okja. That is to say that the themes are more complicated in this film, but that, as often happens when extra layers are introduced to an argument, those themes become more opaque. What we are left with, once the veneer of the film is torn off, is impotent rage.
FILM / Finding the Sacred Among the Profane: The Shawshank Redemption / Sean Woodard
In this month’s “Finding the Sacred Among the Profane” column, Film Editor Sean Woodard explores the themes of hope and spiritual righteousness in Frank Darabont’s adaptation of the Stephen King classic, The Shawshank Redemption.