Penduline Press

I wake from a dream of Mandy
and teeter down the hall
to take a morning piss.

She was a lithe and willowy Kings Cross
honey at the Whiskey à Go Go,
full of sass and licorice whip gyrations.

She could change her color
like a cuttlefish
flopping on Bondi Beach.

Will you marry me?
Take me to America.
I’m serious.
I will love you forever.

1. We can’t have children—“we” meaning “me.”
2. My wife could likely have a child—many children—with another man, a more reproductively competent man.
3. Unfortunately, I’m not this man; I have flawed sperm. Defective swimmies. A maladjusted genital region.
4. There is a medical term for this.
5. The medical term, however, is not frankly that important. What is important is the net effect of oligospermia.
6. The net effect of oligospermia is multifaceted.
7. If the net effect of oligospermia were a color it would be puce, perhaps a particularly pukey puce.
8. Or grey.
9. I’m struggling, frankly, with the cause and effect.

I followed her scent to the kitchen. She was wearing her black patent heels. They had a tendency to make her ankles look small but today, without tights on, they just made her legs look long, her calves look lean. Her skirt started at her knees and hugged her thighs and stomach all the way to her waistline. Her white shirt was half buttoned, half tucked in, and she had her hair in a bun. She was wearing red lipstick. I watched as she carefully took a bite of her Nutella toast, being cautious not to smear the rouge on her lips.

Stemm:   “Why is she not to blame for Abel’s death?”

Dr. Carson:  “Buckley saw the spider first. No spider, no car ride. No car ride, no car accident.”

Stemm:  “Though the nurse may still have been exhausted and caused another accident…”

Dr. Carson:  “Oh, it’s nearly a guarantee that she would have. Yes.”

Stemm:  “But that wouldn’t have fallen into Buckley’s…jurisdiction…I suppose?”

I shot off the high board and dove into a vat of chlorine
and watched the weeping man trudge off to the locker room,
dripping wet . . . some of us are just damp all the time,
I marveled to one of the oiled beauties
who swam toward me like winged confection.
I thought of the man and couldn’t go on – I can’t,
I tried to explain to my now sullen consort,
twitch ecstatic in an unhappy world,
so the young woman splashed noisily away,
as I went in search of the leaking man
who had darkened my life. I would murder him.

        When I was still sleeping in a crib at night, my mother would bind my wrists to the bars with cotton cloth. She said that was the only way I wouldn’t climb straight out and run away. It was the only way she could be sure I’d finally fall asleep, exhausted after struggling against the bindings. Of course I have no actual memory of this. She waited until I was twenty-five and no longer living at home to tell me. Maybe she thought it would upset me.

They weren’t struggling as much as expressing disappointment,
those hands, fish flapping in the mud, the stringer through their gills,
the little boys proud as the river’s roaring white froth of joy,
those arms, trees bent down by the giant foot of the wind,
branches twisted toward a sun that promises more than it delivers,

Half a day is spent losing my laser in their tattoos. That is when you can see inside a patient; you become a psychiatrist, often knowing more about the layers of the onion than a culinary student. Butterflies, marlins, misspelled Chinese idioms, cherries, mermaid, initials of ex-boyfriends who gave them herpes, and dragons mapped out over time. It takes at least eight sessions to get the deeper colors of the ink from their skin, and sometimes it can be impossible to eliminate all traces of the tattoo. Even when it is gone, there is this missing space where the person used to be. It is now a new body, and the past is scrubbed and blended into the unbranded parts. Sometimes they tell me about the tattoo, the story behind it or the reason they need it gone. I nod and hand them their safety goggles. There are things I’ve heard that should put some of my clients in prison, but then again, they already are.

And we heard again and again that you should NOT look down at the ground just prior to landing but should look instead at the horizon. That way you could tell how close you were getting without experiencing the sensation of seeing the ground rushing up at you a thousand miles an hour. Which, we were told, could disorient you and cause you to make a Big Mistake.
        We were also to avoid power lines and if we found ourselves drifting down onto one, we were to cross our legs to avoid electrocuting our genitals. And finally, we were warned to avoid the Sandy River, a fast moving, icy cold body of water that wound through the valley where we trained. “You definitely do not want to land in that water,” Earl said. And I thought this was good advice.
        At five o’clock we piled into the ancient little plane.

        “She’s a thief.”
        Johnny raises his eyebrows. The girls are eating stolen chips, drinking stolen sodas and warming themselves with wood stolen from Imogene’s private stash.
        “She’s a liar.” Patsy’s voice wavers. The waitresses played poker all morning after they called for the breakfast shift claiming to be sick.
        She dances, thinking as she moves, how mixed up things have become. Her hopes are blurred, her values seem flimsy. Are her thefts less reprehensible than Imogene’s? If she goes to college only to find a man to provide her a safe life, will her marriage be any less opportunistic than the old woman’s? Her high school years when she had no boyfriend, no prom invitations, and no fat college fund seemed a month ago to have a gloss of tragic drama, but her challenging circumstances are petty compared to Imogene’s: bleak girlhood, false teeth, violent husband.
        Patsy remembers Imogene earlier tonight as she rolled out of the parking lot on her way to Denver, her hands firmly on the wheel of her Lincoln, her chin tilted to see over the dashboard.

We locked eyes for the first time, together in the ring. My llama humming gently. Hers humming back. I, holding tightly to my lead rope nervously. She, to hers as well. The judge crossed our glance, shifting to feel the hocks and withers, to slide his hand down my llama’s wooly mane.

I was asleep when the bears came. They took me unawares, the bears, down the hill, and beyond there was a convoy waiting. There were other women there, like me, frightened, and resigned. The men were killed. Pain does, ha, it does something to you, after a while. It doesn’t dull, or wane, but always feels the same, as sharp and deep and discouraging as the first time. The same shivers shudder and the neurons fire and deliver the same damn message. Listen to me, they cry. Listen to your body.

And if there’s redemption to be found,
let it be the boy’s cries
confessed between quivering
blades of grass. The not sweet
but metallic smell
after rain. Spiders, unfazed,
mending the slick wreckage
of their webs. The boy’s
blackened feet facing heaven
in backwards prayer.

        The sergeant is impassive. He picks up several of the bags, examines them and tosses them back down. He opens the one that holds your panties and bras, dumps the contents and clumsily paws through them. “And what do you do for money?” he asks, his voice grinding as though his throat is sore.
        Anger flashes through you like arcing electricity. He ransacked your undies. Touched them. He didn’t need to do that. You glance at the young patrolman and he looks uncomfortable. You wonder if the sergeant got off on handling your under-things, or was it just thoughtlessness? Regardless, you swallow your anger and answer. “When my unemployment ran out, I started pawning jewelry. I had a pretty bad jewelry habit back when I was working.” You shrug. “I guess it paid off.”
        Suddenly, you remember Cass’s stash of money in the glove box.

Everyone can point to the decisive moment, the incident that changed it all, the acid-in-the-face consequences. She says:  if I had not married him, but waited for Johnny to come back from the war. He says:  if I had not screwed that conniving bitch but gone home when Mary begged me. If I had arrived an hour earlier, an hour later.  An endless queue of hollow-eyed “if’s.”  Everyone knows the moment that turned into the great divide; a ditch, a trench, a chasm between past happiness and present pain, between bliss and my ulcer, between blue skies and your bottom dollar.

My husband kind of has a super power. I don’t know what else to call it. He is able to do something that no one else can do, at least that I know of. There probably is some underground government facility that houses people like my husband, but as much as he annoys me, I would rather the government stay out of our lives.
        Jerome does not have the kind of superpowers that you read about in comic books. He doesn’t become invisible, see through walls, or teleport. Actually, thank God he is not able to do any of these things. I have enough grief checking the history on his computer and then deleting his activities. I don’t need him walking by a Victoria Secret’s and powering up.
        My high school sweetheart, the love of my life, who I married for better or for worse, walks on air. This was not a romantic sentiment of how I make him feel, but it is what he has been doing for the past month.

Paisley bruise on her shoulder, same astonished green

snaking behind her pupils. Limbs adorned
with fresh welts of ink. I kiss her smudged
mouth & sludge-lined eyelids—without her
narcotic sweat, her voodoo breath breathing
down my neck, how did I survive? She
ushers me into her boudoir, steals my soul
as collateral. I feel as if I’m falling—she
pushes me below the waterline. She moves
the hair from my face—this is why I dis-
appeared—she slaps my face with her
mouth—this is why I’ve returned—she
examines my eyes—this the reason I left in
the first place. Then my she-devil hikes up
her leg—drags out her bow—extracts a
crucial song—punish- & replenishment,
again & again from the small body of her
lovesick violin.

        Except for green eyeshadow and red lipstick, her traffic light expression, her mother may as well have been headless. That’s all Marjorie remembers of her mother’s face, although her mother was anything but nondescript. She remembers the ensembles, with names like Roman Holiday and Gay Parisienne. But before the assembling of ensembles and accessories, there were the complicated underthings—and how easy she made all of them seem. The snaps, hooks, garters, girdles, straps, padding, wires, the nylons stretched to the breaking point. Mrs. Torso. There was also Mr. Man in the Mirror, with the jacket shoulders a little larger than seemed necessary, watching her become his ensemble. Marjorie saw them, but they didn’t see her. Her mother was right. She was easily lost.

        “It’s too early to go home, Davey,” one the guys said, sauntering over. “Join us for a couple of beers? C’mon.” They kept coolers in their cars and sat in them during the early morning with their engines running, getting wasted before driving home. But David had heard about the busts out there. Stuff a lot worse than beer. And anyway, he wasn’t old enough to drink. They seemed like good guys, but they had hard lives with hard edges. He didn’t fit in. Worse, he didn’t want to find out that he did fit in.
        He’d had another bad shift. His belt backed up again. Packages coming faster than he could load them. The other guys could handle it. Even Marty and Suzette could keep up despite their chatter and complaining. “Hey, Davey, let me know if you want me to handle your package,” Suzette had cackled. He didn’t even get it at first.

It was the stupid commercial that finally pushed her over the edge. The hot office broad, up on her desk like a pole dancer, and those goofy executive types leering at her. Be more attractive to your employers, it said, and I laughed.
        Rachel jumped up off the couch and took a few jerky steps toward the kitchen. I thought at first she was going for more snacks. Then she turned on me, hair flying around her head in a pale yellow storm.
        “You goddamned men. You’re all the same.”
        I didn’t stand a chance. “Rach…it was just a commercial. What’s the big deal?” Is this another one of your rape things? I almost said.
        “If you’d been with me that night, instead of out drinking with your fucking football buddies, it never would have happened.”
        I could only stare up at her, my mouth stopped up tight, my hands making these little butterfly motions. Was she broken for good?

        The first time I grasped the tiny bud of her breast, little more than an areole, she looked startled but did not pull away. I knew she would have gleaned enough from her diet of teen magazines, which had bypassed the vigil of buzzard-like parental eyes. She would have recognised this as a release from the prison of our solitude. Later I would replay those shared moments in my mind, whilst completing what could not be finished with my unformed flower. I would wipe my shame on the cloth of familial censure, then return to my studies.
        I was the apple of everyone’s eye, the mango and the guava.

“How’s Big Dick?” I ask Susan, my ex-wife, as we take a seat at a small, unromantic table for two in the starkly lit hospital cafeteria. I don’t understand why people talk down hospital cafeterias so much. In the past two weeks I’ve visited here, I’ve found the staff makes a wonderful breakfast burrito, their cappuccino isn’t half bad, the salad bar’s always fresh, and I’ve developed a strange affection for their gelatin parfait that’s always topped with fresh whipped cream.
        “His name’s Richard,” Susan says, “and he’s fine.”
        “Richard.” I pronounce the name as if I am sampling it for the first time, although I am not, and yet again I note its utterly detestable flavor. “You mean as in Rich. Dick. Big Rich Dick.”
        My former wife rolls her eyes in a way I’ve seen her do before many times, then jabs a fork into a medallion of glazed beef, lifting the meat to her mouth and chewing it. I can’t help but see an analogy between the way she’s spearing her dinner, and the way she’s impaled my heart, slipping my still beating organ between her lips and masticating over and over. It’s a metaphor, you see. I’m a writer.

        I punched in the price. “One round trip ticket to Charlotte comes to 139 dollars.”
        “No. I only want one way,” he said, and frown lines appeared on his forehead. “Are you sure? Do you have anyone to look out for you down there?”
        “I don’t need anyone,” he said. “I’m an adult. One way please,” he said, his voice rising slightly higher.
        “All right, no problem.” I ripped up the round trip fare and passed him the one-way ticket. He paid me the exact change, 69 dollars and 50 cents. I wanted to say something like what a father, brother or uncle would say. I wanted to tell Russell: “I’ll miss you, be careful and call if you need anything.” Instead, all I could manage to spit out was, “Have a good trip, Russ.” But I grabbed one of my business cards on the messy counter and gave it to him. He buried it in his pocket and said, “I won’t need this, but thanks.”

When I pulled up outside your house I was already thinking Shit, why did I offer to give Stella a lift? She’s going to be in my face all the way to the cabin. I sat in the car, hoping you hadn’t been looking out for me. That was the moment when I could’ve changed things. I could’ve made up some excuse, and driven home. I could’ve said I’d eaten a dodgy curry or my cat was sick (I couldn’t have used anything to do with Andrew because everyone knew he’d moved out two weeks ago). A little white lie, that’s all it would have taken and I’d have slipped us both into a parallel universe just like that.

        Instinctively I realized that I had moved back in time – bicycle and all. I leave it to anyone who may come upon this memoir (written with flint on stone to be thereafter buried in the dubious hope of greater preservation) to speculate on how he or she would be affected by such a realization. If I had been younger, I would surely have panicked. If not possessed of an overriding scientific curiosity, I might have done so in any event. As it was, I was excited and bemused at the same instant. But not frightened – a fact which surprised me.
        Until the creature turned in my direction. Curious I was, but being a meal was not the preferred way of learning about a dinosaur’s habits. Empiricism has its limitations.

The boy says, you don’t have one of these,
The girl replies, my mum says with one of these
I can get one of those anytime
If this is the rite of passage
I have already paid at the door

As the sun climbed heavenwards he climbed up through his dreams and climbed out of her bed and climbed out of her window to the vine that climbed the house and climbed the stairs that climbed the path that climbed the ridge that climbed the crooked mile and climbed the crooked stile that climbed a crooked fence as the spider climbed its web.
A crooked sixpence, and the possum full of wry wee will he wink he runs through the town, looking for his gown.

I looked up at the low ceiling. You’d found half a chandelier and hung it low on one side of the room so that the tip of its crystal pendants could graze our heads when we stood up. On the other side of the ceiling, above the bed, was a deflated-looking swing of thick ropes, a trapeze for the flightless, for those without wings, like me, weighed down by slow flesh. By the end of the night I was flying there, suspended in air, my legs and my ass no more an inch above the bed, my breasts and hands turning blue from the cut off circulation of the ropes.

The silence of my solo journey is shattered by a shrieking “Caa-Caaa!” from a nearby tree. I have traveled for so long in silence that the sound startles me.

I look across the frozen river to see a large black Raven perched atop a spruce tree. It caws again, then takes to flight. Speckles of snow crystals lift into the air as it spreads its wings. With two great beats it lifts up and then lands on a dead log not a few feet from me. It caws loudly again at me as it lands.

I look at the Raven. Its black eyes, ringed with tiny white feathers, the blackness of its feathers almost a haze of blue. My feeling of being alone, like magic, lifts. I stop and stare at him for a while. He turns his head, looking around. I feel as though he was talking to me. I take a step forward and reach for him.

Masked, I waltz

with a masked stranger
– tempo rubato –
and he has no hold on me
and I have no hold on him
but our shared contour,
our shared love of the dance.

They used to be in love. But they had been young. They hadn’t known any better. Nora wasn’t sure when they began growing apart; it was a gradual shift, like continents slowly tearing away from one another, the sea between them lapping respective banks, eroding all that seemed familiar. Even before the summer night they finished off two bottles of Pinot, lay naked by the window air conditioner, kissed a little too desperately and made something just a little short of love, there were talks of separation.

First, I explored the outskirts of your heart.
On my back a survival kit, cobbled together:
magnifying glass for closer inspection,
metronome to check for constancy,
drawing pin to puncture holes in
faithless walls, to escape in case
of emergency. I set out from the
point at the base, which overlapped
charmingly because your heart had
been drawn freehand, luscious blunt
pencil on expensive paper. Dotted
around the outline of your heart were
tiny stars and celestial swirls, rough
but recognisable.

She glanced at my floral skirt and slightly mismatched shirt and skin-bare legs. Then she said to my mother, “I heard from Mrs. Vail that perhaps your husband had unexpectedly gone out of town.”
        Mother said that didn’t know how such a silly rumor had been started. Mrs. Jenkins smiled, a pink smile, and added, “Well, I’ll have to check her sources.”
        “No need.”
        And we left just like that.
        In the car, I looked over at Mom, in her button up plaid shirt and long denim skirt hiked high above her knees so that she could push the pedals.
        I wondered how long Dad would be gone.
        He came over on Tuesday that week to pick up some of his clothes and the monogrammed bowling bag out of the back closet.

Ireland, especially the Irish countryside, is a land of unrecorded or of misrecorded crime, particularly of crimes committed by the powerful against the vulnerable. According to an account in a local history journal a woman drowned in a swimming pool in the grounds of a hotel in Wicklow in the 1930s. The hotel belonged to a leading member of the Irish branch of the German Nazi party. High-level Nazi meetings took place there. No explanation is offered for the woman’s death, in this journal. An abyss opens up in the stately grounds of County Wicklow. The story describes what I saw in this particular abyss.

I was working at a Buddhist hospice in San Francisco and creating rave flyers on the side. When I lost my job, the design gigs were the only income I had for a while, so I really arrived at graphic design through necessity. Graphic design is what happened to me while I was looking for a real job. I didn’t really think of it as a “career” until I came a across the Designers Republic issue of Emigre. That was a revelation to me; it was one of the most exciting, arresting things I had ever seen. I was like, “I want to do that, that is what I want to do.”

I went on a long spiritual journey and had to come back to art on my own. Eventually I chose to take a job at an art store in LA where I learned a lot about the various art supplies, and moved into The Parkman House in Silver Lake. I surrounded myself with like-minded, creative, beautiful sorts that shared common creative goals. If I ever needed help figuring something out for a project, I could ask my roommate, my neighbor the tattooist, or the smart boy in the Fine Arts department to guide me. Part of the fun of being mostly self-taught is I have picked my own teachers, whether they knew it or not.