#39: "Naked Lunch" by Denise Falcone

~This essay appeared in Kerouac's Dog Magazine (2010).

Sometimes my mother and her fiancé liked to escape the humdrum formula of comatose suburbia to mill around Greenwich Village for a dose of beatnik fashion and avant-garde social color. It was 1962 and I had not yet crossed over the border of my dreams when they invited me to accompany them. All I knew was that the people who lived there wore black and walked around barefoot all the time. “Denizens of the demimonde” they were and maybe some witches lived there as well.

We browsed in a monotonous dawdle in and out of shops hawking smelly hand-crafted leather goods and turquoise and silver jewelry until they decided to purchase their matching wedding rings from a silversmith who offered to engrave the thick American Indian-style bands while u-wait. I plopped down on a window seat next to something grey and furry, its face hidden in its body while sleeping rolled up like a round loaf of bread. Suddenly a tall girl with thick long bangs walked in. She had on a nubby red knitted poncho over a plaid madras skirt and when she kissed the silversmith on the mouth for an embarrassingly long stretch of time, I had to catch my breath because SHE WASN’T WEARING ANY SHOES!

Cafe Bizarre was located down a flight of stairs in a basement, unlike our local soda fountain where you could sip a cherry coke and gaze out the wide windows at the peeling barks of the sycamore trees and across the street to the friendly neighborhood bakery. They thought it might thrill me to go to a real live Greenwich Village coffee house, but the disconcerting brick walls, the narrow doorways hidden by dark velvet curtains, and the painted black ceiling appeared more like a funhouse than a place where you would want to get something to eat. I ordered a hot chocolate and stared down at the tan-colored liquid in its thick brown china mug placed before me. In tortured silence I pretended to wait for it to cool but minutes passed and I was bugged-eyed by then. What if they doped and kidnapped me, these bongo-drum playing, goateed, black turtleneck-wearing zombies?

The idea of being reprimanded for not drinking what I ordered caused me to eventually bring the cup to my lips. I thought, Oh well, so long everybody, and took a sip.

            It wasn’t bad. In fact, it tasted very good.

            It was dusk when we emerged. Our car was parked a million miles away. My mother wrapped her wonderful arm around me and as she went on about how it was starting to be pot roast weather, I began to notice the words, hung on signs in the windows of stores and apartment buildings, stenciled in white on the street between the crosswalks, in repetitious patterns on the sidewalk, taped as fliers on lampposts, and even pressed in the window of a pizza place, READ NAKED LUNCH.

            Asking a grown-up about anything that had the word naked in it was acutely mortifying for someone my age, so I sat quietly in the back seat of our car while the shadows of the city washed over me. By the time the highway signs assured me that home was just a couple of miles away, I had it figured that this was probably a novel about two people who liked to have sex on their lunch hour everyday. After all, and I could now say this with experience, this was an uncensored bunch.

William Burrough’s controversial novel, Naked Lunch, a landmark publication in the history of American literature, was published in Paris in 1959 by Olympia Press. The book was released in America in 1962 by Grove Press.

     

*****

THE STORY BEHIND THE ESSAY

When William Burrough's controversial novel, a landmark publication in the history of American literature, celebrated the 50th anniversary of its first publication in Paris by Olympia Press, I  felt compelled to write about an experience I had when the book was released in America in 1962 by Grove Press.

*****

ABOUT DENISE FALCONE

Denise Falcone is a writer who lives in New York City. Her work has appeared in Randomly Accessed Poetics, Why Vandalism?, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, Antique Children, Poet Kitchen, J Journal, The Foliate Oak, 6 Tales, Perhaps I Am Wrong About The World, and others.

#38: Three Poems by Kim Roberts

~This poem previously appeared in Gargoyle (2011)

NOT-SO-SUPER HEROES
for Michael Gushue

Edema Man can make others swell at will
so their rings no longer fit.
Dustball Man distracts foes
with repetitive domestic chores.
Each Spring thaw, Ice Damage Man
reveals new potholes along your daily commute.
Papercut Man leaves his enemies with cruel,
nearly invisible hand wounds.
Digital Signal Man can jam
all high-speed internet connections.
Existential Man paralyzes enemies
with a desire to read Heidegger.

*****

#37: "Souvenir" by Diane Simmons

~This piece previously appeared in Local Knowledge (2009)

            He said do you want to come to my place and I said OK.  We paid the bill and walked along to Twelfth Street. We went in to a second floor apartment. It was the usual railroad, long and narrow with windows at either end. 

At the front was a bed.  At the back was the kitchen with a small table and one chair.  In between were two narrow, windowless rooms entirely given over to ceiling-high shelves. The shelves nearest the door contained what looked to be about a thousand record albums.  The shelves closer to the kitchen held CD cases, hundreds of them.

            We passed between the shelves to the kitchen.

 “You sit in the chair,” he said.  “I can get another one in a minute.”

He opened the refrigerator door. An army of brown beer bottles had taken over the top shelves.

            “Want one?”

            “Not yet.”

            He opened a bottle, put his head back and took a long swig.

            He took a foil-covered dish from the one shelf of the refrigerator that had food, put it on the counter, then bent down and lit the gas oven with a match.

He leaned against the counter, pulling hard on the bottle again.

            “I never saw anybody with so many recordings.”

            “Music is pretty much my emotional life. Just to be up front about that.”

#36: "Lorenzo the Parrot" by James Miller Robinson

~This poem previously appeared in The GW Review (1993)

LORENZO THE PARROT

With expressionless eyes and a beak

as dry and cracked as an ancient toenail,

he reminds us of elderly men.

But what good is long life

when full wings no longer spread?

That's why this old man stands still and stares

on the same wooden pole where he has stood

for years, barely pacing from side to side

a step of two before nudging into

the insulting obstacle of a tiny trapeze

that is like to fill a nursing home with toys

and its yard with monkey bars

and see-saws made for kids.

The majestic green and yellow of his coat

were once worthy of Monctezuma's crown

but are now ruffled and dull from years

of burrowing with his beak for lice.

He has seen thousands of tortilla pass

between the bars that perpetually surround.

He tears apathetically at their sustenance

then lets them like for days beneath his droppings.

His water is served in a porcelain teacup

as though to bring the flare of optimism,

the comfort of routine,

and the illusion of companions.

And the senseless things he was taught to say,

and seeing the delight they bring,

he keeps on saying them over and over,

even children's names who grew and left,

and the grandmother's whose blue-veined hand

used to pass through the little gate

with long-awaited ration and the words she spoke

in parrot talk, which in absurdity, is somewhere

even beyond baby talk.  But he spoke back

saying he loved her when in truth he hardly cared.

Little fingers keep poking between the bars

to see if he bites, and to accommodate a child,

he occasionally yawns just to hear them squeal.

His sleep is hardly different from his awakeness,

head grotesquely twisted to one side

and his face buried in a feathery shoulder.

In either state he dreams the same dream

of mango, banana, coconut and palm,

sun light, green shade and the sounds

of screeching, howling and chirping in the tropics.

*****

#35: "My Mother in Tupper Lake" by Joan Potter

~This essay was originally published Stone Canoe (2009)

            My mother moved in with her father when she was fifteen years old.  She traveled alone to his home in the Adirondack village of Tupper Lake on a train from Detroit, where she’d been living with a couple who were strangers to her.

            She and her father shared an apartment over his store; he sold phonographs, musical instruments, and Singer sewing machines. A photograph I found among her papers after she died, a photograph I had never seen, shows her standing next to him on a patch of grass in front of a wooden building. Her glossy black hair is pulled back with a ribbon; she is wearing a loose, light-colored dress with a big floppy collar, dark tights, and high, laced-up boots. Her father, a stocky man with thick dark hair, is dressed in a three-piece suit, white shirt, and tie. His expression is serious but kindly,

I think of this young girl walking home from school one fall afternoon. She sees that her father’s store is closed and a green shade pulled down over the glass on the front door. She climbs the stairs to the apartment, clutching her books to her chest. The rooms are silent.

“Papa, I’m home,” she calls. Not a sound. Her father’s bedroom door is closed. She knocks gently but hears no response. She pounds harder, then rattles the knob. She realizes that the door is fastened from the inside with a metal hook. She runs into the kitchen and grabs a long spoon, then comes back and pushes at the hook until it gives way and the door flies open.

Her father’s body is sprawled on the floor. A torn piece of rope is tied around his neck; the rest dangles from the brass light fixture, its frayed end swaying back and forth in the breeze from an open window.

Fifty years had passed before she told this story to me and my two sisters. It was the first time the three of us had heard it. Even after she married my father, she told us, she couldn’t discuss it with him. “One day he said, ‘Did your father really take his own life?’ and I said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’”

#34: "Hindsight" by Allyson Armistead

~This story was previously published in Coal City Review (2010)

In November we’ll board bus 16Y at eight-thirty in the morning and wonder about the man in gray: who he is, why he’s angry, why his hand is hidden in a brown leather satchel.

He’ll be standing in the back, wearing a wool jacket to his knees: the feather of granite in a cemetery. We’ll notice his spectacles, how they’ll wrap around his ears and perspire on his nose, how his pants will be too short and tapered around his ankles. We’ll see the nape of his black business socks, a thread coming loose, and we’ll think of a string on a kite, in the park, in the wind.

We’ll wonder if he works for a department in the city: of energy, of transportation, of education. We’ll think he’s an intellectual. He’ll be holding four books, two red, one navy, one black—a Bible we’ll think, King James—and we’ll wonder if he’s a religious man. We’ll wonder about our own religion, about god. We’ll question everything, then lose that thought because it will not matter: the man in gray will only be a stranger, passing.

We’ll fold our arms and close our eyes and listen to the wheels driving on asphalt, the sound of acceleration and release. We’ll wish we were flying somewhere tropical, that we could escape the rain, our routine, our staplers and computer screens.

“Black man in the back; I see how the fuck it is,” the man in gray will say, into the silence of our bus. We won’t know why he’s shouting, why he’s sitting in the back; we never told him to. There will be so many seats in the front and we’ll count them with our eyes: four on the right, seven on the left, so many seats. Take one, we’ll say, take a seat.

“There’s one right there,” we’ll say. “By the window.”

#33: Two Poems by Sandra Marchetti

~This poem previously appeared in Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art (2010)

Le Parc des Suicides 

We both chased

the heron, the bridge,

a rafting concrete wave

hard and high.

My jaw dredged across

the watery flood blood—

green water and open

to receive me off

the bastion train track,

bust track—

a human’s perch,

a faction, a fraction—

to be untied,

and given to granite,

carved into a willing water.

A dressage of slipping rocks

braced for the fall.

Fleshed

against the sidewalls

of underwater

blood canyons,

our flexed stomachs carve cold

tidal eaves,

shredding skin,

making shifts of ice.

What’s young

comes lick-swift, dying

hard off the two-tiered bridge.

A loud, dark past

flinches the nuclear edges.

Water lilies and

still-motioning swings:

this is the heron’s

pick-ground.

*****