This selection, chosen by guest editor Sierra Farrare, is from Alone in the House of My Heart by Kari Gunter-Seymour (Ohio University Press 2022).
The Whole Shebang Up for Debate
Today I gave a guy a ride, caught in a cloudburst jogging down East Mill Street. Skinny, backpacked, newspaper a makeshift shield, unsafe under any circumstances. I don’t know what possessed me.
I make bad decisions, am forgetful, cling to structure and routine like static electricity to polyester, a predicament of living under the facade I always add to myself.
Said he needed to catch a GoBus, shaking off droplets before climbing in. He gabbed about Thanksgiving plans, his mom’s cider-basted turkey, grandma’s pecan-crusted pumpkin pie.
It was a quick masked ride. Bless you, he said, unfolding himself from the car. No awkward goodbyes, no what do I owe you? Just Bless you and a backward wave.
At the stop sign, my fingers stroked the dampness where he sat minutes before.
Sometimes life embraces you so unconditionally, it shifts your body from shadow into a full-flung lotus of light.
Sierra Farrare is a short fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to a limited self-published run of her collection, Friday Night Hand Grenade, you can also find her work featured in Pretty Owl Poetry and University of Baltimore’s Welter.
Sierra Farrare is a short fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to a limited self-published run of her collection, Friday Night Hand Grenade, you can also find her work featured in Pretty Owl Poetry and University of Baltimore’s Welter.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Sierra Farrare, is from Alone in the House of My Heart by Kari Gunter-Seymour (Ohio University Press 2022).
Do Not Disturb
Whatever it was that held mother together all these years, is unraveling like a daytime soap opera— turned out like the dusk of her underbed, pacing the kitchen, hands churning air, as if word for word was the same as moment by moment, repetition the answer to prayer.
During the Great War, electricity was used as cure. Volts routed through fractured cerebellums, or directly on sectors of the body where derangements were manifest. Those enduring matters of the heart often undone by the overzealous.
Cracked as a broken mirror and all its mess, her hours decline to halves, halves to minutes, an empty frame all that remains of the what, the where, or the not of her.
Sierra Farrare is a short fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to a limited self-published run of her collection, Friday Night Hand Grenade, you can also find her work featured in Pretty Owl Poetry and University of Baltimore’s Welter.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Sierra Farrare, is from Alone in the House of My Heart by Kari Gunter-Seymour (Ohio University Press 2022).
Alone in the House of My Heart
Without warning, the bane of my being sends me a text about a four-inch-long scratch on my toddler grandson’s arm, one that, swear to God, he already had when he arrived for our last visit.
I know she is trying to set my son up, document false evidence so he will lose privileges or the right to see his fragile boy, who runs on all fours, hides in the dog’s crate the minute anyone sets foot inside the house.
When I think of her, this young woman, obviously lonely, who wanted to get married— a sharp-edged prickle inside my head repeats, Beware!
She started sleeping with crystals, my son says, scratching his head— I mean actual rocks in our bed.
On nights I drink too much wine I blame myself—my A-line skirts, Weight Watchers diets, my son growing up single-mommed inside small-town America,
lured off course by a spritz of patchouli, a flash of black lace.
Tonight I weep for all I cannot fix, wish for a newfangled deity to implore, a let’s make a deal beyond altar and incense, a clearinghouse for the backlog of karma. I drape a makeshift veil over my head, one hand raised in supplication, the other shielding my heart.
Sierra Farrare is a short fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to a limited self-published run of her collection, Friday Night Hand Grenade, you can also find her work featured in Pretty Owl Poetry and University of Baltimore’s Welter.
Intimate and sorrowful, Carrie Nassif’s lithopaedion (Finishing Line Press, 2023) captures readers in the small, dark womb of motherhood, taking us on the slimy and tender journey to birth and be birthed.
This poetry collection opens with an echoing burst of emotion. The speaker introduces an unnamed subject which they constantly and vaguely refer back to as “you.” The descriptions of this character as a wincing toddler with a “clenched tooth smile and pin curls,” along with other parts including the “tang of [your] injuries,” “paw at them curious,” “flimsy husks,” and “grimy coins,” lead readers to feel protective, almost maternal, over the character (Nassif 1). Only at the end is it revealed that the poem is addressed to the speaker’s own mother. And so it begins: the thirty-four page roller-coaster ride through heartbreak and sweetness. Nassif’s flashes of compassion and endearment sharply contrast whetted moments of conflict to create a stunning collection which seems to reflect on itself as it reflects on motherhood from the perspective of a daughter.
Each poem is a punch to the gut; so quick in its succession, Nassif’s lithopaedion barely leaves room to recover before grabbing readers roughly by the collar to stand for the next poem. In “the unmothering,” Nassif describes the speaker’s innocent curiosity surrounding their own birth. The speaker of the poem is wise, describing scenes of birth as only a mother would know, such as, “how your beats would wane,” and “feather breath on ours” (Nassif 5). The poem ends with, “then twisted rubber bands so tight around / we fell away unnoticed” (Nassif 5). Nassif begins the next poem by saying, “you who had been so content to rest within my ribs would come convulsing from me on hands and knees” (6). The transition flows so smoothly; if heard aloud, we may wonder when the last poem ends and when the new one begins. Not only is lithopaedion thematically rich and consistent, the speaker’s perspective is, too. Even when the poem is seemingly from a child’s point of view, the speaker’s narrative distance dominates elegantly with the sage reflections and intimacy that only comes with age.
The collection unabashedly climaxes at several points. The conclusion comes too soon with several poems towards the end finishing their own movements strongly; readers are led into gutting false ends. Each ending leaves readers wondering if what Nassif presents afterwards could possibly top it. “Iterations of collapse” concludes with:
if even liturgical messengers are tempted to reach
then who are we not to bleed for the fruit?
Eden be damned
the orgasm so worth the childbirth (26)
This allusion to the Bible is the first in the collection. The themes of sacrifice and pleasure that Nassif plays with throughout the collection are encapsulated perfectly in these lines, due, in part, to the allusion. Again, Nassif plays with the passage of time, taking us to the conception of the child. Here, the post-birth reflection meditates on the speaker’s personal pleasure, detached from motherhood. The lack of personal pleasure enjoyed by any woman in this collection goes mostly unnoticed until this point, serving as a metaphor for reality. In a few short lines, Nassif has presented us several purposes and interpretations, just one example of many in lithopaedion.
Nassif’s carefully crafted ending leaves us with no doubt that she is a master of diction and a greater master in the art of affliction: “reverberations of afterbirth spiraling within us all” (30). Here, Nassif describes motherhood as it is endured by women who become mothers after first being a daughter. As the speaker in these poems is flawed and suffers greatly, struggling to find space to forgive themself for some far away sin, the speaker also takes on the biggest burden of all: forgiving their own mother. Through motherhood, the speaker seems to find a freshness in empathy. It becomes more difficult to admit that mothers cannot bear everything and easier to understand why their own mother suffered as she did. Nassif’s vulnerability on the page shows us that mothers never stop being daughters and motherhood rips daughterhood away from women, both at the same time. To be a mother is to give and sacrifice. What better way is there to encapsulate this experience than through lithopaedion?
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials, where we invite authors to share the work of their favorite poets. This month, Jillian Fantin joins us to discuss the work of Shelley Feller, world building, queer poetics, hybrid poetry, and how it’s all a labor of love. As always, we hope you enjoy as much as we did.
Ryleigh Wann: When was the first time you read Shelley Feller’s work? Why did it stand out to you then?
Jillian Fantin: So I first encountered Feller’s work when my MFA thesis advisor Joyelle McSweeney (amazing poet and human person, make sure to check out Death Styles when it comes out) recommended Dream Boat. At the time, I was just beginning to experiment with queer world building, as well as popular culture(s) and what is “valuable” to be written about. Additionally, a lot of my poetry at the time began to hybridize into visuals, like emojis and doodles of noses and seahorses, and into playscript, with named characters performing and dialoguing amongst themselves. I didn’t know why, and I’m guessing that’s why Joyelle recommended this collection.
Shelley Feller’s general work—but especially Dream Boat—is now a major foundational inspiration of my poetics. In the simplest terms, my current overarching poetry project is to celebrate the queer transmasculine body, as well as what I find to be its threefold artistic potentiality: to serve as a physical site upon which to survey the degradation of the Anthropocene; to help explore the intimacy that occurs when visual art, specifically fashion and textiles, effectively “transitions” into poems (i.e., the visual subject’s new “queer [written] body”); and to reveal how the intentional writing of gibberish and sound mirrors the making of one’s own body. Without Dream Boat, I truly believe that I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Ultimately, Dream Boat totally rocked all of my worlds. It didn’t feel like I was “reading” poetry. No, Shelley Feller built this ooey gooey world full of sonic experimentation and really made me completely submerge myself into something new. I’ve read collections that excite, entice, and enamour from its page-bound position, but Dream Boat’s poetryresists these traditional boundaries while still eliciting these same emotions. Honestly, I cannot even describe this collection using written language besides encouraging you wholeheartedly to approach it with the knowledge that it will swallow you whole and ride you all the way down. I don’t know where “down” is, but “down” feels right and left an impression on me.
JF: I think I’m a poet because I’m not funny enough to be a comedian and not silent enough to be a mime. Because of that, I gravitate towards writing like Feller’s because their unfettered sound and vision refuses to be boxed in with a qualified “enough.” Reading their poetry is the opposite of sensory deprivation. Sensory decadence, maybe? Whatever it should be called, Dream Boat really inspires me to experiment with sound and vision and to not water my work down in an effort to be palatable to an audience that wouldn’t read my work in the first place. Further, Shelley Feller expresses the tenderness found in queer decadence, and that care for every line’s position and every shadow or echo of text is something I try to imbibe within all of my writing.
The most impactful element of Feller’s writing upon my own, though, is the refusal to accept. Refusal to accept the traditional confines of the page, the line, the word, the image, everything. Now I don’t mean to say that Feller believes that there are no boundaries in the world, or that humans should be and/or are capable of anything. What I mean is that Feller’s writing seems to actively reject the humanmade values that restrict “poetry” to mean “what is saleable.” Their poetry’s disruptions of the traditional line, use of multiple font shades, and inclusion of emojis not only creates a new language, but Feller’s Dream Boat looks forward, explicatingwhat possibilities language holds when we reject the notion of poetry as commodity (and therefore as fetish) and challenging readers to consider the inherent value of poetry in its simple identity as poetry.
All of this to say: much of my work (including my first full-length being published by y’all!) functions as an experimentation in sound and image to excavate what poetry is and what my poetry is. I used to corral poetry. Now, I let poetry take me where it wants to go.
RW: Why did you choose to read these poems specifically?
JF: Admittedly, I just wanted an excuse to jump back into the collection. No big rhyme or reason in the decision-making process: I really just wanted to share some of my absolute favourite poems from one of the poets most impactful to my life. I apologise that this isn’t exactly a verbose answer, but honestly? Feller’s brilliant poetry makes up for all that I lack.
RW: Your debut chapbook, A Playdough Symposium, is published with Ghost City Press. What was the process of creating this collection like? Any specific writing rituals or things you were surprised by as this book was coming to life?
JF: I’m very much a proponent of CAConrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry rituals, so even when I’m not explicitly creating and performing a bodily-involved ritual, that sort of corporeal embodiment of poetry never fails to come out. The concept literally came about while reading Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and I just sort of rolled that name around in my mouth until it birthed sissyfist. After sissyfist came two-piece suitor, and they sort of just fell into their roles from there. After that, A Playdough Symposium came about within my chapbook manuscript young velvet porcelain boy. Eventually, it slowly but surely funked its way right off those pages and demanded the attention of a Platonic dialogue. Much of my current writing process involves recording myself or literally speech-to-texting my thoughts, and most of sissyfist and two-piece suitor’s conversations came from conversations I had with myself.
At the same time these characters emerged, I’d been diving into different forms of masculinity in performative spaces and the intersection of production and laziness—which is sort of a fancy way to say that I was watching a lot of Jackass reruns. I’m really fascinated by Jackass, the way that these men did so much to themselves, their bodies, their total psyches, and in doing so kind of managed to game capitalism and own their own means of production within their labour—i.e., their bodies. I dare anyone to say that they’d be in a state of immediate awe upon seeing Plato and Phaedrus talking beneath a tree. Instead, I think most people would assume that sitting under a tree and talking isn’t anything but nonproductive. I argue that it’s antiproductive and, thus, pretty radical in practice. And what makes it more radical to me is the simplicity of the “because,” i.e., the reason for talking under a tree. Which is, they wanted to talk under a tree. Though of course this is a relatively simplistic take on both Platonic dialogues and Jackass, but I wanted it to be simple. I like simple.
TL;DR: A Playdough Symposium is mushy, formless dialogue of lazy erotics between a pair of beings oscillating between Socrates/Phaedrus and Johnny Knoxville/Steve-O. Nothing happens, but so much happens, too. Without knowing, they explicate the different classical ideas carried in the titles. It’s a love story about a love I’m new to knowing.
One last note because I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it to anyone before: I still don’t know Holographic Will and the Cemetery Flamingo that well. I feel like their appearance as a sort of Sunday Funnies, Calvin and Hobbes-esque dynamic pairing serves more as a conversation starter/extracurricular excursion for sissyfist rather than a totally-autonomous pair of beings. Perhaps a sequel? Or a prequel? Who knows, honestly. They do, but certainly not me!
Shelley Feller holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Their work can be found in Interim, Puerto del Sol, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.
Jillian A. Fantin is a contemporary court jester with roots in the American South and north central England. They are the author of the prose poetry micro-chapbook A Playdough Symposium (Ghost City Press, 2023) and the vessel for transmission of the forthcoming full-length, hybrid poetry-play THE DOUGHNUT WORLD (fifth wheel press, 2024). With writer Joy Wilkoff, Jillian co-founded and edits RENESME LITERARY, a shortform Twilight-inspired online arts journal. They also serve as an assistant editor for Sundress Publications’ Best of The Net Anthology and a blog curator for Querencia Press. Connect with Jillian on Twitter (@jilly_stardust) or Instagram (@jillystardust). If you enjoy their work, they encourage you to either make a donation to the Indigenous nation upon whose land you work, send virtual SIM cards to Gaza via esimsforgaza.com, or contribute to their personal creative and educational work via Venmo @Jillian-Fantin.
Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MFA from UNC Wilmington where she taught poetry and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. You can visit her website at ryleighwann.com
This selection, chosen by guest editor Sierra Farrare, is from Loud Snow by Leah Browning.
Shame
On her way out of the parking lot, Janine hit a parked car. She got out and leaned down, inspecting the damage. One of the back taillights was crushed.
It was Halloween. That morning, she’d dressed up as a German beer maid. The full white blouse was gathered around her midsection by a black corset-style bodice with shoulder straps and front laces, and the green skirt fell just above her knees.
She straightened. In the back seat of her car, the two little girls were also wearing costumes: Raggedy Ann, with red yarn for hair, and a butterfly with glittery makeup on her face and hands.
“Stay here,” Jan said, and went back into the bank. “Does anyone own a beige Toyota?” they could see her asking at the counter.
It was a long strip mall. She walked from store to store, asking.
“Does anyone want me?” she was saying.
She was always making mistakes, doing the wrong thing, sending the wrong item on the wrong day. Once, when Janine overslept, the butterfly made her own lunch and the principal called home. A sharp little metal crown—part of a prize or a broken piece of a toy—was embedded in the apple she’d packed. It had been there so long that the flesh had rotted around it. A slice of bread that she’d used for her sandwich had soft spots of mold.
Still, Jan went on trying to make it work, opening the next door, looking for the one person who would say yes.
I watched her walk toward the car. I’d already gotten the baby out of his car seat and I held him in my lap. He had pulled off the black headband with the cat ears. He was fussing, chewing on his fist. My little sisters kicked the back of my seat. Kick. Kick.
She leaned in the open car window. “Sorry, Josie,” she said. “Just a couple more minutes.” There was a slick glaze of sweat on her forehead.
The baby began to wail, reaching for her. “As soon as we get home, I’ll get you a bottle,” she said, and patted his hand.
A few people were emerging from the shops, looking at us curiously.
She turned and walked toward them. They were the businessmen in the bar, loosening their ties and waiting for a drink. The green skirt twirled above the long white lengths of her calves, the soft insides of her knees. I looked away, but still, I could hear her voice, rising.
Leah Browning is the author of Two Good Ears and Loud Snow, a pair of flash fiction mini-books published by Silent Station Press, and When the Sun Comes Out After Three Days of Rain, a collection of poetry published by Kelsay Books. She is also the author of three short nonfiction books and six chapbooks of poetry and fiction. Browning’s work has appeared in Harpur Palate, Four Way Review, The Threepenny Review, Superstition Review, and other literary journals and anthologies including Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence from White Pine Press. Her first full-length collection of short fiction, The Costume Wedding, is forthcoming from Betty Books, an imprint of WTAW Press. In addition to writing, Browning has served as editor of the Apple Valley Review since 2005.
Sierra Farrare is a short fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to a limited self-published run of her collection, Friday Night Hand Grenade, you can also find her work featured in Pretty Owl Poetry and University of Baltimore’s Welter.
Lisa Braxton’s Dancing Between the Raindrops (Sea Crow Press, 2024) is a masterful and touching memoir in essays, full of grief and healing. Right from the start, Braxton situates readers into her heart, teaching us to care deeply for her mother, a woman who loved to write, though “never saw her words printed in a bound publication placed on the shelf of a bookstore…but she became something much more extraordinary” (Braxton 14). We learn about her father, who ran a clothing store for 40 years and, “at age 83, [has] lost most of his hearing” (Braxton 15). I immediately became invested in Braxton’s family and found myself eager to immerse myself further in her memories.
The idea of home is at the core of this book, including descriptions of physical houses and spaces as well as how people provide comfort and safety. One particularly touching moment is when Braxton decided to play gospel music for her mother, who was near the end of her life. Braxton writes: “Mom began to cry, something I didn’t expect. Then her crying became sobs. I didn’t know what to do. I thought about turning the music off, but decided to let it play, thinking that maybe she needed to express her emotions. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was sobbing because she was aware that she was dying in the same bedroom that she and Dad first occupied in 1961, that she never got the dream house that she wanted.” (28)
Here, a daughter wants so strongly to provide solace for her mother, to love her even if it looks a different way than she originally envisioned. Because so often, the way someone needs to receive love doesn’t exactly align with how one naturally give love. Still, the compassion and bond is there.
The memoir genre is explorative in nature, prompting author (and readers) to ask questions. Braxton admits to what she didn’t know at a young age; in many cases, this involves learning about what it means to African-American in this country. For example, towards the end of the memoir, Braxton writes: “Mom knew what I needed. As a child, I had many questions she couldn’t answer in a way I would understand” (113). In others moments, the learning process involves figuring out how to be a good daughter, citizen, sister, etc., and navigating illness and aging. And so perhaps even more bravely, Braxton also admits to what still doesn’t know as an adult. In a chapter in verse, which also happens to share its title with the book, she says,
“I walk through a season of grief
Fields of heartache leave my feet blistered and raw
Optimism is shrouded by a pewter grey sky.
Hope muffled by fear and heartache
I am unprepared for this pilgrimage.” (Braxton 37)
These lines evoke grief visually through Braxton’s candidness. They also demonstrate her command of poetry; as a poet myself, I was delighted to see chapters of verse within the memoir.
Braxton continues her masterful instrumentation of image and emotion in the following chapter, “Dad’s Playlist.” Here, the format of a track list engage readers in short but powerful memories. She writes, “I watch you blow dust off the record player needle on the Hi-Fi stereo system and lower the arm onto the album as it spins around” (Braxton 39) and swinging hands with her father in his assisted living home to the beat of Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” (Braxton 40). These vivid scenes, while short, paint so much understanding about the love and care Braxton had for her parents.
I admire Braxton’s openness on the page, as well as her confidence to play with genre and style. In addition to the playlist and poetry, other forms that make their way into Dancing Between Raindrops include: newscast script, job listing, photographs, resume, evaluation form, and recipe. One of my favorites, a crossword puzzle complete with answer key, brilliantly inserts definitions into a narrative. For example, when Braxton and her sister are trying to convince their aging father to retire and rest, he adamantly pushes back, saying, “‘I have a plan. There’s a space on East Main Street where I can open another store… ‘“’I can have all the merchandise sent over there. I can set up in a matter of days, get some flyers printed’” (83). Just below, Braxton redirects attention to the game: “(12 across: An idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person’s mind)” (83). As a reader, I found this format playful and emotionally charged—the meaning behind every detail is elevated by each clue, rather than interrupted.
I connect to Braxton’s memoir in so many ways—I am a cancer survivor, I have grappled with the slow grief of family members struggling with their health and memory, eventually passing. Despite any differences between Braxton and myself, her compelling and honest storytelling draws me close. When I reflect upon what this memoir means for Braxton herself, I recall words from her mother, emailed to Braxton: “I know, my dear. I’m well aware. I’m thinking about you too. All the time. Love you!” (135). In these words, I hear Braxton’s care, thoughtfulness, understanding, and admiration towards her family, her parents’ legacy, and the memories she’ll always hold dear.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair and the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She earned a Writers’ Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship, Breakwater Review‘s 2022 Peseroff Prize, and Second Place in The Room Magazine‘s 2023 Poetry Contest. She earned her MFA from Emerson College, where she now teaches writing and literature. She is a cancer survivor.
Reading and I have a complicated situationship that takes place somewhere between “stray cat in my complex” to “car I can’t shovel out of the snow so I sit inside it and beg for cleansing warmth.” “Browsing books we wouldn’t buy” while browsing Walmart as a child, and “finding books for free in bins and estate sales” as an adult. I think many of us tend to flip through anything for a low price, and I hunger for those easy-priced words.
If there’s one gift I love receiving from the world, it is knowledge. In my collection, you’ll find a ton of somewhat-ominous-to-read books ranging from Work in the 21st Century, an Introduction to Industrial and Organizational Psychology to a wider collection of College Writers’ publications. You know about those creative writing/english literature textbooks? Well, it turns out they have tons of short stories. Hundreds of them. This is what I’ve found to be the best way to collect short stories, more so than printing them out and binding them together (this takes up a crazy amount of space). No, I cannot always recommend it. Maybe.
I am glad to share the wider phenomenon of keeping my books stored just wherever they can fit as I collect. I will one day have that wooden bookshelf, but I have a nice little caddy that keeps many of my current reads. You can probably tell that I’ve often reread anything that comes my way, and unfortunately, I’m missing my beloved Warriors series from when I was a little boy.
If you want some serious recommendations, I can’t point you anywhere else but the library. My favorite place! My local library keeps stocks of monthly magazines as well– what a way to keep in touch with what is going on outside my little life. I can’t get enough of seeing what kinds of recipes (this is a godsend for the functions) or styles are considered popular, and I am always on the hunt to see what’s trendy so I can gossip or find a dupe. Book clubs, new additions, and staring at cookbooks in a library aisle, pretending I will remember each recipe are all part of my day-to-day life now.
If you’re as obsessed with finding new material as I am, I can’t recommend Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai enough for a warm, immersive magic fantasy. Cookbooks such as Cook This Book: Techniques That Teach and Recipes To Repeat by Molly Baz, or The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z by Tamar Adler. Red Doc> by Anne Carson for sure. Anything by Octavia Butler gets me excited, and I’ve been crazy about wanting to collect electrifying graphic novels such as The Adventure Zone series by Clint, Justin, Griffin, and Travis Mcelroy. Quite honestly, I wish more story-styled podcasts would get turned into books to devour. Maybe then I will learn another absorption method of sweet, sweet knowledge and fun.
Brendon Blair is an Appalachia-borne writer born and bred on trailer living and warm Mexican cuisine. Having a dual major in Psychology and English from the University of Tennessee Knoxville, Brendon enjoys intertwining the experiences of queer and fostered people in poetry and prose. They also hold an administrative assistantship at the Office of Science and Technology Information in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. When not writing or working, Brendon enjoys playing strategy games, and dreams of owning a cat to call Eggs Benedict.
This selection, chosen by guest editor Sierra Farrare, is from Loud Snow by Leah Browning.
Armie
For years, Roy had been drawing a popular comic strip for a local newspaper. His girlfriend wanted to get married and buy a house near the beach. He told her: Give me one year. If it’s not syndicated by then, I’ll quit drawing and go back to practicing law.
At the end of the year, the comic was still not in syndication. He marked the last X on the calendar in his desk drawer. The next morning, he called and made an appointment at his old firm. On the way to the meeting, he bumped into one of his former colleagues in the parking lot. See you finally gave up, the shithead said, smirking.
He’d made partner and bought a gold Maserati since Roy had left.
So Roy went back to work. The firm was doing well, but they still lowballed him on the salary. He’d gone back for a 5K pay cut.
Still, he thought, his girlfriend had waited long enough. He raided his savings and bought her a diamond. On their anniversary, they drove down to the beach. He took her to a restaurant with a view of the water, and after dessert, he got down on one knee.
They had a simple ceremony and bought the beach house a year later. It was just a little one, though, for weekends, and it turned out that once he was back in the thick of things, he rarely had time to go out there. They ended up selling it at a loss, but by that time, they were happy to get rid of it. What had looked charming and weathered at sunset with a realtor was just plain shabby in broad daylight. They were getting killed on the maintenance.
And they needed the money, because she kept getting pregnant and had already quit her job after the first baby. Don’t you know how these things happen? his brother asked when she showed up in a maternity shirt only six months after the third one was born. At night, after tucking the kids into bed, sometimes they split a bottle of wine and watched a movie. More often, she fell asleep at eight and he retreated to his home office.
Do you still do your little drawings? his grandmother asks him one year at Thanksgiving. When he shakes his head mutely, she pats his hand and says, Don’t worry. You can always start again. You have all the time in the world. He’s a fifty-year-old man. She’s in her early nineties.
His wife is on the other side of the table, wearing a baggy sweater and a pair of baggy slacks. One of the younger kids is making a mess with his mashed potatoes. Their older daughter is a teenager now and she doesn’t want anything to do with this. She’s slumped down in her chair, sullenly pushing carrot coins across her otherwise empty plate. Depending on the day, she’s a vegetarian or a vegan. On the day they planned the meal, vegetarian. Today, vegan. Go figure. There isn’t a single item on the table that hasn’t been slathered with at least two sticks of butter.
He tries to catch her eye. He wants to smile at her. He wants to be a better father than his father was. She looks away, crossing her arms pointedly.
Roy finishes his wine and gets up to refill the glass. He’s stumbling a little but how the hell else is he supposed to make it through this? Every year is the same. The same turkey, the same good china, some spoiled brat giving him the stink eye.
His favorite character in his comic strip was a fat little Texas armadillo with a perpetual glass of scotch and a sharp tongue. Sometimes, especially when Roy’s been drinking, he imagines what the armadillo would say to him, if he could see the situation Roy has gotten himself into. Slogging through his work, washing the car, paying the neighbor’s kid $15 a week to drag a mower across the front lawn for five minutes and then pose in front of Roy’s teenage daughter’s bedroom, flexing his muscles and fluffing his mullet.
Standing in line at the grocery store, going on one vacation a year, going through the motions with this blah blah blah life—but what should he have done? What would have happened? He would have been poor and probably alone, because she wouldn’t have stuck it out with him.
He’s standing at the kitchen island fumbling with the corkscrew, and somehow he drops the bottle of wine on the floor. It’s a red, a Bordeaux something—his eyes are too tired to focus and the bottle is broken. The trash under the sink is already full. Still, he gets down on his knees, trying to sop up wine and broken glass with a wad of paper towels.
He can feel the armadillo, nearby, watching. What would you have done instead, he wants to ask, but as always, he is afraid to hear the response.
Leah Browning is the author of Two Good Ears and Loud Snow, a pair of flash fiction mini-books published by Silent Station Press, and When the Sun Comes Out After Three Days of Rain, a collection of poetry published by Kelsay Books. She is also the author of three short nonfiction books and six chapbooks of poetry and fiction. Browning’s work has appeared in Harpur Palate, Four Way Review, The Threepenny Review, Superstition Review, and other literary journals and anthologies including Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence from White Pine Press. Her first full-length collection of short fiction, The Costume Wedding, is forthcoming from Betty Books, an imprint of WTAW Press. In addition to writing, Browning has served as editor of the Apple Valley Review since 2005.
Sierra Farrare is a short fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to a limited self-published run of her collection, Friday Night Hand Grenade, you can also find her work featured in Pretty Owl Poetry and University of Baltimore’s Welter.
