Selection from Carol Guess’ “F IN”

Chapter Thirty

they

come to the tangle of a butterfly bush

I don’t believe you ever had a twin

years now I’ve known you as

half of something, and now I think you’ve been lying to me.”

“If I didn’t have a twin, you wouldn’t be seeing her ghost.”

ghost could be anyone.”

tide creeps in

This is imagination and this is what’s real

They swim the current

“It’s beautiful here.”

—

This selection is from Carol Guess’ erasure poetry book F IN, available from Noctuary Press. Purchase your copy here!

Carol Guess is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Darling Endangered, Doll Studies: Forensics, and Tinderbox Lawn. Forthcoming books include How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents (co-written with Daniela Olszewska), Instructions For Staging (co-written with Kristina Marie Darling), and With Animal (co-written with Kelly Magee). She is Professor of English at Western Washington University. Follow her here: www.carolguess.blogspot.com.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

Selection from Carol Guess’ “F IN”

                                                                                               Chapter Twenty

                                                                              “They act like she was never born.”

black-and-blue houses

                                                                                                     hidden somewhere in
Central Washington

                                                                                                                                          A sister
like a boarded window. A sister like a passing train.

                      the groom’s mother blindfolds the bride

                                                                                                                               pain like a
freight train down the city’s main drag

 

 

                                                                                                              cars stay     still while

scenery change                         s

                                                                               daily violence        random and reckless

—

This selection is from Carol Guess’ erasure poetry book F IN, available from Noctuary Press. Purchase your copy here!

Carol Guess is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Darling Endangered, Doll Studies: Forensics, and Tinderbox Lawn. Forthcoming books include How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents (co-written with Daniela Olszewska), Instructions For Staging (co-written with Kristina Marie Darling), and With Animal (co-written with Kelly Magee). She is Professor of English at Western Washington University. Follow her here: www.carolguess.blogspot.com.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

Selection from Carol Guess’ “F IN”

                    It isn’t easy to get a ghost drunk.

                                 sugary

                                     camera

                                                                                                            doll

posing        below

                                                                                                                     a good
thing to crave

                  iris                                                                                      escaped

                                  asked for it

                                           no

spread

                                                                                                  out        at school

                                                lawn         s

                                                                                        shoplift

                                                                                                            the practice

car

                                                                           hit any curbs

                                                                                    kid

?”

                                                                                    buried                     the

creepy

                                                                                                                           guy

                                                                            ‘s       key

                                                                                                         red

sky

                                                                         fucking. It was a thing.”

“Do you want to get married?”

“Not to a boy.”

elaborate metalwork: birds                                blossoms

                                                                                                          brambles

blackberries             snapped

falling onto the grass

—

This selection is from Carol Guess’ erasure poetry book F IN, available from Noctuary Press. Purchase your copy here!

Carol Guess is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Darling Endangered, Doll Studies: Forensics, and Tinderbox Lawn. Forthcoming books include How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents (co-written with Daniela Olszewska), Instructions For Staging (co-written with Kristina Marie Darling), and With Animal (co-written with Kelly Magee). She is Professor of English at Western Washington University. Follow her here: www.carolguess.blogspot.com.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

Selection from Carol Guess’ “F IN”

                                                                                                     : a pocket girl, a coin

                                                       Truth or
Dare                                                                       grape juice,
ketchup, and beer

                                                                                                                                the
dress should be able to get on with its life

vodka

                                                                                                            powder

                                                               embroidered
flowers

                                             “Sometimes I lie,”

“Did you lie about Elvis?”

           listening to

porn

                                                                                           squinting as she got hot

sleepier pretending

she was underwater

                                                                                                                                   side

road

                                                                                     thump

                                  swollen tire

                                                    almost impossible, explained police, to identify the driver.

                                    They told each other that although they fooled other people, they

wouldn’t lie to each other, or lie to themselves.

—

This selection is from Carol Guess’ erasure poetry book F IN, available from Noctuary Press. Purchase your copy here!

Carol Guess is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Darling Endangered, Doll Studies: Forensics, and Tinderbox Lawn. Forthcoming books include How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents (co-written with Daniela Olszewska), Instructions For Staging (co-written with Kristina Marie Darling), and With Animal (co-written with Kelly Magee). She is Professor of English at Western Washington University. Follow her here: www.carolguess.blogspot.com.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.

Selection from Carol Guess’ “F IN”

INTRODUCTION

F IN began as a ghost story, a mystery, my attempt to subvert the conventions of those forms. I wanted to tell the story of the (ubiquitous) dead girl from the perspective of a curious girl who makes up the murder, author instead of observer. I wanted to give my heroine agency and appetite. Instead I spent several years writing a manuscript I wasn’t happy with—a novella titled Willful Machine—only to pull it a few weeks before publication.

Rather than publish a book I wished I hadn’t written, I canceled my contract and sat down to revise. At first I tried to make the manuscript longer. Then I made it shorter. Finally I blanked it out: black font to white, invisible screen. After erasing the entire manuscript I allowed a few words back in. Hey you, come in. But you, stay out. I got to be a bouncer at the club I’d constructed.

F IN is an erasure of Willful Machine. I like it better than the original manuscript. I did have moments of wanting to leave the manuscript blank, words hidden in white font. Compression is vital to my aesthetic; when I write something I often just want to erase it. If I were a choreographer I’d be obsessed with stillness, like the moment in Balanchine’s Serenade where the dancers stand motionless, vibrating with patience, before suddenly snapping their feet into first.

city of alleyways            disappearing mountains

 

                                                                                                             winding

roads        rockslides              ghosts                                 serial killers

guard dogs    Minutemen              meth labs

                                                  city of

clear cut

identical floor plans

erase

place

No one drowns

lightly

I don’t want to marry

 

—

This selection is from Carol Guess’ erasure poetry book F IN, available from Noctuary Press. Purchase your copy here!

Carol Guess is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Darling Endangered, Doll Studies: Forensics, and Tinderbox Lawn. Forthcoming books include How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents (co-written with Daniela Olszewska), Instructions For Staging (co-written with Kristina Marie Darling), and With Animal (co-written with Kelly Magee). She is Professor of English at Western Washington University. Follow her here: www.carolguess.blogspot.com.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.