Juliana Johnson – The Lake

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Juliana Johnson
The Lake

In the summers, you stay with your aunt, who lives in the middle of the woods somewhere near a lake. Most of the time, she would leave you alone, but this summer is different. She confronts you in the kitchen one morning, saying she heard you crying last night. You tell her you’re fine because if you tell her the truth you’ll cry again, and when your boyfriend left you he said you cry too much, so it feels so shameful to do it now, though you know it isn’t. Then again, some nights you cry hard enough you think your heart just might stop. So maybe he was right.
      You start going out to the lake after that, sitting on the edge of the dock. It’s better than crying inside anyway. Inside, the walls reverberates the sadness back to you. It clings onto you. It becomes the wallpaper and the blankets you sleep in. The grief becomes the air. Somehow, you think if you are outside, it will all go elsewhere. It could stop being yours to bear alone.
      You walk out to the lake one night, trying to learn how to let go of the past. You cry and the tears fall into the lake and the water ripples. This time, you will not sit. You want to swim.
      You walk to the edge of the dock and sit for a second before pushing yourself into the water. The initial crash is thunder and then nothing. There is no sound except the blood rushing in your ear. You sink for a second and then come back up the top, breaking the surface. The moon above you lights up the whole lake.
      You float on your back, the silver water holding you like he never could. The water doesn’t say it loves you only to say it never really meant it. The water doesn’t break you. It just keeps you afloat.
      You’re surprised it can. You have felt so heavy with grief lately.
      You read somewhere once that when you die, you go back to the earth. Your body rots and becomes nothing more than dirt.
      Instead, you like to think the dead become water. They become the vapour in the air, which becomes the rain in the clouds, which become the oceans and the rivers and the lakes. Maybe right now you’re floating in a pool of other people’s stories, and that’s why the lake can hold you and your story up so well. Maybe they’re listening to you. Maybe they think you’re silly for being so sad over some boy, or maybe they sympathize.
      You’re crying here, on your back on the lake surface, but he was wrong. You don’t cry too much. It’s just enough. The tears, filled with memories, run off your cheeks and become nothing more than lake water. He becomes nothing more than water. Meanwhile, you can hear your heart beating steady as you float. AQ

Gracjan Kraszewski – Footprints is a work of genius!

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Gracjan Kraszewski
Footprints is a work of genius!

I nod, nod, nod, nod. My interior self, ‘Bob’, is just about off the knob relative to the plod and trod concerning all things metaphysics, mimesis, and sub-atomic machinations of the most muscular, deft diplomatic stripe.
      The doctor keeps scribbling. He does not look up once, not even when taking a break for a breath between the furious pen pressing.
      Footprints is a work of genius! I think, and hear myself internally say, in preamble to an immediately forthcoming discourse, if he allows it, concerning this very same topic. The guy put women’s shoes and boots on his hands and feet, dipped them into many buckets of various colors, and just plodded (ah, right, that’s why that word) around his studio until he was done and was ready to display it and ready to have someone bid six, maybe seven, figures plus sincere praise and pedantic sycophantism gratis.
       ‘Okay, but, doc, but, bro, dude but listen, okay? Okay if I speak on one more thing before we finish out here? Right. Good. Post modern art, bruh. I’m talking at the time like called mid-century, you see from all the French students in the streets ’68 plus Dubcek east of us plus MLK far to the west, that time, like ’68, like late ’60s where we just flushed about like a waterfall swirled in the historiographical revolutions toppling top-down analytics into bottom-up, bottoms up celebratory drinking parties for the common man, soon the common ‘person’ because this and that always eats its own, like look what then happened about all types of identities and identifiers decades later, right?, this time, ’68, where we say mid-century and we know 20th, where we say fin de siècle and we know 19th, so this time to my timeframe being framed as we speak, here, frames like those things that maybe even they can’t make all this shit look even passably painting-like, a frame of mind, nothing, it’s nothing because nothing itself means jack shit, we’re past the void here, post-nihilist, because when you can’t explain if the painting is upside down, or right-side up, or left, or right, or what color is that color there on the canvas, or that it is, what is, and really is that anything?; or, okay, but that’s not part ‘of it,’ okay…so this time, doc, feel me when I try and keep it on point and just to the facts. Modern art, five things of import: One, the first thing, is that you have be good at playing the ape game, the imitation game, and, because it’s fundamentally about subversion and inversion, literally in the latter inverting like 180 degrees ideas of good, beauty, form, transcendence, truth, meaning, logos, unto, like, bad, ugliness, scattershot shitstormtroopering, imminence, falsehood, absurdity, and, bro doc bro doc doc, cod, cape cod, doc, cape cod league bro, bruh-doc, dawg, and especially, most especially chaos. So that’s number one: Art used to mean something and that thing, those things, were both objective and objectively good so if we want to be effectively subversive—and that’s the whole fucking fuckcluck pointed point; to fight against, and ultimately destroy, try to destroy at least, die trying, die hard, die hard 2, die…you, you get it, to try and destroy all that is solid, sensible, sane and sacred—we need to effectively develop new ‘schools of art’ that say things we all know are shit are actually good and they’re the ‘new thing’, the new avant-garde whateverthefuckever who cares so long as people are effectively fooled by this ape-imitation to say, in effect, the old ways are out, the new way is here. Okay, so then #2 is to start backing up the trucks full of cashlootdimenickelstacksstcakedcoinage and just straight filthy, dirty, expletive-ridden suscio as fuck facil dinero and start dumping it all over this ‘new art’. It’s just insider trading in Oligarch finishing school. If all these art collectors get together and agree to buy endless piles of this shit pseudo-art then—because people worship money, am I telling you something new?—the prices go up, the buzz goes up, general interest climbs and peaks and keeps buzzing all the way unto what they’re really after: legitimacy. If all these rich people are paying like $20m a painting it must be good, right? I mean, to me it looks like shit but, but that guy just paid $20m so, well it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong; silly me. Legitimacy. Legitimacy. Bruh-doc, Doctor Brother, legitimacy is what we absolutely need, so these they do say, kay? But to really seal the deal the money just won’t do. We need three and four. #3: get these pieces into the museums. How silly does silly me commoner feel when, already rebuked form his absolutely correct first impression that the urine-stained (by the artists’ own sample! The visionary character is found in an impregnable dedication to authenticity) detached toilet seat was, indeed, as valueless as it appeared/appears/will continue to appear to be, he sees said seat hanging in prime real estate within MOMA? And then, #4, something for the true holdouts, the hardest to get common sense critics for whom money and (all) integrity-(and honesty)-for-sale museums won’t bring across the divide, the chasm, that separates art from not-art. #4: Get some academic(s)—if you have to ask does this academic, forcement, forcement as in see: by necessity, have to have a PhD from Harvard or Yale and an undergrad degree from Brown or Berkeley and a current endowed chair at Dartmouth or Princeton? you’re really f***** beyond hopeless, brother; here, for this type of work, even Northwestern need not apply—to write impossibly dense, wordy, inscrutable articles, really as impossible to comprehend as the artwork they’re writing about in the first place, the subject matter (now that, finally, is art), and have it published in the most reputable, most scientifically screened and hyperbonk peer reviewed journals with one message: THIS IS ART AND IT IS GOOD AND YOU MUST LIKE IT AND APPROVE OR ELSE YOU’RE WRONG OR, WORSE OF ALL, A COUNTRY BUMPKIN-LIKE FOURTH RATE FAUX-INTELLECTUAL LIGHTWEIGHT MUCH TOO LIGHT IN THE HEAD TO UNDERSTAND, TO ‘GET’, REAL ART. And there you have it, my doc. I cannot, will not, but, again can not, I do not posses the requisite hairsplitting skills to stop the disco-dancing of all those angels on the pinhead to better, I mean more precisely, cannot any better explain this whole con game to you than that, than I just did, kid; ah, okay, but chu-wanna rid, me, wanna put a lid, on my arguments? Not so fast. A review? One: Perfect imitation game making what was once good bad, and what was once bad, ugly, abhorrent the new ‘good’; two: money to prove legitimacy; three: museums to prove legitimacy; four: a treasure trove of the best and brightest academics and critics proving legitimacy in legitimacy is thy name legitimate journals that only a fool would doubt are in fact legitimate. Five is just one: Step five is the con completed successfully; confirmed; the Z back to A completed loop, 5, Z, that’s all of us, the sheep publicly fleeced for their pleasure certainly not ours, we wearing the itchy wool sweaters of shit ass fake art without the slightest complaint, no, not even a peep, not even a murmur of discontent, rather, an approving and docile smile of passive submission.’ AQ

Mandira Pattnaik – Bustle

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Mandira Pattnaik
Bustle

Days before my eighteenth birthday, I met her at the ramshackle hole-in-the-wall shop in old Kolkata. The place was merely a rendezvous point sandwiched between the cinema hall that screened cheap song-and-dance capers and the grocery where Mum maintained a running account. Ivanna she called herself. But I strongly doubted her. Auburn hair, crimson headband—she was a foreigner, and foreigners in these parts meant only one thing.
      ‘Ivanna from Greece. Want some?’
      I stuffed her palm with cash I’d stolen from Mum’s purse. She pinched my cheeks as she’d a toddler and fished out some grayish-silver tablets from her batik-printed bag, careful not to be too conspicuous.
      Cash was supplanted with tablets.
      I went home to the drone. Most times it was a cacophony; only sometimes got denuded to a static. Those were the rare minutes I could count my life without having to deal with my head.
      I had lived with that soup bubbling inside the orb balanced over my neck for quite some time, but found it boiling over on Friday last, when thousands of us, students in our jeans and tees, spilled onto the streets, without flags or banners, the air thick with cries of, ‘Enough is Enough’. We had taken the abuse and injustices for far too long. Something had snapped somewhere.
      Our peaceful marches rattled the citadels; we stood defiant against sturdy walls of power. We were crushed, we fell, were born again like amoeba, ready to face more water cannons and rubber pellets.
      I began to return home to more voices; more drums beating, directing me. Now there was no stopping. I was slipping more and more into my own dark canyon.
      Someone suggested the tablets. They eased me into sleep for a few nights. Later on, I dreamt of grey skies that were surrendering to the rumblings within and slashing themselves with a silver blade, pouring out torrents. I dreamt I lived in a saucer which clouds filled several larder-full, me devouring it one moment, filling my canvas with idyllic peasant homes, rustic women working in verdant paddy-fields, and the next instant I was drowning. How I cried for help in the quiet of my room!
      The second time Ivanna invited me to her rented place on Sudder Street where tenements were stacked precariously like they were forced upon one another to prove some formulae on gravity or equilibrium, and held together by the roots of wild creepers growing in their crevices. Miscellaneous flags, festoons, cable wires hung over them, but they stood in stoic silence unmindful of the intervention of time.
      Just at the bend, she had come to receive me for I didn’t know the way. The skies had opened their wounds again, this time for real, and we were caught in the sudden shower.
      We stood without words under the awning of a shop, evaluating each other. She was older by at least a decade; I showed off the thin hairline on my upper lip, brushing it with the tip of my index.
      When the clouds were done, spent on an unrepentant afternoon, she led me into her tiny apartment; into what had drawn her to this city; into the details of a mundane job as a store clerk back home that had allowed her to buy this trip.
      To return the frankness, I told her about my family, my landscapes, the bustle in my head which no one seemed to hear, before I paid for what’d suffice to shut those voices for the next few days.
      I turned to see her waving at her door when I left.
      But that was it. There was no third or fourth time. She had disappeared.
      The rest of my years at Art College were spent looking for her. Not that my supplies weren’t coming, but I had lost all interest in them. My mind used to dwell on where she might be. All I wanted was—closure.
      During this time, the silver lining in my rudderless life were the colours of the rainbow stashed in my satchel that helped bind the voices within, that held me together.
      Immediately after college, I left for Europe, living for some years faintly aware that if I ever met Ivanna, I owed her gratitude. I’d easily have been pulled into a bottomless abyss where a racket would be pounding my ears, playing uninterrupted, and opium only blanketing the drone for some time.
      Instead, she chose to remain the girl in crimson headband waving to me, framed by a dark-mahogany door. AQ

Judy Upton – Urban Foxes

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Judy Upton
Urban Foxes

Life’s hard on the streets of Brighton. It’s the constant uncertainty of getting enough to eat, and finding somewhere to sleep that’s both safe and reasonably dry and warm. I worry about Esme. She’s alone, she’s pregnant and she’s a fox.
      I once heard a celebrity pet owner say the thing she loves about animals is that they don’t judge you. It’s not like that actually. At least it’s not with foxes. They’re actually judging you all of the time. Every moment you’re in range of one of their senses, they’re making tiny assessments. Like why are you offering food? Is it poisoned? Is it a trap? When those golden eyes lock on to yours they look for the slightest signs of aggression, hostility or deceit. Foxes live in a world of deceit, but then don’t we all?
      It was all so different when I first met Esme. It was early last autumn, the start of my ecology degree. I went on a freshers’ pub crawl, wearing the same beer-company sponsored t-shirt as everyone else. And like everyone else I drank too much and ended up skinny dipping at 4 a.m. I’m not a person who likes to stand out from the crowd, so I did my best to blend in.
      Esme has never felt the need to conform. She does exactly as she pleases. She doesn’t skulk or keep close to the walls and hedges. She’s bold and swaggering; sass personified. Her fur shines like burnished copper, her brush is full and ermine tipped. She’s the vixen queen and she knows it.
      I tried to make friends with the other two girls I was flat-sharing with. I probably tried too hard. I thought I was lucky to get that room. The third girl in their group had decided to take a year out from her course, so there was a vacancy. Only then she changed her mind and returned, wanting her room back. She and her flatmates wanted me gone and stupidly I hadn’t insisted on any kind of contract. It meant I had to find somewhere else to live in the middle of term when there weren’t many vacancies and the few there were, were out of my price range.
      I did find somewhere. I do have a roof over my head, even if the circumstances aren’t ideal. I suppose in that sense I’m better off than Esme. My beautiful Esme. The first time I saw her, I was walking home, slightly worse for wear, and she was a little way ahead of me. She must’ve heard my footsteps behind, as she turned and looked. Her gorgeous eyes met mine. She stood transfixed, just staring at me, as I looked back at her. And I felt something I can’t put it into words. This beautiful wild animal, with her tawny fur, sharply pricked ears and confident poise—it was love. From my side anyway.
      I saw her again the next night. This time she was dragging the remains of a KFC box under a hedge. When I peered through the branches, I discovered a big, overgrown garden, a sort of mini wilderness. The house was a large detached one and it looked like it hadn’t been lived in for some time.
      I can tell Esme by sight from any other fox. But I also know nearly all the foxes in this neighbourhood by sight now. They’re all subtly different—in colouring, face shape, and one has a nicked ear and another has a long scar on its chest. With Esme, the black smudges at the side of her nose reach almost up to her eyes, as if she is wearing mascara that has run in the rain.
      I often spend hours crouched in the street, or in a shop doorway watching Esme. Some nights I stay out until dawn. It’s awkward now there’s the lockdown, but I’m as stealthy as a fox. I clamber through the hedge into the wild garden and there’s no one to notice me. That way I don’t see Tim, he’s the owner of the flat I’m staying in. He works at a DIY store and they’re open again now, thankfully.
      When I first met Esme she would sometimes stand or sit with her head pointing at the sky, and screech. At first I thought something was wrong, that she might be in pain or some kind of anguish, but it’s actually a mating call. Fox sex is brutal – the male bites the back of the female’s neck and his penis is barbed and sticks inside her. She screams at every painful thrust. I’ve seen many foxes mating, though not Esme, I don’t think I could stomach it. Not with the way things are in my life.
      Male or dog foxes tend to stay with their partner while the cubs are young, bringing them food. It’s a relationship built on raising young together. I’ve named Esme’s mate George. Sometimes she can be short tempered and nippy with him, but often, after a long night apart foraging in different locations, they greet each other excitably like dogs.
      My parents live in Australia and I couldn’t afford to go there at the start of lockdown. I didn’t like to ask them to send me the airfare as I know their business is struggling at the moment. Now of course it’s too late anyway until normal flights resume. I’m stuck in this situation, even if it is one of my own making. And I can’t tell anyone about it, but Esme.
      When I answered Tim’s advertisement, I knew what I was doing, and it seemed like no big deal. It meant the room was rent-free and he wasn’t repulsive or anything like that. In fact he seemed quite normal, and I suppose he is really. He said he’d only want sex a couple of times a week, and I thought that was fair enough, I could handle that. I’d had a few loveless encounters before, who hasn’t? I didn’t fancy him, but as I say he didn’t really turn me off or anything. But I hadn’t really thought about how it would make me feel. I hadn’t thought about that at all.
      Tim isn’t rough, he doesn’t rape me, but it’s meaningless, it’s mechanical. I’m just an object to satisfy him. He has a girlfriend who’s teaching in India at the moment, and our arrangement is, he says, just a convenient way of getting what he needs in the meantime, without it being a relationship. But living like this is killing me. It’s creeping into my soul and eating it away day by day. It’s not I feel ashamed, used, dirty or worthless. It’s more that I feel as if I am no longer whole.
      Now though I’m turning into a shadow. I’m learning invisibility. I’ve managed to avoid Tim seeing me at all for two weeks. I’ve been staying out all night with my fox. Perhaps I’m gaining some of Esme’s spirit. I’m becoming a wild creature. I trust no one. I show no one my vulnerabilities. If any human comes near I shrink back, muscles tightening, ready to fight or flee. Like Esme when under threat, my hackles rise. I bare my teeth.

****

Esme has had her cubs! There are four of them. Her den is under the decking in the overgrown garden. I think it must’ve been their first time popping up above ground. They’ve big blue eyes at this age and they’re into everything. One chased a grasshopper, another tried and failed to eat a worm; the living spaghetti curling around her muzzle.
      Tim is having an illegal party tonight. He’s invited friends around despite the risk of Covid 19. He wants to introduce me to some of them. Actually what he wants to do is share me with them. He’s even offered me money. I said ‘yeah alright’ in a little meek voice, like the cunning ghost I’ve become. I took his stinking money. I nodded and forced a smile when he told me to ‘dress up for once, not those grungy jeans.’ The fridge was full of food ready for the bash: pizzas, burgers, sausages. He’d ordered it all in earlier. While he was in his bedroom getting ready, silent as Esme, I emptied it all into two big bags. My belongings were already stashed in a suitcase in the front garden. All I needed to do was slip out of the door.
      Foxes cache their food to make it last. Esme will have enough to feed her cubs through their most vulnerable weeks. Me, I’ve been caching cash, and with the extra money Tim has given me in advance of tonight’s activities, I reckon I’ve enough to live on for a while. The first things I’ve bought are a sleeping bag, and a chisel to loosen the basement window of the empty house. I can live here. It’s far enough away from Esme to respect her family’s privacy, but near enough to keep each other company. She knows I mean her no harm. She knows I’ll provide for her whenever I can. Together, living on our wits, and what we can scrounge, I know we’ll both survive, wild and free.
AQ

Constanza Baeza Valdenegro – A young tennis player makes a decision

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Constanza Baeza Valdenegro
A young tennis player makes a decision

The usual tennis rigour became incompatible with the hours of science and history at some point in his daily activities. A strict schedule controls every single moment in a tennis player’s day, and an abyss between his passion and school was rising in front of him. His grades weren’t poor but showed the figures of someone who was making early efforts in his life. Sometimes you could see him very concentrated on a book, but two hours later his desk was empty. The tennis hours started before the school duties ended. Nights were filled with homework and obsessive analysis of tennis videos, and he was dealing with the small pieces of free time in quiet resignation.
      Some of his classmates practised sports too, but none of them had reached his level of commitment. He played football and basketball in pursuit of infantile power, feeling strong and mighty with the idea of being good at many sports, but team experience wasn’t interesting and soon he went back to the solitary moments brought by the small yellow ball. His middle-class background made him question the road he was taking, but his parents never complained, and when they were told he had talent, they knew that they had to give everything to help their son chase his dreams. His poor federation and the neglected tennis courts of his country weren’t obstacles either. He used to think that all these things made him stronger and aware of the effort one makes in tennis.
      He saw many junior players falling to the pressure of tennis life. He heard many professional players saying how much they hated tennis. He saw promising players give up and study a degree, in a radical change of plans. All those stories were a reminder of the importance of having more options beyond tennis. Not every junior player becomes professional. It took him several years to admit it. He used to think that it wouldn’t happen to him. His parents had talked about the possibility of university life if he felt overwhelmed. To hear that was very irritating for him, but over the years he accepted the idea of a backup plan if tennis was too absorbing. But there was no reason to think he would choose university. He was never really focused on the subjects he had to study in school. Only history kept him interested. He enjoyed learning about his own country and the world. But he knew he wouldn’t be a historian.
      The time to make a decision had arrived. The juvenile passion was becoming a certainty, the very first certainty in his life. After a long conversation with his parents, the idea of leaving school became a solid resolution from his young will. Every day he had to deal with the heavy routine dictated by too many activities and he could see the moment when he would have to choose the road he was looking for. It was a definitive idea: he had to leave school to focus on tennis only. The trophies and medals that decorated his room with their shiny presence were the backup for his commitment to tennis. He was ready for the next step.
      His classmates threw a small party for him. There were jokes about being the world number one and winning Grand Slams. Always aware of his effort, they were supportive and helpful. They knew they had different lives. ‘I have no time’ was the usual answer when they invited him to parties and activities. It sounded like an adult language they didn’t know yet. He became a man too soon, being taller and stronger than his classmates, and everything made them think that he would choose other things in life, not the future they were waiting for. The nationwide tournaments and the first trips abroad gave him a certain degree of maturity. He could see the world with fresh eyes, the eyes of a young soul who has to grow up too fast. The skinny legs and the pimples on his boyish face were a reminder of his youth, but there was an adult spirit inside him, waiting to show the world all the dreams, all the things he could do.
      He knew they would forget him. They would follow another path, towards the graduation party, a busy university life, soporific offices. They would have yearly reunions and would talk about marriage plans, sorrows, success, parenthood. He didn’t even know if he would ever have a friend on the court, considering how solitary a tennis player is. He was on the road to the uncertainty that sports offers. But there was no way back. He had everything and nothing. He had to try and chase his dreams.
      His compromise was to keep studying the things he wouldn’t learn in school, getting the basic knowledge required and taking exams. His school would help him through online learning. There were also tutors working for the tennis centre, with the young players catching up on all the things they were skipping. But learning had a different significance for him. He learned to hit a yellow ball and run to the net before he could even read. The serve, the score, the tennis legends, that was all he knew.
      The Monday after the party he showed up on the national tennis centre with his usual walk, fast and awkward. There was nothing else in the world to do. No school, no more breakfasts in a hurry, no homework. He was ready to enjoy that breeze of freedom, but something scared him too. A strange feeling paralysed his movements with an unknown cause. Was he scared? He didn’t know where he would go, but he was ready from the very first time he held a racket. He took a deep breath and felt the fresh air of the sunny morning. The other players were warming up. They saw him and waved enthusiastically. He smiled and walked towards them. He was prepared for what was coming. There was no way back. It was too early to feel the weight of his decision. But there was no time to think about it, because the very first thing he had to do that morning was to improve his weak serve! AQ

Irene Hoge Smith – The Good Poetic Mother

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Irene Hoge Smith
The Good Poetic Mother

Washington, D.C.

January 30, 1963

Frances Dean Smith
Somewhere in California

RE: Clarification of your intentions

Dear Mrs Smith Mama,

I am writing to ascertain your plans regarding your position here in Washington, where my three sisters and I have been posted, in our father’s establishment, since the end of last year. Your unannounced departure, which gave us no opportunity for an exit interview, has resulted in some confusion about your future availability. While your appointment remains open (no immediate prospect of a replacement being in view), it would be helpful to know when we might expect to see you again. If ever.

Sincerely,

Irene (Daughter #2)
 
 
 
 
 
Washington, D.C.

March 1, 1963

Frances Dean Smith c/o Ida Mae Dean
Garden Grove, CA

RE: Proposed Disability Accommodations

Dear Mrs Smith Mama,

While awaiting your reply to my previous letter, I have been giving some thought to the question of whether or not your assignment here has ever been one you were in fact wholly able to fulfil. While your abilities and commitment regarding the practice of poetry are exceptional, those having to do with household management and the care of children are, it must be acknowledged, less developed. At the same time, it is obviously unfair that you should be subject to job discrimination on the basis of those specific disabilities. I propose, therefore, that we consider the possibility of reasonable workplace accommodations that might make it possible for you to resume your career here. It seems probable that such adjustments might be made without posing any (further) undue hardship on the rest of the staff.

As you may recall, I am fourteen and Daughter #1 is sixteen—we can of course continue to take care of ourselves. We are currently providing most if not all of what the little girls (eight and five) need. Furthermore, although our father remains for the most part an off-site manager, he has retained a part-time housekeeper, which might obviate the need for you to perform any organizing or cleaning duties. (And, of course, a one-bedroom apartment is much easier to look after than the four-bedroom house we left behind in Ann Arbor.)

Please consider this proposal, and let me know if you think we might come to an arrangement that would facilitate your return.

Sincerely,

Irene (Daughter #2)

P.S. I note that you have a new situation, on what I assume is a temporary basis, in your own mother’s establishment. While I must confess some doubt as to whether this association will prove a better fit than it has been in the past, I do send my best regards to Grandma Dean.
 
 
 
 
 
Washington, D.C.

May 25, 1963

Frances Dean Smith
Los Angeles, CA

RE: Retraction of accommodations offer

Dear Mrs Smith,

It has now been almost five months since your departure and the removal of myself and my three sisters from our former home in Ann Arbor to our father’s D.C. apartment. As perhaps you have been informed, Daughter #1 has, like you, left her position here without notice. Although she is not quite seventeen, she did not provide a forwarding address and is not expected to return. Thus, our establishment consists at this point of the little ones (Daughters #3 and #4), myself, and our father. Since he sleeps at his girlfriend’s place when he is not away on business, there is adequate room for our limited operations.

However, in light of the departure of Daughter #1, the accommodations mentioned in my previous letter are no longer feasible. I myself have taken over the functions of both your job and hers; the little ones are more self-sufficient every day and have stopped asking about you.

Thank you for sending copies of your poems and the one by your friend Mr Bukowski. Your Los Angeles life sounds very interesting, and I recognize, of course, that two poets really cannot be expected to take on parenting obligations while devoting their lives to Art.

Yrs,

Daughter #2 Irene
 
 
 
 
 
Washington, D.C.

November 15, 1963

Jon Webb, Editor, LOUJON Press
New Orleans, La.

RE: Book review and marketing plan

Dear Mr Webb,

Thank you very much for forwarding the signed copy of Charles Bukowski’s recent book, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, which you tell me in your cover letter is ‘already a collector’s item’ which I should ‘take good care of.’ I note your offer that that if anyone I know would like a copy ‘they may have 30% off.’

Regarding the personalized inscription, ‘To Irene Smith: Of the Good Poetic Mother’, can you tell me if the Great Poet’s handwritten note makes the book more valuable, or less? Just asking.

As it happens, Mr Bukowski and I have never met, and, for that matter, I have not seen the Good Poetic Mother in almost a year. I have read some of these poems, looking (of course) for some mention of my actual mother, but after seeing what the poet has to say about other women, have set the book aside, at least for now. I am sure this collection is much admired by those who know more than I about these things, but at fifteen I am afraid I lack sufficient literary discrimination to assess its merits. Further, as one left behind in favour of a Life in Letters, I cannot claim the necessary impartiality to respond to the work fully or fairly.

I am afraid that I will be unable to assist in marketing this collection, notwithstanding the generous discount you offer.

Regretfully,

Irene Hoge Smith (Not-Poetic Daughter)

Cc: Frances Dean Smith (Good Poetic Mother)
 
 
 
 
 
Washington, D.C.

December 10, 1964

Frances Dean Smith Bukowski
Los Angeles, CA

RE: Revised Expectations

Dear Mrs Bukowski,

I note that the poems you sent me recently are signed ‘f.d.b.’ and, since you and the Great Poet now have a daughter together, I assume this is the name you use now, despite not actually being married. (I do understand that poets don’t follow the same rules as other people.)

It seems that the assumptions I expressed in my earlier letters about your reasons for leaving your former post were incorrect. I had believed that being a poet was incompatible with being a mother, but the information now at hand would seem to disprove that hypothesis.

While I am somewhat confused, I do hope everything works out well for all of you.

Goodbye and good luck,

Irene Hoge Smith
 
 
 
 
 
Washington, DC

December 15, 1969

Frances Dean Smith c/o Ida Mae Dean
Garden Grove, CA

RE: Your offer

Dear Mrs Smith,

I have received your letter of November 15, but am not sure that you read my letters to you on February 4 and September 19 of this year, bringing you up to date on my life here. I had assumed that, despite having resigned from your post as Mother of Four several years ago, you would nonetheless be pleased to know that I am supporting myself, going to college at night, and am engaged to be married. I must conclude from your silence on these points that they are not matters of interest to you.

I am afraid that I do not find it feasible to abandon my responsibilities here in order to accept the assignment you offer in California, despite the intriguing description of the ‘borrowed trailer not far from the beach’, which you and my little half-sister expect to occupy soon.

I was sorry to hear that you and Mr Bukowski are no longer together. I note that your current address is once again care of your mother, and assume that your plan to move in with Daughter #1 and her two small children did not work out, either. Like her, I must decline your offer of the position of Resident Adult-in-Charge.

Sincerely,

Irene Hoge Smith
 
 
 
 
 
Washington, DC

July 30, 1996

Frances Dean Smith a.k.a. FrancEyE
Los Angeles, CA

RE: Book review and author profile

Dear Mama/FrancEyE,

Thank you for sending a copy of your collection, Snaggletooth in Ocean Park. I enjoyed our phone conversation the other day and have been thinking since about the fact that you have been a poet for your entire life (except, as you mentioned, ‘that long dry spell when I was married to your father’). I realize that it has been unfair of me to judge you based only on the rather few years when you were trying to be my mother. With two children of my own, and having outgrown the need for a mother myself, I can recognize your significant accomplishments outside the narrow sphere of motherhood and I am even coming to appreciate your poems.

Your new writing name, which you explain alludes to the writer’s “eye,” is most intriguing. I recall various names you’ve used over the years, starting with Frances Dean Smith. What seem to be the first works you published after leaving the East Coast are written under the name ‘S. S. Veri.’ It took me quite a while to discover (or remember?) that the name refers to a Latin motto Simplex Sigilum Veri, meaning ‘simplicity is the seal of truth,’ and now that I think about it, I’ve always liked that pen name best. Some poems you sent me during the years when you and The Great Poet lived together were signed ‘f.d.b.’ (which I understood indicated Frances Dean Bukowski, along with, perhaps, some ambivalence about using a man’s name once again.) ‘FrancEyE,’ finally, is yours alone. Is it pronounced Fran’s Eye, or France-Eye? And is that what you wish to be called, going forward?

Sincerely,

Irene
 
 
 
 
 
Washington, D.C.

January 8, 2004

FrancEyE
Los Angeles, CA

RE: Congratulations, appreciation, offer of feedback

Dear FrancEyE,

I am writing to congratulate you on the publication of your latest collection of poetry, Amber Spider, and to thank you for sending me a signed copy. I am excited to hear of your plans for a memoir, and flattered to be asked to read a draft. I will be especially happy to offer my perspective on the sections of your book that have to do with the fourteen years during which you and I were together.

I look forward to receiving your manuscript.

Warm regards,

Irene
 
 
 
 
 
Washington, D.C.

August 31, 2005

FrancEyE
Los Angeles, CA

RE: Review of Grandma Stories

Dear FrancEyE,

Thank you for sharing the galleys of your soon-to-be-released memoir, Grandma Stories. I find much to appreciate in this lovely collection of prose poems, recounting your life from infancy up to the point when you reinvented yourself in Los Angeles in 1963, met the Great Poet, and had his child. I note that the book is dedicated to “Grandson #4,” and although you have ten other grandchildren (my children being Grandson #2 and Granddaughter #7), I have grown very fond of my half-sister and her sweet son, and am perfectly okay with that choice.

However, I also note that nowhere in the memoir do you make any reference to the decade and a half during which you were married to my father and were my mother. I am not in your book, and am forced to say that I am not really okay with that.

I regret that I will not be able to attend the book launch party. The trip to Los Angeles is more than I can undertake at this time (three thousand miles, as I’m sure you recognize, is the least of the difficulty). In that light I feel that I must request to be released from my commitments as your beta reader.

Best regards,

Daughter #2 (formerly The Loyal One)
 
 
 
 
 
Washington, D.C.

November 23, 2007

FrancEyE, c/o Daughter #5
Albany CA

RE: Interview Request

Dear FrancEyE,

I am sorry to hear that your health is not good, but pleased that you are able to stay for a while with Daughter #5. I look forward to seeing you next month, when daughter #3 and I will be in California for our half-sister’s wedding. I hope that we might find a time to talk with you while visiting California. We still have lots of questions about our earlier life, and about you, and hope that you will feel up to an interview.

I would like to apologize for my earlier misunderstanding about the gaps in your memoir. Having had some experiences of my own about which I cannot bear to write, I comprehend your situation more clearly.

Warm regards,

Irene
 
 
 
 
 
Washington, D.C.

May 31, 2009

FrancEyE
Northgate Care Center, San Rafael, CA

Dear Mama,

It was good to be able to visit with you last month, and to provide some assistance to Daughter #5 as she manages your current placement. She is taking very good care of you, and I was relieved to find your current circumstances relatively comfortable. It was a delight to receive a copy of your latest collection of poetry, Call. Having (against all odds) taken up writing myself, I am in awe of the body of work you have accumulated during a lifetime dedicated to this arduous calling. You have much to be proud of.

I cannot thank you enough for agreeing to the interview a little over a year ago, and for providing so much useful data about our shared history. While you were not able to incorporate that material in your own memoir, I believe I may now be able to take that project forward myself.

love,

Irene

P.S. I just noticed that you are living in San Rafael, in fact not far from the little hospital where you were born eighty-seven years ago. Perhaps there is a poem in that.
 
 

* * *

 
 

LOS ANGELES TIMES OBITUARIES

FrancEyE dies at 87; prolific Santa Monica poet

BY CLAIRE NOLAND JUN 21, 2009

Frances Dean Smith, a Santa Monica poet known as FrancEyE who was inspired by Charles Bukowski, lived with him and had a child with him in the 1960s, has died. She was 87.
      Smith, who had been living in a nursing home in San Rafael, Calif., died June 2 at Marin General Hospital in nearby Greenbrae of complications from a broken hip. . .
      A singular character affectionately called the Bearded Witch of Ocean Park—or, as Bukowski fondly referred to her in one poem, Old Snaggle-Tooth—Smith had lived in the Ocean Park neighbourhood of Santa Monica for decades. Her work under the pen name FrancEyE was published in poetry journals and gathered in the collections Snaggletooth in Ocean Park (Sacred Beverage Press, 1996), Amber Spider (Pearl, 2004), Grandma Stories (Conflux Press, 2008) and Call (Rose of Sharon Press, 2008). . . Although Smith had been writing poetry in fits and starts nearly all her life, she arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1960s determined to reinvent herself, leaving behind the man she had divorced and the four daughters they had produced during an unhappy marriage. . .
      Frances Elizabeth Dean was born March 19, 1922, in San Rafael. Her father died when she was a child, and his family took his widow and two daughters into their home in Lexington, Mass. She became interested in poetry and as a teenager had poems published in Scholastic magazine and the influential Saturday Review of Literature. She attended Smith College for two years but left at the onset of World War II to join the Women’s Army Corps, based in the Washington, D.C., area. . .
      A celebration of her life will be held at 1 p.m. today at the Church in Ocean Park, 235 Hill St., Santa Monica. Instead of flowers, her family suggests donations to the Church in Ocean Park or a charity.       AQ

Stephen Boyce – Gracing the Stage

/in

Stephen Boyce
Gracing the Stage

Twenty years later, coming to Oxford on the off-chance
     of catching Brief Lives at the Playhouse,
I found you’d dressed John Aubrey in a long coat
     of moss-green velour,
its folds as smooth as Yorkshire’s dales.

Heel-length behind and rising to the calf,
the coat was frog-fastened, fur-edged.
I thought of that brown pelt that lay across your bed
     in the days of our loving,
the soft nap of your thigh beneath my palm.

The curtain fell. I shrugged on my raincoat in the foyer,
     slipped out,
wanting to feel the cobbles beneath my feet.
This brief life, I thought, needs no awkward reconciliation.
Let settled lives play out on separate stages.

Keith Brighouse – a modern Bourbon

/in

Keith Brighouse
a modern Bourbon

I stroll through any shopping mall
lose myself in the confusion of the herd
merge into a coffee blend of imagination and aspiration
this sometimes leads me into a romantic liaison
a lover who never lived or breathed but simply stared
a manufactured stare, of aloof indifference
chilled chic with fawning admirers, this is me
in control of my own whoredom

I am a modern Bourbon, strutting my stuff
up and down consumerism’s Hall of Mirrors
I preen and pout and strut through the palace
from the reflection with which I converse
a reflection within a world of reflections
there is nothing solid to hold fast to, no centre
just myself, shell empty, soulless, beyond reach
no heart, no wounds, no history, touch without feeling

such love is like a day, it simply slips away
the madness and the dream, the cocaine mall experience
you’re up, you’re down but you want something
in between, but in between is nothing much
the daily drudge and hand signals from the clock
breakfast, work, dinner, TV, make love
if love can survive the competition but mostly it’s
‘No thanks. Thank you very much!’

each morning the mirror refuses to lie
but neither does it tell the truth, it simply echoes
the mannequin that is me, I present before it
so while I seize the day, amidst the sparing vanities
practiced in artifice, confident in my own insincerity
in more lucid moments I ask, where is the ‘I’ in all this
the individual ‘I’, the independent thinking ‘I’
the real ‘I’ that would be better off reading books

trapped in a labyrinth of crystal alleys
my reflection no longer depends upon mirrors
like a hologram, I occupy space with light
an invisible hand which rearranges my thoughts and desires
freed this other me beyond my control
I talk to myself but I could be someone else
but what does it matter in this relative world
I choose my own facts and create my own fiction

Peter Neil Carroll – The Volunteer

/in

Peter Neil Carroll
The Volunteer

April dawn: a man foreign to the land
jumps out the window of a Normandy farm house.
German soldiers spray him with gunfire—
a bullet lodges in his head.

The breathing body carried away
returns next day as a corpse.
The mortuary reports: five foot eight, 30 years,
brown hair and eyes, origin unknown.

He acquires these details, my orphaned cousin,
late in life, adds them to a small cache
of photos, letters, a presidential citation
and the bruise beneath his ribs
begins again to sob.

What emptiness is, is still so.

Never enough, the obvious motive
that puts aside the fear and parachutes
through the night to drop disguised
into a field of shadowed peas.

He’d found the appointed haven,
fallen asleep in blue silk pyjamas,
so says the once secret file from France—
then a cry at the door.

He throws on a brown shirt and trousers—
and leaps. Better a bullet
than a night of rack and screw.

My cousin understands the weight
of that distant war, but wishes
he didn’t, even as he admires
his father’s lucid choice.

Jennifer L. Freed – Eight Months After My Mother’s Stroke…

/in

Jennifer L. Freed
Eight Months After My Mother’s Stroke, My Parents Decide To Leave Assisted Living

1.
She wants capers, cumin, garlic. Fresh basil
in the salad. Feta cheese.
She wants olives with the pits. The whole
chicken—skin and bone and dark.
She wants the carcass
for soup. She’ll risk
a few spills.
She needs
to try, to know what will happen
if she tries.

2.
He speaks of escaping
the bingo, the sing-alongs,
the bland faces, bland chatter.
He thinks he can see well enough
to do what she used to,
as long as she tells him
what to do. He thinks
he can hear well enough to hear her
instructions. He doesn’t think
of what a woman holding her walker
can’t lift or carry or clean.
He doesn’t know
how much time he would have to give
to rinsing salad greens, bringing plates to the table.
He doesn’t know how often
she’d want to wash the sheets,
or how long it would take him
to help put them back on the bed,
or how little of the day he’d have left
after emptying the dishwasher
and sweeping the floor, and keeping watch
outside her bathroom door. I know
it is hope
that carries him away.
Eight months in this place.
He feels buried alive
in this place full of waiting
to die.