In love with the idea of love,
the girl with the papier mâchè heart
says sometimes I see only what I want
then adds another chipped plate
to her collection of broken things.

She dreams the vagina dentata
beneath the arrows of the night sky,
imagines cutting off a breast before shaking
out ashes, dry leaves.  It’s in here, she says,
holding up a locked box.

She will tell you anything,
give over her assemblage of facts:
the moon is an embryo playing guitar
and all the stars have teeth.  She doesn’t
know it’s after midnight — you are trying

to sleep. This rain-bellied girl takes your pillow.
Where is that freshwater pearl? she whispers,
igniting her spleen. Tired of extraordinary things,
she will ask to hold your eyes.  She will open
her hands and swallow them whole.

The wooden corner of her room holds a closet
where she keeps all manner of quiet things.
It smells of shoe polish and sandalwood. It casts
the echo of an antique mirror.  I know how to take
down my kill, she will tell you, begging to be prey,

holding her breath until she’s covered you with words.

_________________________________________

Shannon Carson’s poems and stories have appeared in The Portland Review, The Suisun Valley Review, The Smoking Poet, and Caffeine Destiny. She’s published an essay in an Oregon anthology and lyrics for a Bay Area jazz musician. Originally from San Francisco, she now lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Pilot Mountain in North Carolina

Yesterday we explored regionalism in language, specifically our personal region — the American South. Geographically speaking, Larry Brown’s Mississippi is far different from our genteel South Carolina and even our second home, the backwoods mountains of North Carolina. Inspired by yesterday’s post, we’re starting today’s flurry with an article on the current state of another language, Yiddish. Next, we remember an oft-forgotten German author, Heinrich von Kleist, and then check out some Soviet-era art. James Wood reviews The Privileges and Union Atlantic, books that explore ethics and money, and The Millions trumpets its new cause: Dave Eggers as Editor of the Paris Review. How’s that for regionalism? – Andrew Geer

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Jack Gilbert Is Old And Good

Searching For Pittsburgh

by Jack Gilbert

The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,
between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart
and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it.
Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.
Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh
in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers. The authority of them.
The gritty alleys where we played every evening were
stained pink by the inferno always surging in the sky,
as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning the Earth.
Locomotives driving through the cold rain,
lordly and bestial in their strength. Massive water
flowing morning and night throughout a city
girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered,
sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.
All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.
A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit.
Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling
of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.
Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged
by the heart. Making together a consequence of America.
The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again.
In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands
with their fields of stone. In beds with women, sometimes,
amid their gentleness. Now the fox will live in our ruined
house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound
of water. In this happy place my serious heart has made.

Regionalism's Finest

Today’s letters lack regional flavor. We live in an era of creative writing exercise. The vast majority of which turns out new works driven by conceit rather than experience. Think of a movie-script situation: a tongue-in-cheek apocalypse, a generation of  men birthed through a prolonged deconstruction of a unit. Apply this situation to a couple dozen flash-fictions, and then do your damnedest to hold true to the supposition that the language of  a story trumps the story of a story. Our advice: Make sure the only telling dialect is that of the well learned. Kill many words. Kill all links to your people. Be heavy-handed in your editing. Don’t love. Don’t fuck. Don’t ever let the world grow excited. Don’t enjoy a thing, you genius.

Stop.

This is growing boring. We’re thirsty. And it’s time for blood.

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The girl that I live with is a piñata. It’s not hard to get mad at her, because she doesn’t feel. Hugging is an issue for her. When we fight, she just stares at me, standing on four cardboard legs. She’s a donkey — paper for fur and a long neck the color of a faded Mexican flag, like green and orange cat vomit — and her paper-eyes sicken me.

I like those googly eyes you get at the craft store. I’d buy her some but she’d refuse to wear them. She’d stand and stare. Her outsides, the glue-cardboard-paper-mâché-dullness, they make my stomach turn. Her insides though, they make my mouth water, make me stick around. The first time I slept with her I slit a hole in her head. I forced a long knife through a spot behind her ear. But she didn’t even notice. Now, when she’s sleeping, I slip my hand inside her and pluck chocolates form her guts.

____________________________________________

C.J. Krakeel wears tight pants, rides bikes, plays poker and writes when he damn well pleases. He once stole the welcome mat from a strip club and he doesn’t hold hands while he’s walking because it ruins his swag.