You can write about God in at least two ways, through his absence and through his presence. I’m sure there are other ways, too. Slowly the gate rises. He died a few days ago. They shot him in the chest. His camera was still running when it happened. The young people were all twirling about in their red and their black, throwing stones and bricks. And the man playing the music got angry. He was walking along the rooftop of the 5^th Street Squat. Tall with long hair. He was trying to get back inside to get his equipment. He was walking along the rooftop when the firemen saw him. And the police saw him. He just wanted to save his equipment. And he did. God was patient. He waited until Oaxaca. Then he got him.

It Happened 

Suddenly, after twenty-five years of sitting inside and listening to the radio, only occasionally taking the bus somewhere, only occasionally going down the creaking staircase with a paper bag full of empty soup cans for the recycling bin. Not even time to clean the shelves. It was an ancient craftsman, dimly lit. Inside, the smell of bedclothes and stillness. A black rotary phone sat in a niche in the hall. Lots of dark wood and stained glass. A room with matching twin beds. A pantry with pale blue walls and a washing machine. Geometric deco linoleum on the floor in one of the closets. Vintage linens folded neatly in piles. A bathroom painted an unfriendly shade of pink. A book collection. German. A window overlooking Stanyon. A carpet leading down a long hallway. A piano with broken keys. More dark wood, more books, more German, self-taught. A bath tub with claws. Wallpaper with bare trees against a pale beige background. A dining room at the very back. Original dark wood. An oval mirror with smoky glass. More ancient linens stacked in closets. A Wedgwood stove (not for sale), canned food still in the cabinets (mostly soup). An ironing board hanging out of the wall. Another room, another bed, with a walker next to it. This one neatly made, a ladies bed. Two pen-and-ink sketches of cable cars. Open drawers. A shelf with more books (Goethe, Holderlin). Another bathroom. Another tub with massive claws. Stained glass tulips. A blackberry bush growing over the back fence. Another gilded mirror with fuzzy glass. A table set up by the front door. A cash drawer on top. A woman sitting behind it, smiling. It happened. Suddenly. Not even time to clean the shelves. Not even time to bring down the soup cans.

Seafaring Woman

She came in, lanky, smelling of tobacco and salt. She was half drunk and it was before noon. She had been out at sea and things were rocky. But she didn’t lift up her face. Which was a good thing, since black ships were moving in at a clip. It was windy and stormy. The sea was hiding the large one with the long tentacles. Eight, ten, twenty-five feet long. This large one. This thing from underneath. It was a blonde. Not naturally so. And not white either, but pale and moving, disturbingly deep and cold, it had teeth, and indiscernible friends, lots of wreckage. Large eyes, in bone skulls, against that sky, that wretched blue gray sky. Turbulent. It was difficult to watch. The ship moving along. Not nice, this large one. Underneath, this large one. Inappropriate. Descending. And the seafaring voyager just returning from her journey. This woman. This lanky, smelly, half- drunk broad.

Mira Martin-Parker is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared in Diverse Voices Quarterly, Istanbul Literary Review, Literary Bohemian, The Minetta Review, The Monarch Review, Mythium, Ragazine, Tattoo Highway, Yellow Medicine Review, and Zyzzyva.

The answer is yes.

The novel moves in the  jerky movements of Sands’s shorter prose yet bewilderingly maintains a linear structure throughout. Characters’ homes explode or fly into a McDonald’s franchise competing in a city-wide demolition derby and most of them make it out alive. A man falls out of a 300 story building and survives by having his fall broken by a pile of pigeon leavings. A boy detective is sawed in half by his divorcing parents only to become an even better detective. An overweight ninja has few combat skills other than his “silent but extremely deadly” flatulence. In between all of these outlandish plot progressions the boy detective repeatedly breaks the fourth wall in conversations with Bradley Sands hoping to detect the theme of his novel while insisting this is actually a collection of novellas; the latter vehemently disagrees. Miraculously I was able to read the book in one very comfortable sitting and was actually convinced I had read something that makes sense.

In the midst of all this are not so subtle critiques made about life in general. Think Stephen Colbert style satire meets Jim Carey pre-Eternal Sunshine. In the novel’s middle and longest novella a demolition derby takes place among the fast food franchises, a rogue office tower and  an apartment building for control of the fast food world. In its “reign of terror over the digestive systems of the American people” one franchise creates an aptly named “Donner Burger” out of its competitor’s customers and eventually its own. I am sure this says something about one of the things that happens thesedays. A homophobic, evil ninja is tasked with bringing about the end of the world by inducing the second coming of Jesus. If you are thinking something that you should be paddled by a nun for you are on the right track. In searching for clues to his parents’ pending divorce our boy detective comes home to find his mother “sitting” on her new “chair” named Bill and is told by both parents, contrarty to  popular platitudes, that yes it is his fault they no longer love each other.

It may just be my wishful thinking that these things are absurdist forays into social commentary rather than just 200 pages of R-rated Wily Coyote-esque exploits but both are fine by me. In searching for a way to summarize Sands’s approach to this book I think the author of Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You says it best in his blurb for Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face:

“This is a book for anyone who has ever hated someone. This is a book for anyone who has ever wanted to break into someone’s house while they are sleeping, wrap a book around your fist and punch that asshole in the throat until they’re dead. This is that kind of book.”

Yes, Sands quoted himself for the jacket lining of his book. He makes a good point though, no one writes like Bradley Sands. He deftly writes in the mental disposition of his three protagonists: a disillusioned adolescent; a disillusioned, virgin office employee and a disillusioned incompetent; overweight, sex-crazed, homophobic ninja. Of the first he almost fools you into believing for a moment that his trauma is real and deeply felt:

“Frankie does not remember being a boy detective. He does not remember working on The Case of the Missing Heart. He does not remember his house blowing up. All he remembers is finding out his mommy has been in an accident and getting out of school early because of it. Yay! Getting out of school early makes Frankie happy.”

Meet the author

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Visit the reviewer at unronic.blogpsot.com

Forecast for the New Night Tides

	I’m remembering the many paper plates I’ve held on my lap
at family picnics and barbeques.  My mother kept a stack the size
of a doric column smuggled from Greece in her cupboard,
	doling them out like forewarnings
		to people like me who couldn’t be trusted with glasswares.  

  	Neither waste nor want; I forgive those who pulped the trees,
just as I forgive those who pollute fresh water with dish soap, forgiveness
	being the only choice in a world where everything relentlessly matters.  

Just let me have my plates.

					What about the children
	who need paper plates so they can make masks, paint cheeks
	and chins, glue yarn hair, rubberbands worn tight around their ears?
It’s important to have a face that isn’t your own,
				at least once in a while—in fourth grade
						when Mrs. Wilcox screamed at us
for using too much glitter and glue, I hid behind my cheetah’s snarl and felt
its teeth over my mouth even after she ripped the plate away and slapped my cheek.

		You’d think I’d hate paper plates after something like that,
									but I don’t.

		I keep looking for chances to love them even more
and the world obliges—
				just the other day my children brought home plates
		cut into the crescent phases of the moon.  They left one whole
and now it hangs above me, so full
	the seas pull up their skirts so the waves can dance.

Uncle

	Glenn, how could I have forgotten you,
the only sober soul in all of drunken upstate New York?
	Thank god for this picture of you sitting by the grill,
your shirt unbuttoned
	(as if I wore them I remember those shirts),
						white belly
				like some great boulder
			bleached by the waves of Gennesse-soaked
			laughter my aunts and uncles washed you with.
		Your wife called you a tea-totaler, Mr. Goody
							Two Shoes

		and your expression in the photo feels like my face, too,
			this wanting to belong, longing to withstand,
	but I only have my ordinary sadness

while you had your state trooper days, and that story,
		I had to pull her out of the ditch, the mother
		was there, screaming and
		crying, and the child so small, pinned	

	and the backyard went silent except for Lynyrd Skynyrd,
			Gimme Two Steps,
	until my mother said, “Way to bring us all down,
					Glenda, Good Witch of the North.”
		You old lady, they said.  Time for bed, they said,

and you just took it.
	Some things go away forever then suddenly come back.
I don’t know if you’re alive or dead, Uncle
Glenn, there is no fairness in the world.

Barack Obama

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Pay no attention to the man in front of the curtain. Pay no attention to the curtain, the gold tassle edges sweeping dust from the stage. Pay no attention to the theater, abandoned seats like red velvet patrons, the house lights gone dim.
	Pay no attention to the girl and her companions: the beast, the machine, the empty inside. Pay no attention to the witch’s curled toes, curled feet. Pay no attention to the sky; it’s only a backdrop. Pay no attention to the city’s two dimensions.
	Pay no yellow, no brick, no road.
	Pay some attention to the monkeys. Pay some attention to the little voices. Pay some attention to the girl after all, lonely, longing for home.
	Pay attention to the parts in black and white. Everyone is someone else.
	A tension as the curtain rises: a stage set. An office, oval. On the wall, a peace prize is framed. The frame is crooked. Pay no attention; it’s only paper, only words. Pay no attention to the promises. Somewhere over.
	Is the girl clicking her heels or having a seizure?
	Pay attention.
	The dog whirls into a small black funnel of fur and fang. Pay attention.
	Blue birds
		fall in a flock. Confetti from the celebration of a moment
		we almost believed.
	We’re off
		to see the rainbow, the rainbow,
	and still, there’s no place.

You can contact Eric Anderson through Facebook.

“After xTx’s He Is Talking To The Fat Lady and Frank Hinton’s I Don’t Respect Female Expression sold out in less than 48 hours, eager readers have begged for a repress.

But Atlanta-based Safety Third Enterprises only does one run of each release… until now.

To celebrate the second and final print of the two chapbooks, Vouched Books  and Safety Third Enterprises are inviting you to submit your own Single Sentence Reviews of Frank Hinton or xTx’s work (the author’s work overall, not just the chapbooks) to contest (at) VouchedBooks.com. We just ask that with your Single Sentence Review you include your name and specify which of the author’s work you are encapsulating.”

To learn more, and to see the awesome prizes up for grabs, visit HERE right now. HERE HERE HERE!

…Happy New Year.

Omicron Ceti III
Thomas P. Balázs. Aqueous Books, $14 trade paper (260p) ISBN 978-0-9847399-0-5

Don’t let the sci-fi tinged title fool you, the rich stories in Balázs’ debut collection are earthbound and invariably human. Billed as a triptych, the book is carved into three sections of three thus giving us nine stories in all. It opens slowly with Niddah—a tale of a schoolgirl who must face family, classmates, and herself as she deals with her changing, menstruating body—but quickly builds with My Secret War and the title story Omicron Ceti III, the latter of which is a Star Trek reference. In the opening story, Balázs boldly writes from the perspective of the young woman, and while his rendering comes across as honest, the story as a whole, absent of a strong arc, falls flat. Things pick up in My Secret War as a homosexual student spies his English teacher outside a gay bar and then decides to press the issue, setting off a wonderful, uncomfortable game of cat and mouse. The title story is the true gem of the first third as a mentally disturbed man searches for love and reasons to live while wrestling with his troubled past. The momentum carries, and the stories of the second third build steadily and powerfully. In The Music Man, Balázs creates an outstanding character in Dinah, a desperate, selfish, depressed woman who hounds a kindhearted grad student. However, the wordscapes Balázs so deftly paints in the following The Sea of Faith and April Paris fade away too abruptly as he mashes the accelerator to reach tidy, though too speedy endings. The stories here feel more like the seeds of novels, particularly April Paris where we follow a young man as he explores the highs and lows of love, sex, and drugs in a crowded, volatile New York City loft. And then later in The Gourmand, the opening story of the final third, Balázs shows us an amazing character obsessed with the far lesser-known cuisines of varied cultures. The story is playful at times, and at other times fearless and shocking, but in the final moments it loses its legs as the curtain drops and we’re rushed from the theater. Teeming with deep, layered characters who flirt with the fringe but who exist among us, whether hidden or in plain view, these stories are at their very best when taking hard, unexpected turns, something for which Balázs has a fine, cutting instinct. (January 2012)

For more information, visit Aqueous Books HERE.

I might as well start calling this website Outsider Pablo Collective, because he’s had more screen space on this site than anyone else. But, that’s what happens when you constantly come up with amazing ideas.

This latest, a contest, in which Pablo has put up over $200 of his own money (which I assume is some sort of emergency cash loan, Pablo), places the man firmly in the love-him-or-hate-him realm of writers. I, personally, love him. I sure as hell wouldn’t take him up on this bet.

Here’s some details, pulled from the contest’s dedicated site, Out of Bullets, Throw the Gun:

• 12-20 Crime/Noir authors will contribute Crime/Noir flash fiction pieces of their choosing to compile one collection.
• Pablo D’Stair will, in one consecutive 8 hour period, write a collection of approximate length (an equal number of stories, the lengths of which are up to D’Stair). This collection will be fully executed, from conception to finished product inside these 8hrs.
• Readers will decide (1) which collection they prefer and (2) from that preferred collection will pick their three favorite pieces, numbering these in order of quality (#1 is best, #2 is second best, #3 is third best)

Wow. For all the details, visit the Out of Bullets, Throw the Gun site.

I was told to expect an old man. That was all the information I had. I asked to know more but the program director told me there were reasons that I was being kept in the dark.

“I don’t want to sound cryptic, but this is a sort of- need to know basis… type thing.”

His oldness would have to be enough information for now.

Through some local AA program, a project emerged about eight months ago. The goal was to find affordable housing for recovering addicts, creating a situation where the roommates who are each going through the same problems can help each other stay sober and out of trouble. Sober Buddies, it was called. Apparently my buddy is an old man.

In what is now my bedroom, I pour some vodka into a smoothie cup, mixing it with the random fruit juices and take a whiff. Cannot smell the vodka. Pop the lid on the cup just to be safe. Switch off the computer screen, the brightly lit Google search results quickly fading.

Sigh. Hide the booze in a drawer under some issues of Swank and I’m back downstairs just as the door bell is ringing. His silhouette is bobbing in front of the tiny window in the front door as he puts down various bags or whatever, waiting for me to answer. Quickly glancing around the room I notice an empty Lucky can sitting on the floor by the furniture. The door bell rings again.

Snatch up the can, throw myself into the kitchen and grabbing a handful of day old garbage, I bury the beer can deep at the bottom of the trash, replacing the disgusting handful on top.

Pick up the smoothie. Take a sip. Answer the door.

The first thing I notice: He is not as old as I imagined. Mid fifties. When the chick on the phone said old, I just thought she meant Super Old. If anything, he is merely Booze Old. Or maybe Coke and Oxy Old. Hopefully he isn’t Smells Bad Old. I have a weak gag reflex and there are scarcely any windows here.

He reaches out to shake my hand but stops, noticing the coffee grinds and bits of old lettuce on my fingers.

His name is Whit.

“So the Outreach program called and set me up with this place and for the last -I dunno- couple days, I’ve been here on my own. Once a month: I gotta take a piss test, couple times a week I gotta make a call n’ check in or whatever. Easy stuff, all easy stuff. The hard part is staying clean…”

“Work the program.” Whit mumbles.

“I work it! I do the steps, I’m doin’ ‘em! Just sayin’ it’s not easy.”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“Don’t be cocky, Whit. The lady said: the whole point of this is, we gotta support each other, help keep the other guy sober. Like she said.”

They want us to look at318 Lucite Streetas our new home, a permanent one as long as we stayed clean. However, as my sobriety had ended three nights ago, I fear this home will be anything but permanent.

Whit stares at me, studying my face and then the pile of furniture. Cannot think of anything to say to him so I drain the rest of the smoothie and suppress the burp that follows. The words I don’t want to sound cryptic, but this is a sort of need-to-know basis type thing echo through my head.

“Why is the furniture all stacked up like this?”

Do not know what to say so I pathetically take a fake sip from the empty smoothie cup.

“Um, it was like that when I got here…”

He asks. “Well, which way do you want the couch to face?”

“I don’t know, doesn’t really matter…”

“Yeah I don’t much care either.”

Later: We lay out the furniture and get the TV hooked up. Whit is walking around the house, looking for a place to hang a painting. It is just a jumbled mess of colors but he insists it is a picture of a cat. I make the mistake of asking the cat’s name.

“It’s not a real cat, Thomas.”

“You can just call me Tom.”

“It’s not a real cat, Tom.”

When Deal or No Deal ends, I go up to bed.

As I hear the TV being switched off, Whit calls up the stairs behind me: “See ya. Have a, uh… sober night.”

Closing the door, I grab the smoothie cup. Fuck. The vodka bottle is nearly empty so I roll a joint, grab the parka and head outside via the window. The beer vendor is still open for another two hours. Light the joint as I pass the Mennonite church, a faint light still glowing behind the stained glass and I inhale deeply. Out in this weather, the heat of the smoke hits my lungs like it did back in the day and I start coughing. This cycle continues until the joint is finished.

At the vendor: I grab a twelve of Lucky Lager, tossing the clerk a twenty and go about stuffing the box into my shitty old backpack, a process that should by now be very familiar to the backpack.

Pocket my change. Head for the exit, where I bump into some guy, causing him to drop his cell phone. He picks it up and as I offer my apologies, he raises his head. Realize that I have just bumped into my new-old roommate.

“Hey Whit…”

If it is a flat surface, there is an empty beer can sitting on top of it. The small front window in the living room is covered by a large bed sheet, hung by Whit who stumbles back and forth trying to keep from dropping it. It had been somewhere between the vendor and the house, when we started laughing and the obligatory awkwardness disappeared. The whole point of the Sober Buddies program was to create a situation where people going through the same addiction problems could help one another stay sober. Whit and I definitely had the same problem but not after tonight. Now we could help each other stay wasted.

But still: Lingering in the back of my mind were the words the program director had said. …need to know basis…

We had opened up to each other about the lies, the drinking and drugs, all of it was now exposed and we felt better.

Not good. Better.

As long as we were opening up and being so honest with each other, I figure, a couple questions couldn’t hurt.

“So Whit, tell me about yourself.”

Light a cigarette.

The conversation idles quite a bit before the bullet finally hits the target. About six hours into it, he finally shows me.

The quality of the video is pretty bad but I am too shocked to mention it, an empty beer can getting warm in my hand, eyes glued to the screen. It was a lot to take in: the lime green sets, the dated clothing and hairstyles, how mundane and pathetic the prizes were. Despite all this, his face lights up as the video plays. This, That or The Other Thing was a shitty Canadian game show that ran for a few years in the early 90’s.

“Got the job in ’89, before that I was a local new anchor, and we finally shot the pilot in 1990, February um… anyway, it was still winter.”

The juxtaposition is almost alarming. On the videotape, he looks like a handsome young TV star, his teeth, hair, skin all perfect as he effortlessly wields the microphone. In person, all that perfection has disappeared. He sits perched off the edge of a torn white leather couch, glancing back and forth from the TV to his cat painting, a partially burnt cigar between his fingers and a can of Lucky at his lips. He grins, the booze scars more visible in the early daylight.

“The hours are longer than you could ever imagine but for a local fuck up like me, it always felt like I was making a lot of money. You can do pretty well for yourself as a game show host. A lot better than reading the fuckin’ news.”

Pull the last can of beer from the box and open it. On the tape a short haired middle aged woman cheers as a smiling Whit Franklin hands over the keys to a new car. Chucking at this, he relights his cigar and puffs on it for a few moments before finishing his beer.

Laughing. “It was a good time.”

I cannot fucking believe this.

“That’s why?”

“Why what?” he asks, belching.

“That’s why the program director wouldn’t tell me anything about you?”

“Oh Katie? Yeah, I spoke to her and she told me she’d keep it-“

“Seriously? That’s why?”

“Yes, it was just to-“

Cut him off. “So what happened? The show got cancelled?”

“What happened?” Whit echoes.

“Yeah…”

“No, the show did not get cancelled.”

“Well, then what happened, Whit?”

He chews on the cigar, taking it out to ash and then goes right back to chewing. The room is silent until I hear the sound of an empty beer can being slammed down on a wooden table and the couch groans as Whit stands up, leaving a slowly vanishing cloud of smoke in his place.

As he climbs the stairs: “What do you think happened, Thomas?”

Finishing the last beer, the guilt pangs are getting stronger and stronger inside me and as the videotape ends, the screen turns a glowing blue and the tape begins rewinding itself. Upstairs, my computer screen has the same glow. I want to tell Whit something but I cannot say it. Not at the moment. Now, once again I have a secret.

Check the time. 10:28AM.

Half an hour until the beer vendor opens.

Knock: A Van Morrison song is playing inside the room at low volume and I can hear footsteps pacing around but a minute passes before he answers the door. His cigar is burnt down to his lips. On the floor: a myriad of photos are laid out, some in color and some in black and white. Hand him a beer. He sighs and waves me into the room. Sit down against the wall. After the beers are cracked, I start talking.

“When I was a kid I would always pretend to be sick, you know, tell my mom that I didn’t feel well, so I wouldn’t have to go to school. Most times she would make me go but every now and then, she would let me stay home.”

“How unique…” Whit mumbles.

“Whatever, I didn’t like school… But the main reason I wanted to stay home? Because every morning at eleven, This, That or The Other Thing would be on and I fucking loved that show.”

He winces. “Right, of course…”

“I’m not joking…”

Closing his eyes. “I know. You insult me downstairs and now, you feel bad and all of a sudden you’re my biggest fan?”

“I couldn’t believe it when you put the tape on.”

“You’re serious?”

Take a sip.

“Remember how there were the three main prizes. There was the This prize, the That prize and The Other Thing prize, right?”

“That doesn’t mean you’re a fan! You watched the one episode I showed you and remembered one thing from it, wow!”

“No, listen! The Other Thing prize, wasn’t it always a new car?”

Whit pauses.

“No matter what, the third prize was always a new fucking car.” I repeat.

To avoid eye contact, I am looking at the photographs. Each picture shows the same woman at varying ages. Some are candid shots while others look like they were taken at the photo studios at the mall. She has bad hair but smiles in every photo, her teeth always visible.

Hear a sound: Whit rapidly exhaling in and out through his nose.

And then he starts laughing.

“Always! Every goddamn time, it was always a new car! And the fucking rube contestants would be shocked- totally shocked every time.” He said, taking a swig of Lucky. “You did watch it.”

As if that inside information was not a few mouse-clicks away.

“No kidding, I watched it. They should have called the show This, That or a New Car.”

Whit laughs again, this time spitting beer across the room, foam coming out of his nostrils as he falls onto his back giggling uncontrollably. No one takes compliments better than drunks.

Shake my head at his reaction to my lame joke -my white lie- as I notice that the photographs were hit with beer during his spit take. Amber colored liquid drips off an unknown woman’s face as an unemployed game show host rolls around on the carpet. I was totally wrong about him.

Whit Franklin is Game Show Old.

Kristin Fouquet’s

You can read his full article today at Guilty Conscience.

A piece went live over at Sunday Observer (Sri Lanka’s English Newspaper with the largest circulation, they say) called “The Program” which has a deeply cynical, nihilistic feel that a lot of people around these OWC parts might grab onto. Though, with the right spin, we could call this an optimistic piece. I suppose that’s the magic of writing about death; do it well enough and the words may actually comfort.

I wonder. Why don’t we let each other die? Really, how long has this been going on? Who was the first person to die? Imagine the scratching heads, searching eyes, gathering flies and ants. Imagine some vultures betraying the peaceful resting place with their brooding black spirals, cycling lower to the ground. Later heads buried, punching in and out of the carcass like gophers. But what about the grief? Could we have mourned something we did not understand? I suppose we do even now.

That same mystery, swallowing everyone whole. But imagine the first death. The only death. No siren, no medical attention and no diagnosis. Trembling before that blanching rotten body in an absolute stupor. God, the fear must have lit like a brushfire, wild and guttural. Terror, such a primal instinct.

Is it fiction? Is it a manifesto? Is it a simple rant? All three? More? Read and find out.

Pablo D’Stair is a monster of the independent publishing world. He’s always got a new project or nine popping up, with little to no notice. And just as quickly, he’s got something new to follow close behind.

This week’s project is called Persona Nihil: brief dialogues with poets. And who’s the first to be granted page-space but OWC’s own David Blaine. Head over the the Persona Nihil page at the BlankVerseDead site to download the full dialogues for free, along with a selection of poems from David Blaine.