Volume Three Excerpts
Excerpts
FICTION
from Jennifer Pullen’s Little Red Riding Hood(s)
I
Little Red Riding Hood isn’t really named Little Red Riding Hood, her name is Elizabeth, or Mary, or some other good English name. Regardless of whether her name is Mary or Elizabeth she always loves the smell of her mother’s baking, the way she can wake up as dawn wipes gray out of the sky, and even though she has to go milk the cows, gather eggs and pull water from the well, she’s happy. She’s happy because the smell of bread fills her nostrils and makes her feel loved and cared for. Everyone acknowledges her mother as the best baker in the village. Everyday her mother sends her down the path to the edge of the forest to her grandmother’s cottage with a loaf of bread in a basket, because her mother says that a daughter’s duty (she looks pointedly at Mary/Elizabeth as she says this) is to take care of an aging mother. So, Mary/Elizabeth walks down the path every day and brings a loaf of bread.
But one day she gets a riding hood of bright scarlet from the church charity bin, and the story starts to swallow her name. If you watch carefully you might be able to see the story lurking in the dusty corners of that church waiting to envelop her. The hood is red and soft and warm and looks like nothing her family could ever afford. Red dye is expensive, red dye belongs to the rich, red dye screams for attention. A grown woman might have one red kirtle for feast days, but only a rich person would make a red riding hood for a little girl. But Mary/Elizabeth gets the hood and then wears it on the walk to her grandmother’s. Wolves can’t see the color red (lacking the appropriate cones to do so), but that doesn’t stop the wolf from seeing the girl and smelling her blood in her veins—hot-alive, and also red. That doesn’t stop the story from going on, doesn’t stop Mary/Elizabeth from getting eaten, it doesn’t save her grandmother, and it doesn’t stop that beautiful bread from going to waste because the wolf is sated on so much red bloody-person-meat. Sometimes a woodcutter saves them, cutting open the wolf, and the grandmother and the girl emerge, probably covered in nasty smelling stomach acid, and hug the wood cutter and everything turns out okay. Sometimes they both get eaten. Sometimes just Mary/Elizabeth. Sometimes the wolf is clever, sometimes the wolf is stupid. But always Mary/Elizabeth ends up as Little Red Riding Hood and always a wolf eats someone. The versions where no one gets eaten aren’t real, and everyone knows it.
from Michael Carroll’s I Know a Little:
They hit. Ronnie’d thought We might just hit. Then there was radio play and they’d hit.
Signing up, they’d changed their spelling. They toured with The Who. Nobody booed.
With The Who there were supposed to be nightly howls of boos, but there weren’t any.
What felt like silence, they were told, was awe, no one had ever heard their sound before.
Then it was cock of the walk. It was Jack Daniels and coke and better, it was tomorrows, the ones that caught up with you and became blur-yesterdays, girls, everything always waiting.
And it felt that good. Their traveling changed, their hotels. Now real food, and now real accommodations. And airplanes cross-country. And MCA was starting to believe in them. The Honkettes along for the ride singing back-up, and with the girls he began to feel tender, think It’s a mistake, shouldn’t be this way, it’s going too fast and in the wrong direction away from home.
It wasn’t just the girls singing, it was the ones backstage, too young, too far from home.
Ronnie started to see. Young guys had strokes, got MS, had heart attacks in their rooms at night. Drunk and stoned, they barfed while unconscious choking to death. Rock took them.
Before it was a building party. Now it was just harder to look in the mirror. Cassie and them, he didn’t know how he’d be held accountable. They were his singers, this was his band.
Talking to Lacy, after the next album and the next, Ronnie said, “Daddy, I’m not going to live to see thirty.” That time was compacted and hard-driven, all events compacted, the drinking having started, and he said to Lacy further, “The time of my life but it can’t go on forever, Lacy.”
“What gunk are you talking? You have some crystal ball? It’s what you wanted, son.”
Ronnie thought about the whuppings, how they’d driven him, too, their force and sting.
He had a daughter he’d rarely seen, Melody.
They went to Britain and played Knebworth, where it all started over and just grew.
Did everybody love them, or did it just feel that way?
CREATIVE NONFICTION
Robert Vivian’s Stay Awhile
I feel the letters happening and then the words all by themselves as I watch and I listen with the mailbox gaping wide under the almost full moon with its hangdog mouth and first one letter then another of greeting and then bird song sent to the heart of things touching whatever they can, whatever they must, table top and drawer and fingertips of a careful reader so crisp on the page she almost cannot bear it, suitcase and envelope (never a more precious skin and all the tiny lights still burning) and Kilroy and Susie were here for they scratched their names into the bark of an everlasting tree with a broken bottle neck in cruciform letters stark as reckoning and then siren a letter and candle a letter as well as rooftop, sledge hammer, and the feathery down inside a pillow where I lay my head perchance to dream and to wonder and see how light and fleeting the letters are and every stick of threadbare utterance and how transient though they aspire to everlasting vibrancy in the book of electrical feeling vast as the wide awake world as I watch and I listen for other words and letters, oh, all the days of my life cherishing the stillness and not-knowing how they come to take on flesh of ink and speech as living and loving bodies offering themselves with open arms, open legs and there are a thousand ways to kiss the ground and this is one of them, oh, kiss me on the lips and what you do with your tongue to shape the letter and the word and give voice to them, what you do with your mouth to shape these birds of air and song and this shaping of letters and words in desire to romp and play and stay awhile throwing a little party for the glycerin that is poem and hymn in speech so move and shake it, waylay it, the wiggle, the waggle, the hum and dazzle and rising whimper that give way to moan then silent prayer then wisp of smoke whispering No more, no more—I’ve lived what I could every part and molecule and now I am air rising high above, disappearing without a sound, goodbye.
DRAMA
from Edward M. Pinkowski’s Washington
TED and PATTY are sitting facing each other, on opposite sides of an empty moving subway train. The gentle swaying of the motion makes it appear that both are subconsciously nodding to the other. TED senses the train slowing to approach a stop; he becomes increasingly agitated. He jumps to his feet and begins to pace in the small area between them.
PATTY
(bewildered) Is this the end or the beginning?
(TED puts his hands over his ears and begins to blabber, attempting to drown out the anticipated loudspeaker stop announcement.)
TED
(repeats several times) My body flies over the ocean my body lives in a green tree my body spills into the ocean oh bring back my body to flee.
(PATTY is equally anxious and intensely focused on TED. She watches his every action and pays attention to every word. She then moves toward him and attempts to make eye contact, but he continues to distance himself from her.
The train finally stops and side doors open, but no one enters. TED continues mumbling, now to himself.
Over the speaker we hear the half-muffled stop announcement from the conductor.)
V.O. TRAIN ANNOUNCEMENT
Some pay to remember—Some pray to forget. Have a pleasant day, Little Shooter.
PATTY
(recognizing the voice) Daddy???
(The doors close and the train again begins to move. TED immediately stops his rambling and removes his hands from his ears. PATTY now looks into Ted’s tired eyes. TED sadly shakes his head ‘no’ and they slowly make their way back to their seats.)
TED
Looking through wet windows makes everything look . . . runny. Sure, you can try to identify objects—but are you sure?
(beat)
When you take off in an airplane, and you feel the vibration and the speed and the torque and all of a sudden—in your mouth and between your teeth—you can taste fear. How do you know for sure that you’re not looking at some green screen out the window, making it appear that you’re in the sky, but in reality, you’ve only been towed to a fake airport a couple of blocks away? How do you know for sure? Do you feel the wind slapping your face? How do you know that some high school kids weren’t hired to shake this train so it would appear like we’re moving, but in reality, it’s those runny cars outside these runny windows that are moving and not us? I can’t say for sure, but runny eggs, in my opinion, seem far more trustworthy than runny windows.
PATTY
We were going to buy the Smoky Wagon, right? You were going to call me ‘Boss’ and I was going to call you ‘Pa.’ We imagined that the early-morning truckers would yell kindly to ya when they walked through the door and say “Hey Ted—for God’s sake, don’t let the old lady cook my hot cakes. She’s a good woman Ted, but she’d starve a field mouse to disrepair.” Then I’d snap my dishtowel in their direction and look angry and pleased at once, and half fuss: “Now you boys just sit down and try to behave. The good Lord gave you two ears and only one mouth, and that’s a pretty good ratio for just shuttin’ up.” That’s when I’d serve them the runny eggs.
(PATTY chuckles sadly, then lets her head fall slightly. She looks at TED.)
We made those kinds of plans, honey. We made plans together.
POETRY
Charlie Bondhus’ George Zimmerman Signs Autographs at a Florida Gun Show
Don’t be ashamed of the fear
which makes us godful men
defending neighborhoods
besieged, like the truth:
our kind—the last heroes.
Bearing black-washed guns,
we storm gunmetal
darkness, cleansing the fears
night imposes. Like comic book heroes
we loved before we were men,
we stand sure in the bullet-blunt truth
that there are good men and hoodlums
and nothing in between. Who’d
have known so many love black and hate the gun
which drives it out? Why do they deny truth?
Knowing won’t make you less afraid;
fear won’t make you less a man.
That’s why you’ve made me your hero.
“But I’m not a hero,”
I say, fooling no one, “just a falcon unhooded,
my beak yellow as muzzle flash. A good man
with a gun
who happened to be tougher than fear,
and that’s the simple truth.”
You laugh and say the true
George Zimmerman is American hero,
neighborhood protector, slayer of fear,
the only guy who tore back the hood,
and that’s why you come with your guns
for me to sign. Ask man-to-man
and I’ll tell you—I was a man
in the right place. Any guy who sees the truth
and can fire a gun
knows how to be a hero.
You’re here, so you too see beneath the hood
and know the importance of being afraid.
These days, evil men get called heroes.
But the truth is that no hood
can stand against a gun. Teach them our fear.
Michele Karas’ In the You-Are-Still-Alive Dream
we are back on that train,
bound for Prague.
You teach me
how to say excuse me in German.
Entschuldigen Sie you pronounce slowly
and repeat it. Is that how the seat assignments
got decided? We have barely sipped
the Weissbier in our plastic hospital cups
when there is a disruption,
a sound, like
tectonic plates shifting.
Or prayer hands unclasping.
Then there is our mother with all her luggage,
Blessed Mary in first class. How will I
explain your departure to her?
O Sister,
I only looked away for a minute.
Be a bold voyager--
anything is possible in a dream; soon,
you’ll wake up in a different country,
you will grow strong, you will take a wife.
A train is a train is a train, isn’t it? Parallel lines
hurtling across a steel-gray landscape. Never will I forget
the way your lips worked to form the question
as the carriage unhitched:
Will you live a long life?
No, I lied,
so you would feel less
lonely on your trip.
Suzanne Parker’s Gauguin in Paradise
The card reads: “As suggested by the thick
black line.” Indeed, the women swell
against their limits, this “his
full bloom primitivistic Tahitian period”
a man says before a platter of fruit
and breasts. Your note says: “Cream
we have. If you'll get coffee.” I know
there is charcoal sketching my skin.
I smudge what I touch, think color
has its own mind. I cannot get it right.
I came to you with bags full
of small desires but standing
before the Gauguins, I see,
a woman swallowing her own hand,
think this is how to change
the shape, know this woman
caught in his remembering.
It states: “Some areas were left bare--
naked canvas.” My eye
smearing what surrounds.
Dave Morrison’s Being a Poet
When you write poems the
one thing you hear the most is
some version of “You ought to
write a poem about that.”
Whether it’s some awkward
family gathering, some strange
animal loose in your house, a
funny mishap at work, someone
will raise their eyebrows and
say “There must be a poem
in there somewhere.”
I remember long ago when I
was young I had a girlfriend
who lived in a run-down
neighborhood that was terrorized
by this pack of wild dogs that
slept in this abandoned burnt-out
church. One day my girlfriend
narrowly avoided being attacked
by some of the dogs, and she was
beside herself—I wanted to do
something heroic to make her
feel safe.
That night I stood outside the
shell of the church with a Molotov
Cocktail—I would hurl it into the
church, the dogs would perish in
the fire, the neighborhood would
be safe from these monsters, and
my girlfriend’s love and gratitude
would know no bounds.
My coat and three cars caught fire--
I was arrested in my hospital bed and
soon after my girlfriend showed up
to tell me that she couldn’t possibly
be with someone who was capable of
such cruelty.
That was one time when no one said
“now there’s a poem,” and yet
here we are.
Want to read more? Order your copy today!
from Jennifer Pullen’s Little Red Riding Hood(s)
I
Little Red Riding Hood isn’t really named Little Red Riding Hood, her name is Elizabeth, or Mary, or some other good English name. Regardless of whether her name is Mary or Elizabeth she always loves the smell of her mother’s baking, the way she can wake up as dawn wipes gray out of the sky, and even though she has to go milk the cows, gather eggs and pull water from the well, she’s happy. She’s happy because the smell of bread fills her nostrils and makes her feel loved and cared for. Everyone acknowledges her mother as the best baker in the village. Everyday her mother sends her down the path to the edge of the forest to her grandmother’s cottage with a loaf of bread in a basket, because her mother says that a daughter’s duty (she looks pointedly at Mary/Elizabeth as she says this) is to take care of an aging mother. So, Mary/Elizabeth walks down the path every day and brings a loaf of bread.
But one day she gets a riding hood of bright scarlet from the church charity bin, and the story starts to swallow her name. If you watch carefully you might be able to see the story lurking in the dusty corners of that church waiting to envelop her. The hood is red and soft and warm and looks like nothing her family could ever afford. Red dye is expensive, red dye belongs to the rich, red dye screams for attention. A grown woman might have one red kirtle for feast days, but only a rich person would make a red riding hood for a little girl. But Mary/Elizabeth gets the hood and then wears it on the walk to her grandmother’s. Wolves can’t see the color red (lacking the appropriate cones to do so), but that doesn’t stop the wolf from seeing the girl and smelling her blood in her veins—hot-alive, and also red. That doesn’t stop the story from going on, doesn’t stop Mary/Elizabeth from getting eaten, it doesn’t save her grandmother, and it doesn’t stop that beautiful bread from going to waste because the wolf is sated on so much red bloody-person-meat. Sometimes a woodcutter saves them, cutting open the wolf, and the grandmother and the girl emerge, probably covered in nasty smelling stomach acid, and hug the wood cutter and everything turns out okay. Sometimes they both get eaten. Sometimes just Mary/Elizabeth. Sometimes the wolf is clever, sometimes the wolf is stupid. But always Mary/Elizabeth ends up as Little Red Riding Hood and always a wolf eats someone. The versions where no one gets eaten aren’t real, and everyone knows it.
from Michael Carroll’s I Know a Little:
They hit. Ronnie’d thought We might just hit. Then there was radio play and they’d hit.
Signing up, they’d changed their spelling. They toured with The Who. Nobody booed.
With The Who there were supposed to be nightly howls of boos, but there weren’t any.
What felt like silence, they were told, was awe, no one had ever heard their sound before.
Then it was cock of the walk. It was Jack Daniels and coke and better, it was tomorrows, the ones that caught up with you and became blur-yesterdays, girls, everything always waiting.
And it felt that good. Their traveling changed, their hotels. Now real food, and now real accommodations. And airplanes cross-country. And MCA was starting to believe in them. The Honkettes along for the ride singing back-up, and with the girls he began to feel tender, think It’s a mistake, shouldn’t be this way, it’s going too fast and in the wrong direction away from home.
It wasn’t just the girls singing, it was the ones backstage, too young, too far from home.
Ronnie started to see. Young guys had strokes, got MS, had heart attacks in their rooms at night. Drunk and stoned, they barfed while unconscious choking to death. Rock took them.
Before it was a building party. Now it was just harder to look in the mirror. Cassie and them, he didn’t know how he’d be held accountable. They were his singers, this was his band.
Talking to Lacy, after the next album and the next, Ronnie said, “Daddy, I’m not going to live to see thirty.” That time was compacted and hard-driven, all events compacted, the drinking having started, and he said to Lacy further, “The time of my life but it can’t go on forever, Lacy.”
“What gunk are you talking? You have some crystal ball? It’s what you wanted, son.”
Ronnie thought about the whuppings, how they’d driven him, too, their force and sting.
He had a daughter he’d rarely seen, Melody.
They went to Britain and played Knebworth, where it all started over and just grew.
Did everybody love them, or did it just feel that way?
CREATIVE NONFICTION
Robert Vivian’s Stay Awhile
I feel the letters happening and then the words all by themselves as I watch and I listen with the mailbox gaping wide under the almost full moon with its hangdog mouth and first one letter then another of greeting and then bird song sent to the heart of things touching whatever they can, whatever they must, table top and drawer and fingertips of a careful reader so crisp on the page she almost cannot bear it, suitcase and envelope (never a more precious skin and all the tiny lights still burning) and Kilroy and Susie were here for they scratched their names into the bark of an everlasting tree with a broken bottle neck in cruciform letters stark as reckoning and then siren a letter and candle a letter as well as rooftop, sledge hammer, and the feathery down inside a pillow where I lay my head perchance to dream and to wonder and see how light and fleeting the letters are and every stick of threadbare utterance and how transient though they aspire to everlasting vibrancy in the book of electrical feeling vast as the wide awake world as I watch and I listen for other words and letters, oh, all the days of my life cherishing the stillness and not-knowing how they come to take on flesh of ink and speech as living and loving bodies offering themselves with open arms, open legs and there are a thousand ways to kiss the ground and this is one of them, oh, kiss me on the lips and what you do with your tongue to shape the letter and the word and give voice to them, what you do with your mouth to shape these birds of air and song and this shaping of letters and words in desire to romp and play and stay awhile throwing a little party for the glycerin that is poem and hymn in speech so move and shake it, waylay it, the wiggle, the waggle, the hum and dazzle and rising whimper that give way to moan then silent prayer then wisp of smoke whispering No more, no more—I’ve lived what I could every part and molecule and now I am air rising high above, disappearing without a sound, goodbye.
DRAMA
from Edward M. Pinkowski’s Washington
TED and PATTY are sitting facing each other, on opposite sides of an empty moving subway train. The gentle swaying of the motion makes it appear that both are subconsciously nodding to the other. TED senses the train slowing to approach a stop; he becomes increasingly agitated. He jumps to his feet and begins to pace in the small area between them.
PATTY
(bewildered) Is this the end or the beginning?
(TED puts his hands over his ears and begins to blabber, attempting to drown out the anticipated loudspeaker stop announcement.)
TED
(repeats several times) My body flies over the ocean my body lives in a green tree my body spills into the ocean oh bring back my body to flee.
(PATTY is equally anxious and intensely focused on TED. She watches his every action and pays attention to every word. She then moves toward him and attempts to make eye contact, but he continues to distance himself from her.
The train finally stops and side doors open, but no one enters. TED continues mumbling, now to himself.
Over the speaker we hear the half-muffled stop announcement from the conductor.)
V.O. TRAIN ANNOUNCEMENT
Some pay to remember—Some pray to forget. Have a pleasant day, Little Shooter.
PATTY
(recognizing the voice) Daddy???
(The doors close and the train again begins to move. TED immediately stops his rambling and removes his hands from his ears. PATTY now looks into Ted’s tired eyes. TED sadly shakes his head ‘no’ and they slowly make their way back to their seats.)
TED
Looking through wet windows makes everything look . . . runny. Sure, you can try to identify objects—but are you sure?
(beat)
When you take off in an airplane, and you feel the vibration and the speed and the torque and all of a sudden—in your mouth and between your teeth—you can taste fear. How do you know for sure that you’re not looking at some green screen out the window, making it appear that you’re in the sky, but in reality, you’ve only been towed to a fake airport a couple of blocks away? How do you know for sure? Do you feel the wind slapping your face? How do you know that some high school kids weren’t hired to shake this train so it would appear like we’re moving, but in reality, it’s those runny cars outside these runny windows that are moving and not us? I can’t say for sure, but runny eggs, in my opinion, seem far more trustworthy than runny windows.
PATTY
We were going to buy the Smoky Wagon, right? You were going to call me ‘Boss’ and I was going to call you ‘Pa.’ We imagined that the early-morning truckers would yell kindly to ya when they walked through the door and say “Hey Ted—for God’s sake, don’t let the old lady cook my hot cakes. She’s a good woman Ted, but she’d starve a field mouse to disrepair.” Then I’d snap my dishtowel in their direction and look angry and pleased at once, and half fuss: “Now you boys just sit down and try to behave. The good Lord gave you two ears and only one mouth, and that’s a pretty good ratio for just shuttin’ up.” That’s when I’d serve them the runny eggs.
(PATTY chuckles sadly, then lets her head fall slightly. She looks at TED.)
We made those kinds of plans, honey. We made plans together.
POETRY
Charlie Bondhus’ George Zimmerman Signs Autographs at a Florida Gun Show
Don’t be ashamed of the fear
which makes us godful men
defending neighborhoods
besieged, like the truth:
our kind—the last heroes.
Bearing black-washed guns,
we storm gunmetal
darkness, cleansing the fears
night imposes. Like comic book heroes
we loved before we were men,
we stand sure in the bullet-blunt truth
that there are good men and hoodlums
and nothing in between. Who’d
have known so many love black and hate the gun
which drives it out? Why do they deny truth?
Knowing won’t make you less afraid;
fear won’t make you less a man.
That’s why you’ve made me your hero.
“But I’m not a hero,”
I say, fooling no one, “just a falcon unhooded,
my beak yellow as muzzle flash. A good man
with a gun
who happened to be tougher than fear,
and that’s the simple truth.”
You laugh and say the true
George Zimmerman is American hero,
neighborhood protector, slayer of fear,
the only guy who tore back the hood,
and that’s why you come with your guns
for me to sign. Ask man-to-man
and I’ll tell you—I was a man
in the right place. Any guy who sees the truth
and can fire a gun
knows how to be a hero.
You’re here, so you too see beneath the hood
and know the importance of being afraid.
These days, evil men get called heroes.
But the truth is that no hood
can stand against a gun. Teach them our fear.
Michele Karas’ In the You-Are-Still-Alive Dream
we are back on that train,
bound for Prague.
You teach me
how to say excuse me in German.
Entschuldigen Sie you pronounce slowly
and repeat it. Is that how the seat assignments
got decided? We have barely sipped
the Weissbier in our plastic hospital cups
when there is a disruption,
a sound, like
tectonic plates shifting.
Or prayer hands unclasping.
Then there is our mother with all her luggage,
Blessed Mary in first class. How will I
explain your departure to her?
O Sister,
I only looked away for a minute.
Be a bold voyager--
anything is possible in a dream; soon,
you’ll wake up in a different country,
you will grow strong, you will take a wife.
A train is a train is a train, isn’t it? Parallel lines
hurtling across a steel-gray landscape. Never will I forget
the way your lips worked to form the question
as the carriage unhitched:
Will you live a long life?
No, I lied,
so you would feel less
lonely on your trip.
Suzanne Parker’s Gauguin in Paradise
The card reads: “As suggested by the thick
black line.” Indeed, the women swell
against their limits, this “his
full bloom primitivistic Tahitian period”
a man says before a platter of fruit
and breasts. Your note says: “Cream
we have. If you'll get coffee.” I know
there is charcoal sketching my skin.
I smudge what I touch, think color
has its own mind. I cannot get it right.
I came to you with bags full
of small desires but standing
before the Gauguins, I see,
a woman swallowing her own hand,
think this is how to change
the shape, know this woman
caught in his remembering.
It states: “Some areas were left bare--
naked canvas.” My eye
smearing what surrounds.
Dave Morrison’s Being a Poet
When you write poems the
one thing you hear the most is
some version of “You ought to
write a poem about that.”
Whether it’s some awkward
family gathering, some strange
animal loose in your house, a
funny mishap at work, someone
will raise their eyebrows and
say “There must be a poem
in there somewhere.”
I remember long ago when I
was young I had a girlfriend
who lived in a run-down
neighborhood that was terrorized
by this pack of wild dogs that
slept in this abandoned burnt-out
church. One day my girlfriend
narrowly avoided being attacked
by some of the dogs, and she was
beside herself—I wanted to do
something heroic to make her
feel safe.
That night I stood outside the
shell of the church with a Molotov
Cocktail—I would hurl it into the
church, the dogs would perish in
the fire, the neighborhood would
be safe from these monsters, and
my girlfriend’s love and gratitude
would know no bounds.
My coat and three cars caught fire--
I was arrested in my hospital bed and
soon after my girlfriend showed up
to tell me that she couldn’t possibly
be with someone who was capable of
such cruelty.
That was one time when no one said
“now there’s a poem,” and yet
here we are.
Want to read more? Order your copy today!