I let my arm press against hers in the way people who are comfortable can. Outside the window it was dark and there were cars and orange roads. I craned my neck like a child.
The plane leaned downward.
“Did you see Brisbane as we were flying in?” I asked.
She looked up from her book.
“No,” she said.
The girl had spent some time with me in the spring. Her apartment smelled like hardwood and linen. She would sit with her legs pulled up or lean into me and let her hair fall like curtains.
“I just want to read this book,” she said.
I turned toward the window and turned off my overhead light.
We were on the kind of trip students like us took to become better people. We went through customs and paid cab drivers. We learned small differences: the colors at intersections, the labelson cigarettes. The people there didn’t bark their words as if each had its own significance separate from the ones that surrounded it.
.
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Dylan Nice is from central Pennsylvania—this is his favorite things to tell people. His work has appeared in NOON, Unsaid, Quick Fiction, and Gigantic. He now lives in Iowa.
(continue reading “We’ll Both Feel Better” in DEWCLAW Issue 2)
I dreamed Eileen Myles’ voice reading the LaTeX manual like it was her poem. She was reading from the part about lines. All I remember is something about ragged edges.
We’re almost done laying out Dewclaw, is what that dream means.
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I’ve been trying to notice how my mind connects to objects just before it makes sense of them. A few days ago I found myself comparing myself to a big silver “walk” button. I realize I’m dreaming all the time. A dog runs to each point of a quasi-star.
Today I saw a can of Bud Light under a tree in huge white blossom and realized what a lovely name that is, Bud Light, like from some haiku, but in the spring everything seems like it’s composed in haiku.
I have to get the hell out of the way of something, maybe of this:
“When I’m surrounded by trees, a condition I’ve sought out pretty persistently throughout my life I think the thing I might like the most about them is this whisper like all the hair of the world passing through the tunnel of one single breath – if that is a form of percussion. This irregular hiss of trees and wind. I think it is my mother. And I am her son, and you are my dog.”
from “Protect Me You” by Eileen Myles
At a young age Gerald made a name for himself in the Phillipines by poaching the rare effervescent beetles of his local community and exporting them to Korea at inflated prices, where they are believed to be a powerful aphrodesiac (this has yet to be proven by modern science). He parlayed this into a small empire for himself through a variety of questionable business practices and overseas investments. At the height of his wealth, and to the chagrin of his enemies, Gerald moved his fortune to the new world where he quickly set up shop as the proprietor of a profitable overseas shipping company and earned himself the nickname “the Weed”. He currently owns several specialty antique and jewelery stores, two high profile nightclubs on either side of town, and has an entourage of thugs at his disposal and city officials in his pocket. As undesirable a figure as he is, the community would crumble without him as he is the chief owner of the only freight line in town. Primarily a shut in due to his high profile, Mr. Tarsier can occasionally be seen at one of his nightclubs and never without his trademark pinstripe suit and his claws around a dry Manhattan (his drink of choice).
Ilan Schraer is an illustrator currently residing in Portland, Oregon. He is originally from San Diego, California, from which he misses vegetarian burritos and potato rolled tacos. He occasionally does illustrations for music blog “Chickens Don’t Clap!” and keeps up a sketch blog at http://dailysketch17.blogspot.com
(from DEWCLAW Issue 2)
I’m blogging now at HTML GIANT. I just posted my first post, Thought Experiments. My blogging for HTML GIANT is an experiment in consistency and tolerance.
Issue 2
with writing by
Alison Bundy
Heather Christle
Claire Donato
Tyler Flynn Dorholt
Brandon Gorrell
Jac Jemc
Sheila Heti
Dorothea Lasky
Dylan Nice
Sam Pink
Ilan Schraer
Jen Tynes
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illustrations by
Natsumi Nishizumi
Ilan Schraer
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woodcut cover by
Stephanie Brachmann
.
Pre-order
$8
The first five people to pre-order will receive a gift with their order. Items to be given away include current issues of Birkensnake and Sleepingfish, MLP chapbooks, and other small-press publications. This page will be updated when the gifts are no longer available. UPDATE: the gifts are no longer available.
Come see contributors to issues 1 & 2 read at AWP. Click the image to get it bigger.
Piotr of MINIMALBOOKS translated my story, “Stories of the Things That Had No Power of Their Own”, into Polish. A fun thing to do is to Google-translate it back into English. Here is the third back-translated paragraph:
My family has had problems caused by the stupidity of my parents or someone else, or maybe no one’s stupidity, or perhaps their parents and anyone else. I did not feel like a girl. Did not feel like a boy. But it was my name and details are taken on the name of the shape to the adult, where I lived.
It’s true, my family has had problems caused by anyone else’s stupidity.
Another funny translation:
As a child I thought that the promised future is God, and somehow his apostles in the minibuses…
Also in the March issue is my response to Amina Cain’s I Go To Some Hollow. You can read my response in English here.
Evelyn is blind.
Evelyn was permanently and totally disabled in 2009.
It’s true I don’t know what I am.
Today is March 2. Today I am the Japanese maple or just a branch?
Only the sides of things are Tuesday. The insides are timeless
like the time we drove from Minnesota to Missouri in three hours.
Or how, in the science museum, I ran up and down a piano.
You said the mummy was a man and I begged a man for three-dimensional
glasses to see the mountain, but all I saw was a woman with hair
down to her ankles. I am thanking everything that tickles. I am wearing
three-dimensional glasses going downtown, and the bus is stuck in a mountain.
I think the mummy was a woman. I think in two-dimensions until I hear
a piano, and then I think of strings wiggling inside matter. It doesn’t matter.
The strings are strung from Tuesday to Missouri, hung from the branches
downtown. I am running away from sound. I am running up and down a mountain
in Missouri, the one you made out of glasses we found downtown.
I am permanently and totally able to know what we found
inside a mountain. It was Tuesday and it was the Japanese maple.
Today is March 2. I am coming down from the piano and going downtown.
[written very quickly this morning after breakfast and a day after doing my taxes]
