–René Belloq, to Indiana Jones

This past weekend I set shovel to dirt in the backyard of the home I grew up in, which just so happens to be three blocks from where I currently live. The plan is to create a garden in my dad’s backyard because the sun’s life-giving rays shine generously there – unlike my own backyard which could be likened to the Valley of the Shadow of Vegetable Death. The location I selected housed a sandbox once upon a time. But twenty years of disuse has removed all trace of it.

Claiming space for a garden out of unsullied lawn turf could be favorably compared to homesteading in the pioneer days, I think. It involves a lot of digging and sweating, for instance, and perhaps some wiping of the brow while scowling up at the burning sun. It leaves you with a thirst for a cold brew and a yearning to be somewhere else. But as I turned over one shovelfull of dirt and began breaking up the clod, an unmistakeably action-figure-like shape protruded from the grass roots. I pried the toy out the clay and wiped away the bigger chunks of soil, and the figure that emerged was none other than Han Solo: smuggler, gambler, hero of the Battle of Yavin, loveable scoundrel.

And lost toy.

And now here he was, nearly perfectly preserved after twenty years of tranquil waiting beneath the sod.

Han had been a stocking stuffer (circa 1984?), but to be honest, my Star Wars affection did not begin till much later in life, and I don’t think I really had any idea who Han Solo was at the time. He still received playing time (together with Admiral Ackbar, who was his stocking mate), and clearly made it out to the sandbox from which he never returned. Perhaps the sarlaac got him after all, in this timeline.

A good washing revealed that he’s in pretty good shape. Some of the paint has flecked from his hair, and his hands (tortured by Jabba’s guards, no doubt), but his limbs are all still accounted for and his paint job has weathered well enough. My daughter doesn’t mind the wear and tear. When I brought him home, she immediately fell in love. Han is now living the easy life, sleeping in the baby crib in her Fisher Price Little People house and hob-knobbing with some very friendly farm animals. Probably a better retirement than moving to Coruscant with Princess Leia to rebuild the New Republic, when you think about it.

Here’s a link to the article: http://www.themillions.com/2012/04/the-activity-that-dare-not-speak-its-name-my-mothers-secret-literary-life.html

once left the slope of her hand,

hoping to radiate out into the stratosphere

a clear signal

to those who wanted her.

But suns set, she knows,

Constellations fade, she knows, and

in the end her weary rays

Flicker across the desert sea,

Lose their nerve, grow listless

While huddled masses,

those who were once necessary

no longer are.

Smash and grab a sovereign state,

and her dark fire splutters, casting

only shadows.

It’s getting so you have

to slap her awake

to face the nice girl

she used to be.

___

Dick Bentley’s books, Post-Freudian Dreaming and A General Theory of Desire, are available at Amazon & Powell’s. He’s a Pushcart Prize nominee, and won the Paris Review/Paris Writers Workshop International Fiction Award. He has published over 200 works of fiction, poetry and memoir in Literary Magazines and Quarterlies in the US, the UK, France, Canada and Brazil. His next book will be titled All Rise. The cover features a picture of an unshaven Chief Justice Roberts with holes in his judicial robe, mud all over his face, and a swarm of fleas and gnats circling his head.  In the background, by contrast, are Botticelli’s Venus Rising from the Half Shell, helium balloons, a rising sun, and lots of butterflies. Check out his website www.dickbentley.com He loves hearing from readers. 413-256-0240 

was esse quam videri.

To be, rather than to seem.

I was I am I will be

to be, rather than to seem.

I wore blue tunics with the belt around my

ass and a billow of fabric around my belly.

You could be nine months under there—

that’s what we used to say—

no one would ever know.

Lips dry, pressed tight together,

I wore my hair in a ponytail and my

socks rolled down around my ankles.

I smoked cigarettes and pierced other

girls’ ears with ice and a safety pin.

What to be, what to be?

Cogito ergo sum and all but I

thought and thought and thought

because I was I am and would be

a D student who could not seem

to see the meaning in the words

stacked like bricks across

page after page after page.

Can you seem to understand?

Can you seem to be smarter than

that, please, woman?

Will you ever be a real woman?

Will you ever grow to be a real womb man?

How will you live?

How will you ever live like that

with your mouth sealed shut, and

your eyes so open?

It will come at you, woman,

with your black eyes and baby powder face.

It will come at you, woman,

in your skinny flower regalia

and the bong over your mouth.

It will come at you, woman,

with your pressed flat hair and

drugstore lipsticks. Be don’t seem

be don’t seem be don’t seem to be

trying to seem until you can no longer

be anything but fortunate that you

seem enough to be. Woman.

Keep your mouth closed. Keep your lips together.

Fortes fortuna adiuvat.

___

Christina Kapp has published her short fiction, poetry, and essays in numerous publications includingBarn Owl Review, Gargoyle, DOGZPLOT, Pindeldyboz, PANK, Anderbo.com, and apt. She has a M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University and is working toward her second M.A. in literature at Rutgers University-Newark. She leads the Franklin Chapter of the New Jersey Writers Society and is currently working on her first novel. 

I dig my fingers into the dirt, holding tight.

Holding on is exhausting;

humans have no roots.

A cat walks by and shows me her claws,

knives curved into sharp white moons, tucked

away in black fur sleeves. With a screech,

small birds shatter to the ground. The cat smiles;

I hold on. Across the street children chase

a ball down the driveway. It rolls away

down the street. They yell: Can you get that?

They are not allowed to roam in the streets.

I dig in: I shake my head, feeling the earth.

Fall away. Freedom belongs to the greedy.

We are all free to be greedy. Greed is a push.

Come on, lady, please! A child trips forward.

The ball has a face. It rolls head over chin.

Faces become wheels. Wheels score the earth.

There is no sense in fighting, children.

Gravity is the greatest teacher.

___

Christina Kapp has published her short fiction, poetry, and essays in numerous publications includingBarn Owl Review, Gargoyle, DOGZPLOT, Pindeldyboz, PANK, Anderbo.com, and apt. She has a M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University and is working toward her second M.A. in literature at Rutgers University-Newark. She leads the Franklin Chapter of the New Jersey Writers Society and is currently working on her first novel. 

to ogle the old house of many windows,

torn to an incomprehensible index

of jagged rubble and glass tears.

Already they struggle to remember

what it looked like, if there

had been faces inside, if bodies

had circulated within its rooms.

How loud had been the splintering

of a fortress? Could they still hear the echo

of the machines and men? Why did

all the good things happen when

they were shuffled away at school?

In the hours of darkness,

her audience called to dinner,

the old house remains, panting,

a tongue of flowered wallpaper,

her shocked mouth a tipped toilet,

the soft pink of her broken beams

wrapped around an empty belly,

concrete hips tipped sideways,

aching, but still strong,

sagging under shingled skin,

disheveled shock of black roof.

She rests stiffly in the silent postmodern—

the hopeless dementia of broken time

that returns to gaze upon her dissembled

form and imagine it again, constructing

anew, the bodies that abandoned her

blinking back at us in secret, charged

collusion of the eternal body,

boiling upwards from the brown earth.

___

Christina Kapp has published her short fiction, poetry, and essays in numerous publications includingBarn Owl Review, Gargoyle, DOGZPLOT, Pindeldyboz, PANK, Anderbo.com, and apt. She has a M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University and is working toward her second M.A. in literature at Rutgers University-Newark. She leads the Franklin Chapter of the New Jersey Writers Society and is currently working on her first novel. 

Get Back Better On

Do You Feel White Frost

All that Comes from Ores

___

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 16 year old internationally award winning photographer and artist who has won first places with National Geographic, The World Photography Organisation, Nature’s Best Photography, Papworth Trust, Mencap, The Woodland trust and Postal Heritage. Her photography has  been published in the Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC News Website, and on the cover of books and magazines in the United States and Canada. Her art is globally exhibited, having shown work in London, Paris, Indonesia, Los Angeles, Florida, Washington, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Spain, Germany, Japan, Australia and The Environmental Photographer of the year Exhibition (2011) amongst many other locations. She was also the only person from the UK to have her work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus run See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010.

We drink until we laugh like dunces
and half the books she owns are on the floor.
She takes a chess set, grabs a bag of pills, walks out her window;
she’s deep into the shine of Montreal at night, she says,
descants on everything from optics to Camus,
English girls, neural fatigue, the merits of the Shah.

I was born, she says, in possession of a profound innocence,
then giggles, fluent in four tongues, in forked tongue—
gives a shove, goddamns the Klonopin, leans on me and tells me to shut up.
Sometimes I am grateful for this life;
sometimes a balcony is anywhere you don’t fall off.
This is how we talk until the substances wear thin,
until the sun’s meniscus starts to give us hints.

___

Andrew Purcell lives and works in Syracuse, New York. He has met Patrick Lawler.

At the time of this letter, something founders beneath the Perseids,
tear-struck, salt into salt; I’m sorry.
Because I stared while you bit the soaked lime
and juice ran down your neck to your breast.
Because the ocean between us is the ocean of wisdom.
Because lead sinks ever inward, plumbing a further deep.

How this letter will find you even you cannot say, sublime
or a decadent wreck; I can only hope you are not seized
by the summer’s torpor, dreams in dreams of a winter beach,
your sleep half sand, half snow.
I can only hope that seawater beads along your back
and you are free.

Each meteor’s white reddens to darkness above,
whether we watch or not, the verge between us delicate
as the fibrous crystals of purified caffeine.
To sit with you is to be tender and too chaste,
while that which is base in me sinks, turning precious
as it settles, a shimmering of ingots and funerary masks.

___

Andrew Purcell lives and works in Syracuse, New York. He has met Patrick Lawler.