 |
|
|
|
Five Opium9 Bookmark Contest Finalists! |
|
by M.E. Brown, MK Chavez, Eileen G'Sell, Daniel Grandbois, Chris West
|
|
6:00 |
|
 |
|
|
|
The Divorce
By M.E. Brown
A man with a gun came in at a late hour and shot the 17-year-old in the face. She fell to the ground. The hole through her forehead was cloven like her mouth, dauntingly agape and hooked up in the corners, clutching the last of a sojourning laugh. Her head had fallen back, and from above she was smiling. He stepped over her, went to the drawer and incuriously took the till. He went home, fell asleep, and woke up the next morning. It was his first day of work. He had been hired the week before, given an embroidered polo and hat with the company’s logo and told he would get his name tag on the first day of work. He came in, met the manager, the one that had given a statement to a news channel that morning while crying. Both employees who had been in the rear of the store during the shooting had quit, so a supervisor from another branch was covering. As a precaution, the store hours were reverted from summer back to winter and a private security company was hired to patrol for the week. A large man in a uniform stood outside. New cameras would be installed, outside lights upgraded and better insurance was being purchased. And there was a 28-minute emergency training video that was being sent from corporate. It was now a safe place, a much safer place.
----
The Mandrake
By M.K. Chavez
The year I lost my uterus was filled with plastic foliage and warm wood panel tones of 2pm therapist appointments. The therapist was a cricket, she was always cross legged. She would sit tri-angled across from the sling of the thick-veined, overstuffed corduroy chair, which I sank into more each week.
It was protocol to discuss the once pink, now pale as boiled cabbage, thing, before it was removed.
Week after week the shrink would tilt her diamond shaped face at me and try to help me make the connection. It finally happened. It was our last session, and we sat in the stale air, the fake plants beaming and faux wood a bit brittle but unashamed; the cricket revved one more time, criss-crossing those thinking legs. She leaned forward and said:
“Imagine that your uterus is sitting across the room.
What would it look like? What would it say?”
I lifted my eyes and saw it, the earth thing, dirt stained fissures, a tangle of new growth emerging from here and there. A blanched out Shiva. Two distinct legs, and those legs were crossed, as were its two main arms, and it was looking away, shaking its head. And all I could think was “That’s just great, my uterus is a mandrake with an attitude.”
I had nothing to say out loud.
After the surgery, it lay alone; carved chunks on a stainless steel tray. I felt sorry for it. Such a misunderstood root.
----
Closure
By Eileen G'Sell
While moving out of the yellow house, I found your soul in the basement. It was dusty, in a suitcase, but perfectly functional. My dog looked over. I showed it to him. He sniffed it out, then hid in the laundry. I thought about whether I’d use it or not. My own was old, but in pretty good shape. In the right kind of light, it could even look beautiful. Could a brand new room have the right kind of light? Can a brand-clean blue bring the best type of clouds? Dream on, little duck, little dustbill of ache. Wax on, and then off, about patterns of breaking. You know how to scar, how to star the whole city; you lower your face to the pool that consumes. Wipe out the sun from your eyes, indeed. Rip off that tie you were wearing to please him. And if, in the end, we are not indifferent, cherish the God that steams from below. You wanna get a piece of it? Marry the wary. You wanna go home? God bless you for wanting.
----
Boxes
By Daniel Grandbois
They hide in boxes at the peripheries, their limbs and small heads moving within. We believed they grew the boxes around themselves like shells. Now, some are saying the boxes are not protective dead matter at all but the living things. Glancing over casually, I walk past them. Sometimes, I stop and stare. It doesn’t matter.
Those who believe they’re here to observe us have begun putting on shows to confuse them. They’ll walk when they meant to lie down, for example, or vocalize when they would have been silent.
Then, just as we’d begun to grow used to them, they moved away, seeming to glide along the ground, yet making an unholy racket as if they might burst into flames at any moment.
Long had they been out of our sight when we were all wandering further than we’d meant to, looking out when we should have looked back, and devouring things that had formerly disgusted us. That is, until we noticed that their tracks, which remained burned into the ground, enclosed us in a pen, and we turned on each other.
----
Young Karl Marx
By Chris West
The day he passed her the note, the number of spindles increased by 1,612,541. She took the slip of paper with a gaze like the autocracy of capital, and merely nodded. That night, at the boarding house, he wondered what she would make of the first line:
Yarn with which we neither weave nor knit is cotton wasted.
Despite the Ten Hours’ Act, he had trouble sleeping. The would-be capitalist tossed and turned like money and commodities in circulation. He counted jumping English cotton, woolen, silk and flax mills in his head, to no avail. The life process of society, the Poverty of Philosophy, even Smith and Ricardo, would hold no joy for him until he knew her quantitative determination of his relative value. That night he finally understood why it is said that the product of individual consumption is the consumer himself. The next morning at the University he faced her with eyes like smelting furnaces. She looked at him with the steadiness of constant capital and handed him a note back. He kept it in his pocket all day, treasuring it as if it contained the text of the Factory Acts Extension Act. That night, back at the boarding house, he opened it with shaking hands. Steady, he told himself. Remember: Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. The moment he read it, 338 cotton factories disappeared. It contained only a single line:
Out of nothing, nothing can be created.
M.E. Brown, MK Chavez, Eileen G'Sell, Daniel Grandbois, Chris West M.E. Brown is a writer and artist currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared in Muster Magazine. His first novel, Tenderling, is currently in progress.
MK Chavez writes about the beauty that can be found in ugliness. She has published several chapbooks Virgin Eyes, (Zeitgeist Press) Visitation, Next Exit #9 with john sweet, and Pinnacle (Kendra Special Editions) which is due out in October 2009. Most recent and upcoming publications include 580 Split, Zygote in My Coffee, and Down This Crooked Road: Modern Poetry From the Road Less Traveled. You can visit her online at www.littlebrownsparrow.com
Eileen G'Sell teaches at Ellis University and Washington University in St. Louis, and is an editor at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Recent and forthcoming work can be found in Boston Review, Conduit, Ninth Letter, and American Poetry Journal.
Daniel Grandbois is the author of the Believer Book Award Reader Survey Selection Unlucky Lucky Days and the art novel The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir. His work appears in Conjunctions, Boulevard, Fiction and elsewhere. Also a musician, he plays in three of the pioneering bands of "The Denver Sound": Slim Cessna's Auto Club, Tarantella, and Munly. He lives in Colorado.
Chris West works for a non-profit in San Francisco and marvels at cats, Beat Poetry and Star Trek while seeking a publisher for his first novel. His writing has appeared in Kitchen Sink, Morbid Curiosity and various online venues. His exploits, literary and other, can be followed at: http://chris-west.blogspot.com/
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|