Sean Lovelace is running right now, far. Other times he teaches at Ball State University. HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS is his flash fiction collection by Rose Metal Press. His works have appeared in Crazyhorse, Diagram, Sonora Review, Willow Springs, and so on.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu0uOONkX-E
As I rule I suggest you marry yourself first. Take a moment. OK. Today we will marry a chapbook with a domestic beer.
“Lost and Found” (elimae stories) is glow for the hammock, though I suggest an older model, one swaying for seasons and made of fishing line—as in cutting into flesh–and below it a brush pile with a brown rat you name Brown Rat. You feed Brown Rat crumbling Cheetos. I think these flashes are fragile, about to collapse, falling, as in you/me/us…They disintegrate you forward.
She’s ruined this before.
Abfulled Plank Road (Miller) since 1885, Icehouse pours to a golden yellow, basically the color of human urine in the later stages of renal failure, but don’t let my description (sorry, former RN here) put you off your feed. You probably have some hazy nostalgia—possibly college, a dorm room bathtub full of ice and balthazars of beer?
“I’m not very modern, I’m afraid,” she said.
Outdated things make me sad, like the word, “howdy.”
14. Sometimes people write stupid shit just hoping for a response. Example, at Huff: Comparing Dave Barry and David Foster Wallace…right. (Next week David Stoesz will examine a midnight dinner of two bottles of white wine [fling cork into air, don’t need it]/rooftop blanket making out/grappling versus a quick lunch at Cracker Barrel.)
2. Over at The Short Review: Richard Yates Collected Stories.
4. June 30 is Indy Underground Reading Series. Donald Ray Pollock, Andrew Scott, The Brick Windows. Music, words, alcohol–what do you need in life?
7. Ernaux’s autobiographical books are breathtaking in their level of disclosure and unflinching as they rehash real-life experiences—obsessive love, bereavement, abortion, marriage, illness, sexual jealousy—that are not bizarre or uncommonly tragic, nor by any stretch uplifting or inspirational in the Eat, Pray, Love vein.
Amazing expose of Annie Ernaux at The Second Pass. Do you know her well? You should. Summer is here–get to jumping.
A mind too active is no mind at all.
Drink at any dance.
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
A glass of beer first thing in the morning.
Grew wild, broke furniture, beat out windows.
His favorite bar: The Corner Unusual.
I may look like a beer salesman but I am a poet.
The garden is a river flowing south.
Racing the devil for Rainbow, a beer joint.
You smell like television.
Father was wailing. I deduced from the morning sun and moving flotsam that we were drifting slowly southward with the force of an unknown current. He slumped on the backseat of the wooden rowboat and I leaned forward grabbing his shirt to keep him from pitching overboard. Both of his hands had been severed at the wrist and the stumps had been tightly bound with duct tape. His normally withered forearms now bulged with an unsightly color. When they had pushed us out from the estuary on a falling tide before dawn I had been given only one oar. When I clearly noticed this at first light the humor wasn’t lost on me. I was equipped to row in circles with my left hand. The thumb of my right hand was missing and the pain lessened when I raised it high. In the early light I had seen a green or loggerhead turtle and took my thumb someone had stuffed in my pocket pitching it toward the beast but the turtle had submerged in alarm misunderstanding my good intentions. By midmorning the shore had arisen and I could see the coastline south of Veracruz. The current was carrying us toward Alvarado. My father woke from his latest faint. His face was too bruised for clear speech and now rather than wailing he bleated. His eyes made his request clear and I pushed him gently over the back of the boat. It was quite some time before he completely sunk. I would study the stinking fish scales and bits of dried viscera on the boat’s bottom and then look up and he would still be there floating in the current. And then finally I was pleased to see him sink. What a strange way to say goodbye to your father.
My friend recently received this rejection (?) from magazine-I-shall-not-name. Your opinion?
Dear (name withheld),
Thank you for submitting your work to the (name withheld)
While your submission made it into the later stages of my consideration. After having a chance to reread your submission, at least once aloud, I must tell you that I will not be able to use any of your poems in this upcoming issue.
I know that a rejection almost always seems to be a personal thing–but seriously, I am only rejecting the poems you sent in this submission. If you’re poems made it this far into the process then I think you possess the talent and I would recommend/encourage you submit during the next reading period.
Best,
She claimed he was my type, which I took to mean a little bit twisted.
A massive hollow swallowed.
Too drunk to stop.
I’m nihilistic, antagonistic, violent, horrible – but not obliterated, yet.
Room 453 smelled of beer, barbecue, and old leather.
The party was a bust, full of Valley chicks, jocks, and rockabillies.
Pig Mountain Valley in the middle of the South.
I prepared by swallowing a couple of quaaludes washed down with Jack Daniels.
Stirring the fiery liquid.
One drink away.
Light leeches out.
I am presenting the concept of creative nonfiction to intro writing students tomorrow. They will write their first exercise. Should I tell them to use qualifiers–“Perhaps, my mother said…” “As I remember it…”–or should I tell them to respect the reader: the contemporary reader obviously understands that CNF is flawed memory using flawed words.
11. Alexandra Chasin at the always glow zoran rosko vacuum player.
2. Question: Is Andy Warhol’s art on the moon?
19. Fady Joudah interview over at Willow Springs.
Nevertheless, it is just the idea that you store something you don’t want to throw away, your sense of existence—you store it and ignore it. Only when you move from that house do you check what you left in the attic and see what you want to take with you or throw away.
5. The words inside were solid, but the cover for Oxford American 2010 Best of the South sort of annoys me. Some type of Euro-model riding on the back of her adolescent brother? Is it the toy gun? The Tide clean T-shirt? Or the airbrushed/possibly perfectly placed strand of horizontal hair on her head? Something. It doesn’t click for me.