Listen Hard and Hear the Ocean
by Barry Graham

For Claudia Smith

If I could lie there on the cool green floor and listen hard enough, I would sleep and seep and sleep and fall away, dead like possums or gone where insects go after a storm.

He’s moved so that I can see him. Fireflies flickering, and all that burned grass. If you listen hard enough, they begin to sound like rushing water. They can hear the ocean, even after they close the door. Fire, he says, fire. You aren’t supposed to say.

We hanged the cowardly women. They stink and then they cover up the stink. It seemed an okay way to fill up the long dirty time.

Then she asked me if I ever wondered what it felt like, to live someplace where there was no light, at the bottom of the sea. Cold and hard, a deep, sweet ache. I don’t. She’s shivering in between branches of our little tree. But I intend to look at it directly. Go out in the cold and walk to a bar, where there’s only a few and I don’t know them. The taste was awful, but it was what I craved. Stick with that one.

 

Minimize Me; I’d Be Terrible

for Nicolle Elizabeth

(Originally published in Ex Cathedra)

By the time I figured out what the smell was, they were already dropping the bomb, there was nothing I could do so I climbed to the roof and remembered the story you told me about setting tiny fires all over your apartment to keep out burglars.

We are on borrowed money, oxygen, and enthusiasm. Awooooogah awoooo awoaahh that’s whale talk for I love you. At the top they gave me a drug test and said I was hired as a temp I said I didn’t want it they said yes you did put on this football helmet and get ready for life. “Look at me, tell me I’m clean,” I said, and now, for the real thing, waving the frying pan above our heads. Jump in the line, rock your body in time, okay, I believe you. These hips, which we have spent most of our lifetime trying to minimize, are meant for baby holding.

He’s talking at me but all I keep thinking is seven green alligators, two purple hippos, three pink make it go aways. The answer is 50/50. I’d be terrible in your office. I could feel his ghost within my ribs, I hissed toward the coffee machine, what are you looking at. I am watching these vines grow from your ear and sprout across the ceiling, your chest is lifting, you are breathing like some sort of goddess I cannot get you to roll over only one of us is naked. Below our feet, there was wine in the castle, I snuck in to the servant’s quarters I said I’m the press here to interview Queen Anne Boleyn, we’ve discovered invitro, they said she went broke after the stock in her lace flowers plummeted I said I can be her son they said lady get out. I’m getting ready, I’m like this close.

***

I’m like poof it’s ten years ago but it didn’t count. The day we were going to have an affair there was a gigantic thunderstorm I should have listened. Sunday is the day, Christmas trees in heaven. Julie Andrews was dancing and singing it was cold we were on a hill in Park Slope by we I mean we and it was night she was in front of a graveyard Santa showed up with some serious looking reindeer they were really something they didn’t come near me he flew up into the sky I searched for the word for bottom of the toboggan and thought about slitting my neck. So Napoleon high-tailed it on out of there to run with the buffalo while Oedipus, bruised but not broken was left to win the Pulitzer. You are going to leave me for someone with a stronger scent, I said. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. I wanted to say, honey are you in for a surprise but you wouldn’t listen anyway, instead I thought live the dream, see how long she stays.

***

In that Jack London story, with the guy and the dog in snow, why didn’t he just send the dog running up the path for help? Draw an ascending line and walk it. I tell you this because I know you have left me for my best friend, only the latter is true. Oh this, this is nothing. You’ve changed your hair you’ve changed your face you’ve changed your bookshelf you’ve changed your day to day your coffee guy moved somewhere else you’ve changed how funny you were you’ve changed how you touch my hand you’ve changed how the hair on my neck doesn’t react to you anymore you’ve changed how you walk you’ve changed what you’ve done to me. I don’t know how we’re going to tell them I can’t make babies. The factory was out of small and big hearts, the only real size of actual hearts. You ever notice that unhappy settles in one part of your body and won’t leave? Threadbare and barren, and brave, Von Barren.

 

Dear Whatever Bloc, You need to stop publishing things I do not understand. What is all this Barry Graham nonsense. I bet you thought it sounded intelligent. I am going to read a different literary journal, one that has all its peas in a pod. Love, Every Single Reader   Dear Every Single Reader, No, we did not understand these collages at first, but after you read the author’s explanation, we think you will find all our peas properly podded. Quoth Barry: “To create the collages, I used every last line from all the individual pieces in a published collection of flash fiction/prose poems and I reshaped them into a new text entirely. I used the lines exactly as written, which is limiting. No substitutions, deletions, tense shifts, changes of point of view. It gets tricky. “I got the idea by accident, really. I remember reading Christopher Kennedy’s collection of flash fiction [Trouble with the Machine] and I felt part of my head blowing apart and it really forced me to reconsider the ideas I had about my own writing. Up until that point I was only writing poetry, I called myself a poet and everything I wrote I squeezed into that genre. My education and exposure to literature was very traditional. I studied William Carlos Williams and Dr. Seuss and Robert Lowell and other great poets, but there was no flash fiction. I remember reading TWTM and rereading it and rereading it until I forced myself to write fiction and think fiction, albeit very very short fiction. “So I was sitting around watching reruns of Law and Order: SVU a couple months ago, waiting for something inspiring to happen, because I couldn’t get shit for writing done, so I pulled out TWTM and started typing out the first lines of all the individual flashes, just to sort of serve as a prompt, then I did the same thing with the last sentences. But by accident I deleted words here and there and  I was only left with his last lines on the page and they sounded amazing smashed against each other, so I started playing around with them, trying to create a narrative, something cohesive. I understood by the very nature of it being a collage that it was going to be surreal in a sense, so that is what I went for. So I put the thing together and it just felt good. I read it and read it and I e-mailed Christopher and asked what he thought of the idea of me trying to get it published somewhere to sort of show my gratitude towards him and his contribution to flash fiction and he seemed pretty excited about it too. “That piece, ‘Another Strategy,’ was published in elimae. “From there the project was born, I began contacting flash fiction writers whose words I admired a great deal and asking their permission and they all seemed genuinely enthusiastic. The two collages here were derived from Claudia Smith’s The Sky is a Well and Other Stories and Nicolle Elizabeth’s Threadbare Von Barren; both chosen for their scarce, sometimes cryptic use of language, their ability to tell a powerful story using such few words.” Our peas are not only in a pod, but their wrinkles are aligned like wood grain, or like iron filings in one of those magnetic toys where you draw hair on a bald guy. *Most of Barry’s explanation was originally published in FRiGG. Love, Writers’ Bloc

 

BARRY GRAHAM is the editor-in-chief of DOGZPLOT. He is the last remaining descendant of the last remaining survivor of the Titanic. He also wrote the national virginity pledge and his grandfather was the first non-drafted Amishman to serve in the military during wartime. One of these things is made up... what?

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