Untitled - NAP

NAP 3.3 YEAR 3 ISSUE 3 BRADLEY - SALIER - REDDEN NAP MAGAZINE & BOOKS INDIANAPOLIS, IN napnapnaps.com

R E M E M B E R THE MOTIONS YOU HAVE MOTIONED AND THE MOTIONS STILL AHEAD

CEMENT POND, L.L.C. SARAH JEAN GRIMM KATY GUNN NICOLAS JAMES HAMPTON ANNALEESE JOCHEMS DANIEL SCOTT PARKER URSULA VILLARREAL-MOURA DILLON J. WELCH

CEMENT POND, L.L.C.

[email protected]

#21- BLUE SUNSHINE

This town made famous by a mass vibration of squash in the field. I have never doubted my life was blessed. You remember the tone that summons the bats, but “[t]here is no way to stop the drum circle without inviting retaliation,” so we dangled our legs over the pit, played games from before the war. “The earth wants to hear some Moon Mullican.” I am proud I said this and will not back down. “Though what’s the point of playing fantastic blues if it can’t include your eyes, the child trapped in the orgone box accumulating an outsized life force?” Once, I tried to live in a temporary shelter in your yard. Cut fox weevils from under my skin with a penknife. You came out to say your bedroom is spectral: there’s a diorama where the Monitor still battles the Merrimac along the rivers of toothpaste, without loss of blood or armor. “The bobcat is still out here, asleep in an iron lung under endless stars.”

#22-TIRE SWING+GASOLINE+CLOUDS

People struggle to believe there’s a voice still trapped in the ice. They heard someone was running topless down the street, but are disappointed it’s me. You have a secret “but it’s not about me; it’s about me getting from one story to another.” Anyway, it works. A raven lands on your shoulder and no one asks if it’s your familiar. The houses are turning dark. “Spengler said the west is doomed, but what about the peasant dances, the guys selling stereos out of car trunks?” We survived the night, stepping over working girls blindfolded on the lawn. They were showing a movie on a bedsheet: a fleshy periscope surfaces on Killer Lake, blinks at us, and disappears. “No name for what follows, just glottal sighs, the audience holding hands.” “On our street,” you said “the truth is not a fog, but steam from coins burning in the fountain.” We sit through long flashes of silence, then a beautiful woman dressed as Melville begins talking about the sea.

SARAH JEAN GRIMM

www.sarahjeangrimm.com

UNTITLED AGAIN

The sun through your window imitates a Rothko painting I think I saw once. The sun paints in panels too. The sun uses broad brushstrokes. The sun is a plagiarist. After Rothko, children can’t color rectangles in school the same way any more. Coloring outside the lines is still OK and considered a sign of also thinking outside the lines, but it’s like how after Magritte you start seeing bowler hats everywhere, and men smoking pipes wearing bowler hats, and men smoking pipes wearing bowler hats while eating apples. Fruit never means just fruit. It almost always means something else. It almost always means sex. And to take a bite of fruit is a violent thing. You can go to prison for enjoying fruit too much. What I mean to say is, you’re a real peach. You go be a peach and I will be a set of teeth and the sun can be the sun and I will lick you good luck every morning because it’s hard to be a peach out there.

KATY GUNN

katygunn.blogspot.com

BARRETTE

Scout Helena coughs up river pebbles. They glisten with river slime and body slime in her hands. Body slime as some of us know is called mucous. A call is made for Scouts who display the Junior First Aid badge. Is it bleeding? Have we applied pressure? Is the wound dirty with sticks or mud? It is dirty with stupid pebbles, says the head First Aid Scout Percelle. It is not a nice thing to say. The situation shows bad emotional and physical health within the Troop, which is two strikes for everybody. In the daily arguments, six Junior Scouts break the Girl Scout Law before Scout Angela, that Scout voted most likely to lead an expedition, throws her largest ribbon barrette on the ground in protest and says everybody has the stupidest nose and we should have purified the water.

PERMISSION

On the open eyes hike Scout Laurie finds a wedding ring. Scout Bella finds twelve wine cooler bottles without caps and a Virginia Slims box without Virginia Slims. It is too bad Scout Bella did not find the bottle caps, or we could have made magnets, belts, bracelets, sculptures, or earrings to wear with our guardians’ permission.

Scouts Ruthie and Shelley find a plastic bag full of Get Moving! badges with only the Camper badges already earned. Brownie Scout Shelley climbs up a tree with the bag in her teeth because she wants a little respect around here. It is a tough life in the wilderness and nobody gets everything they want! we shout up the tree. Scout Bella yells that Scout Shelley should stop being a damn bitch, but we all agree that was a little out of line and Scout Bella has to stand on a pine stump for five minutes with her arms horizontal. She gets an Independence badge just like everybody else when we knock the bag down, though, because it is a damn tough life and we all deserve a taste of the sauce.

NICOLAS JAMES HAMPTON

njhampton.weebly.com

YOUR IDEA OF COMMUNICATION IS SAILING TO THE SOUND OF NO ONE DRIVING AWAY

And now, for my next trick, I will play back the punctuation you built in a bottle while drunk and broken on a model gravel driveway I left as a tiny oceanliner’s maiden voyage leaves you and that bottle in your wild hand to sail to some deserted island of lost memories and perhaps entertaining such running recursive thoughts in writing is a writer’s attempt at avoiding writing, only leaving the Ars Unpoetica to cryptically underdetail disamibiguities as though the only truth in any sharp piece of art is the truth that art can’t tell you, truthfully reaching through this bottleneck with cold hooks on long rods, dressing you in tornness and jeans and a ragged tank top, topping your small plastic figure off with a miniature bottle of the same bottle of El Toro you’re drowning in, the same bottle I built this diorama in as my tweezers reach inside again, placing a grain of sand for each and every rock of gravel in this speck-like facsimile of what used to be our driveway, your driveway, or some guy’s driveway we rented from somebody, that driveway you screamed couldn’t be

my fucking driveway, and as these statements and the Droste effect are cheap products of vanity, creations using the same careful hooks and cold rods as their creators, I place myself next to you in a badass leather jacket with my leg halfway over the hog for posterity because, in reality, I was really wearing skinny jeans with a matching jacket and never have I ever owned a motorcycle, but I did once, when I was younger, kinda make a moped look the same as a sorta small Harley if seen with a slight bent, like a ship inside a bottle breaking, or a diorama of Hiroshima built into the hanger of Enola Gay, or a gift shoppe you have to walk through to exit Macy’s, or some other Russian doll type emptiness we sell in America where the corporations eat their own tails and I digress from my digressions shattered in these bottles and back to the bottle swinging in your hand while wondering what else that bottle’s breaking, what titanic cracks running through it and your body, what has left its unsinkable across sea gravel lining your belly, what recursive art

commemorates leaving, what genetic memories don’t ask or speak but scream symphonies of whimpering, a choir of cribs dreaming of careers in interior designing a better broken home as his tires peel out on a thousand tiny shards of driveway and glittering split-leveled bottles for little soprano girls are barely heard in the back of the bottle in your hand, and funny how I echo in this bottle belonging to you dad, funny how I can’t recall this beginning, funny how snakes were present before we entered eden, and funny who we find coiled before the quince drops a mild disagreement over all those soon to be global thermal nuclear gift shops and all Barbies cloister inside themselves as Kens leave them in Macy’s with nothing and I, inside all these bottles, drop this bottle and somewhere in Mexico the whole goddamn El Toro Factory shatters into a thousand tiny plastic red hats and long rods with tiny hooks pull out of our world broken where a bomb dropped and we watch a thousand paper cranes unfolding God’s self consuming hand finally pouring our tiny ship of ghosts into a giant sea. Tada!

ANNALEESE JOCHEMS

[email protected]

WHEN I RUN I AM A WILD CONFUSED GOOSE my nose does not comply with any kind of symmetry and when i smile my face becomes a pizza of nose and yellow teeth. if you pick off and throw away the nose all you’re left with is teeth, sorry if there were rose petals i would squash them, but that’s irrelevant because there are no rose petals. i am a goose with my feet on fire. i am in the ocean, in the bog and in the forest, i will trape mud all through your house. i am the weeds suffocating your garden. i am the dancing of the deranged. this is not about skin that feels like talcum powder because talcum powder is not skin. this is how much blood can rush to a person’s head in thirty seconds.

DANIEL SCOTT PARKER

danielsparker.tumblr.com

SLEEPING BEAUTY [FULL MOVIE] IS AVAILABLE AT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_ qf8IPTq0o You are swimming in a swimming pool deep in the woods. You have been underwater for years. You have been underwater for so many years that your daughter has grown up, married Freddie Prinze, Jr., and moved to Akron to open an IKEA. All the walls of the pool are made of glass. When you swim close to one, you can see your reflection. That’s when you see someone behind you in a swimming pool next door, because there are no trees in these woods, there are only swimming pools. You swim to the other side and see that it is an old lady. I need to talk to you, you try and say to her through the glass, but she is dead. ‘What can you tell me about souls?’ you ask, inspecting your fingertips for wrinkles. When I pull you up out of the water, it’s like you don’t even recognize me. What the hell are you doing?! you scream. It was never supposed to happen like this, I say.

URSULA VILLARREALMOURA

@Ursulaofthebook

DAILY DICTIONARIES

Over tacos, Zach tells us he won the 7th grade spelling bee with lingerie. That word catapulted him from pickedon pipsqueak to winner extraordinaire. His wife bristles a little at his history, raking a metal fork up and down her napkin like she’s revving up a wind-up car. Zach continues painting the picture. He was wearing oiled cowboy boots and emerald green Girbaud jeans as he stood in front of the student body, trembling, spelling. While his tattooed hands gesticulate in excitement, I remember my own Girbauds, purchased at Dillard’s and brought home in a crinkly brown bag. Before the win, Zach says he was trailer park trash, but his mom insisted people would respect them if he won. She quizzed him daily with dictionaries until he could spell hundreds of words. At their kitchen table, he prepared for the verbal tsunami, knee-high in words like rhinestone, maneuver, handkerchief, encyclopedia, and chauffeur. When the local newspaper interviewed him afterward, asking what it felt like to win, he crunches a taco shell and says he called the entire ordeal euphoric. For weeks he bargained in championship jargon, but no one at school dared shit-talk him. No adolescent arms launched rocks at his family’s trailer home.

DILLON J. WELCH

ratrapss.tumblr.com

YAHOO ANSWERS TELLS ME EVERYTHING WILL PROBABLY This morning I pricked the center of my palm on a bent nail, watched a small track of blood run through a smaller crack in my hand like a snake in a skinny trench. Tadd, 15, from Texas says he stepped on shattered glass when he was sinking his feet into mud at the lake. He says it stung for a minute, then the pain subsided. I’m wondering how long it takes for a supernova to burn out, & Tadd is sitting in some mud in his memories & worrying about soles. Maria from Vermont thinks that pain is just pent up kinetic energy. She thinks anguish is hallucination, thinks ‘fuck it & strap a bandage on that bitch.’ Tadd remembers a time when he was six & singing karaoke to his dog. He says his dog could never really understand the lyrics but loved to listen anyway. His ears would perk up like hoisted flags. Like the raised blades of a disposable razor. Like a little sailboat expanding its collapsed body, saying hello wind, hello sun, hello shards of glass beneath mud.

YAHOO ANSWERS EXPECTS NOTHING, GETS NOTHING IN RETURN BeanMama22 asks the internet if a stillborn baby can feel itself dying before its death. She says she needs to know, can’t sleep at night thinking that the lump in her gut knew of shared pain, communal psychosis, a staggered set of breaths & the stagnant heart of another. BeanMama22 is clutching to the paneling on each side of the webpage. She sees ads for electronic cigarettes & facial scrubs. She pulls another clump of hair from the base of her scalp. Tim from Los Angeles says that stillborns experience next to nothing before death, that their bodies are merely vessels of little electrical firings. He surrounds the phrase with quotation marks: “little electrical firings.” BeanMama22 remembers a still life painting she saw when she lived in the city. She remembers the peach walls of a nursery, a cradle & mobile—all calm & unmoving. She imagines sitting on the floor in that room, the carpet meshing to meet the shape of her weight. ‘There’s meaning in this,’ she thinks, as she pushes the cradle with the base of her knuckles.

YAHOO ANSWERS EXPLAINS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BLOOD & WINE “How do you get blood stains out of cur tains?” - Mike, 44, Kansas Mike, 44, from Kansas says he was out for a bite with his wife. He says the wait wasn’t too long & the surf & turf was subpar. He says it was oily— the surf—& that last time he checked, fish wasn’t supposed to be oily. Mike, 44, from Kansas says that the drive home was short, says they took a back road from the restaurant, a slight right at the laundromat. He says he took a handful of dinner mints because he likes to keep them in a bowl on the counter at home. He says that one time, his wife suggested they buy a bag of dinner mints from the grocers. He says she doesn’t suggest much anymore. Mike, 44, from Kansas thinks that red meat is for men, but seafood is for gentlemen. He thinks that the ocean’s spritz can reach as far inland as it wants, that geographical limitations don’t exist & that people only cite them because they’re too lazy to make a break for the nearest coast. Mike’s wife told him once that Cleveland is closer than Daytona. She said that it’s nice there, in Cleveland. She said

her family has lived there for years & that she’d love to see her old house, the knots in the wooden steps, the screened-in porch where scraps of limp moths lie in compliance. When Mike, 44, from Kansas asks for a glass of red wine, he pictures the beaches & the sun peeling his skin back, inch by inch.