Editors' Notes

Maria Damon and Michelle Greenblatt
Jim Leftwich and Michelle Greenblatt
Sheila E. Murphy and Michelle Greenblatt

A Visual Conversation on Michelle Greenblatt's ASHES AND SEEDS with Stephen Harrison, Monika Mori | MOO, Jonathan Penton and Michelle Greenblatt

Letters for Michelle: with work by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Jeffrey Side, Larry Goodell, mark hartenbach, Charles J. Butler, Alexandria Bryan and Brian Kovich

Visual Poetry by Reed Altemus
Poetry by Glen Armstrong
Poetry by Lana Bella
A Eulogic Poem by John M. Bennett
Elegic Poetry by John M. Bennett
Poetry by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
A Eulogy by Vincent A. Cellucci
Poetry by Vincent A. Cellucci
Poetry by Joel Chace
A Spoken Word Poem and Visual Art by K.R. Copeland
A Eulogy by Alan Fyfe
Poetry by Win Harms
Poetry by Carolyn Hembree
Poetry by Cindy Hochman
A Eulogy by Steffen Horstmann
A Eulogic Poem by Dylan Krieger
An Elegic Poem by Dylan Krieger
Visual Art by Donna Kuhn
Poetry by Louise Landes Levi
Poetry by Jim Lineberger
Poetry by Dennis Mahagin
Poetry by Peter Marra
A Eulogy by Frankie Metro
A Song by Alexis Moon and Jonathan Penton
Poetry by Jay Passer
A Eulogy by Jonathan Penton
Visual Poetry by Anne Elezabeth Pluto and Bryson Dean-Gauthier
Visual Art by Marthe Reed
A Eulogy by Gabriel Ricard
Poetry by Alison Ross
A Short Movie by Bernd Sauermann
Poetry by Christopher Shipman
A Spoken Word Poem by Larissa Shmailo
A Eulogic Poem by Jay Sizemore
Elegic Poetry by Jay Sizemore
Poetry by Felino A. Soriano
Visual Art by Jamie Stoneman
Poetry by Ray Succre
Poetry by Yuriy Tarnawsky
A Song by Marc Vincenz


Join our Facebook group!

Join our mailing list!


The Perfect Night for Open Air Travel
by Pamela Kearney

At five am, Helen Stanilaus's neighbor slams his Dead River Propane Truck into her picket fence. The tire thumps against the front gate and then knocks it over with a snarl. The truck rolls into her front yard.

"Shit," her neighbor says when he jumps out of his vehicle. He stands surveying the damage, his cab door open, "O Come All Ye Faithful" blasts from the interior of the truck.

"Shit," Helen says as she stumbles out the front door, still half-asleep. Shit. Last week he plowed through her mailbox. The week before last, he cracked one of her birch trees with his Pontiac Sunbird.

"Well then I will come back later to retrieve my things," he says. He lopes across the street to his house, packaged with red foil and tied with blinking lights.

"Wait!" The porch is ice slick and Helen slides around it. Her feet are bare.

The man, her neighbor, pulls off his red cap with the white fur trim and waves it at her. "Merry Christmas," he says. He disappears inside.

"It's not Christmas, you crackpot. Get your propane truck out of my front yard!"

Helen slips back into her living room. She wraps her feet in towels and then mashes her old down coat all over them. The open propane truck still screams, "O come let us adore Him." Helen is wide awake: she tugs on her snow boots and skids across her short yard.

Clamoring into the cab of the truck, Helen bangs at the dashboard until she finds the knob which makes the chorus stop. She sits there and watches the snow fall. Not much snow has accumulated. If more had piled up, the truck might have hit a snow bank and not her fence.

This cannot go on. Across the street in her neighbor's yard, a crèche, protected by a glass bell jar, glows. The figures inside are mechanically animated: Mary lifts up a baby Jesus whose arms flap like a bird's. A sheep and a cow orbit around the manger like furry planets. And Joseph, the husband of Mary falls back, break dances on his elbows in front of Mother and Child. Maybe he is having an epileptic fit, Helen thinks. Or perhaps he is just excited now that he can enjoy the luxury of Mary's flesh once more. Joseph may suddenly have access to his wife's body again. After the whole extramarital God fling.

Helen does not want to think about husbands who might actually sexually desire their wives. Her husband Bill moved out of their farmhouse last fall to live in the barn with his dog team. Bill mushes around in the snow on a sled. The dogs pull him and the sled in and out of the trees. Helen decided she did not even want to try to reason with him. She was over it.

"Helen, I just don't want contact with human beings anymore, "Bill told her when he moved into the barn.

"Okay Bill."

Helen withdrew all the money in their joint Dreyfus account and bought a house on the coast of Maine. It was an impulse purchase. At the time, the contract closed in late October, she did not know she would be living across the street from the "year around Christmas people." Helen just thought they put up their decorations a little early. Now in March, her corner of the street still flashes red and green 24 hours a day. She called the Mayor's office to see if there wasn't an ordinance against such an eternal display.

"Nope. No ordinance. We don't have many rules in Maine. You are not from around here are you?"

"Nope." But now she is stuck here. At least she does not have to live with her cuckoo husband anymore.

Helen shivers in the cab of the propane truck. She slides down and goes into her house. Inside, the blinds are always closed. Helen does not want to watch the jumping Joseph through the glass. The windows on the east side of her house face the Atlantic Ocean. Helen keeps the blinds to these windows closed too. The ocean is too abstract for her right now: it reminds her of "The Future" or "Destiny" or "The Inevitable." Such vast concepts overwhelm her. She only handles small, finite things.

Helen is no longer sleepy.

She drinks vodka and Tangerine Emergen-C with a splash of water, neat, for breakfast. This is her good morning energy drink. Tangerine is her favorite flavor and Stoli is her favorite vodka so she throbs along. The fire in the wood stove smacks against the iron; the morning sun pops its orangey head like a pattypan squash over the rooftops.

She thinks about what she must accomplish. Today she will finish the painting of the two-headed whale swirling in a sea of flames which engulf the Quoddy Head Lighthouse.

Helen's artwork is not that popular here in Eastport, Maine.

Helen has a penchant for the violent and the incongruous. If she won't alter her vision, she may have to yank her paintings off the walls of the Commons Collective Gallery. A few weeks ago, the chubby woman at the front desk of the Commons Art Shop, where Helen displays her work, told her this. They sell a lot of seagull sculptures made out of lobster shells there. The everyday tourist consistently overlooks Helen's paintings.

"Can't you fashion whales out of mussel shells? Or paint sweet-faced plovers on a white empty beach?" The round woman at the Commons asked, her small eyes swam around like Koi in the pond of her glasses.

"No," Helen said.

"Frankly Helen your paintings alarm tourists. People do not come to the Maine coast for an existential experience."

Helen faces financial ruin. She might have to file for bankruptcy.

* * *

Before she begins her work day, Helen must clean her brushes which lay in hard gold acrylic halos on the red Formica counter in the kitchen. They look like stick angels clinging together. Helen does not want to disconnect them.

Instead, she slashes open a new bag of sable brushes and crushes the bag and breaks one of the brushes. "I want to kill my husband." Helen says this out loud. She scrambles to her feet and looks frantically around as if she has just released an extraterrestrial beetle which might eat the rafters of her small house.

"I want to kill my husband." She breaks all the other brushes in the half-opened bag. Let the roof collapse. Helen drinks a little bit more vodka, straight. Helen paints with the stubs of the brushes and adds dorsal fins like knifes to the whale's back and teeth like long needles to the whale's double mouths. I will never sell this painting, Helen thinks.

It's a very good painting.

She pauses briefly to look out the front window—the propane truck is still in her yard.

Helen's hands cramp up from smashing the very short brushes around the canvas. She decides she will walk to L. Wadsworth's Hardware & General Store to look for new brushes which sometimes lean in small receptacles at the back of the shop.

Besides, she wants to talk to someone. Helen has not talked to anyone in weeks except her crazy neighbor. She practices her voice a little bit as she walks down Washington Street towards Water. She says, "Brushes" and "Where" and "Are" and each word flashes like a piece of money. Or floats like an air balloon. Or collects like a swarm of bees which buzzes briefly around the hive of her lungs and then escapes.

No brushes lounge at the back of the store. The entire art section has been denuded. A sign says, "Artists come back in May. Sorry for any Inconvenience."

Well, then I will have to buy a light bulb or something, Helen thinks.

She zigzags through the narrow tall aisles which zoom above her head like catacombs. Picking up a roll of duck tape and an Air Wick, she smashes into things. The noise reverberates like a wheelbarrow thrown down a sewer hole. Just plunge in Helen and choose something, Helen says to herself.

The clerk rushes towards her, his shoulders pull forward around his tense neck as if tugged by invisible magnets. His jowls are the color of an over boiled cauliflower.

"Miss, may I help you find something?"

"A plunger, do you sell plungers here?"

"A toilet plunger?"

Helen nods. Where did that come from?

She likes the feel of the plunger when he hands it to her—its heft and substantiality—the straight wooden shaft and the flange, like black lips that O at her. She brandishes it around a bit.

"Oh, oh, oh," The clerk says.

"Can you kill a husband with this?"

"I can't recommend anything for that activity." The clerk's face blanches to the point of disintegration. His hands tremble as he charges her $9.62.

Helen won't be able to have a civilized conversation in that store anymore. No matter.

She must stick to the day's original plan which did not include buying a toilet plunger. Her toilet is a fine machine. Although she just might smear paint over the plunger's rubbery head and crush it down onto a large stretched canvas, creating vermillion flying saucers which carpet bomb the town of Eastport, Maine.

For now, Helen throws the plunger down the basement stairs.

Helen trots to the IGA up at the point where the road shoots out of town. Today is the first day of spring but the falling snow whacks at her. She buys a rotisserie chicken there and a package of Stouffer's stuffing and a box of Idaho Potato Spuds. And a bottle of Fleismann's vodka since she is short of funds for the good stuff. She already splurged on the plunger. She intended to create some small feast to celebrate the first day of spring: she hoped to "magic it up."

She is not hungry after all.

The pudgy clouds swallow the sun like a baby aspirin.

* * *

Helen picks at the chicken carcass. Helen stands over the carcass and peels the meat from the bone and stacks it in little meat teepees on the table. She paints the chicken skeleton violet. Helen wants to know when eccentricity becomes plain old madness. She wants to wave at the border guard.

A snow plow flashes its yellow light all over the thin blinds of Helen's dining room like a marauding UFO. Helen's body lights up for a moment, a jaundiced doll painting chicken bones lavender. Helen's dining room and bedroom and living room are all one room. She has closed off the upstairs and the den to save energy and cost. The fire flattens out in the wood stove. She pulls the comforter off the futon and curls up on the floor around the heater vent. It is only 3 p.m.

At eight p.m., she wakes up. She flips through a few of the blinds at her front window and peeks outside. The propane truck is no longer in her front yard. Christmas lights blink. A new disturbing decoration stands on the roof across the street. A six foot tall Santa Claus statue looms at the edge of the sloping roof. Helen thinks it is a Santa: He is not fat but a long white beard and white hair flip about in the wind; he is wearing black rubber boots and red pants and a green flannel shirt. It stares directly down at her with wide incandescent plastic eyes. It is lit up from inside.

This is clearly harassment.

She can't stay in her house one more minute: she may torch the thing.

It is karaoke night at the Sloppy Lobster Sports Bar. Helen hates this bar but Arthur Commeau might be there. He loves to sing in public even though he has a voice that can drop a housefly in midflight. She has not seen him since February as he is going through a long manic phase which includes a lot of optimism.

* * *

Optimism exhausts Helen. Arthur's artwork is not happy: he paints gaunt women running in tunnels with long pubic hair floating up like seaweed and naked men stacked up in dry boats in the desert. He is a famous artist so he sells his artwork in New York City and online. Arthur does not have to grovel at the Commons although this is where Helen met him because he bought two of her paintings there and then asked to look at more and then asked to look at Helen. At 64, he is exactly twice her age and not a romantic prospect but Helen likes him. Helen likes him a lot.

Slithering into her tight blue jeans, Helen grabs her purse and walks into the night. No one is out there. The streets are as empty as Pompeii after the lava hardened into black peaks. Small lights funnel out of deep houses.

Helen spots Arthur right away in the murky bar; he is standing on one of the tables, screeching at the top of his lungs, "Jane says, have you seen my wig around? I feel naked without it."

He is still off his medication then, Helen thinks; the night promises to be a wild one. When he sees her, Arthur leaps off the table, jump trots in her direction.

"Christ Helen, where have you been? I need to buy a few more of your paintings. Let's get out of this cheesy joint."

He spins her around and guides her right back out into the night.

"Let's take a drive. Look, the cruiser awaits us." Arthur's convertible PT Cruiser is parked across three spaces in front of the Peavy Library. Thankfully, the top is up. In January, Arthur took Helen for a ride in a snowstorm with the top rolled down.

At the time he said, "Imagine you're in a troika, Helen—imagine three Percherons and ringing sleigh bells as we charge for the Menshikov Palace or the Baltic Sea. Why live in Maine if you don't want to?"

Helen's throat ached for three days after that adventure.

Tonight, the cruiser is warm though and smells of oil paint and turpentine. Good familiar scents.

"Well, well, well. The elusive Helen of Eastport has resurfaced. What have you been doing? Having an affair? Rolling around in some decadent den with a handsome Paris." Arthur crunches the cruiser's right set of tires up and over the curb.

"Den? Look at my hands Arthur. They are still violet. I painted a chicken carcass purple this afternoon. I think I am going insane."

"Purple is a reasonable color for a chicken carcass. I probably would have chosen the same hue. Helen." Arthur is quiet as he takes Route 190 out of town. He pats her head quickly as he might touch a strange Rottweiler.

"You are right Arthur. I need an affair."

"Your husband is a madman."

"I need a quick little thing. Or a long entanglement which destroys everybody."

"Don't look at me. Parts don't work right down there anymore. Besides, I still love my wife."

"I know you love your wife. You explained all this to me before. Arthur."

"I have this colostomy bag which inhibits romantic endeavors."

"Arthur. That thing is a figment of your imagination. I don't believe it exists for one minute."

"It is a spiritual colostomy bag. I can't just throw it away."

"Well, well, well. That is too much for me. Let's just drive and not talk."

* * *

Somewhere near Jonesboro, Arthur stops the car. "Look at the sky Helen. No clouds." He opens the door and pulls her out. He is still handsome over six feet tall, slender and he wears his long silver hair in a braid down his back.

"There are a billion stars and a fat diabetic moon. Why fret about anything?" He grabs her two hands in his and dances around with her in a lumpy pasture which might be a blueberry field in a few months.

He takes his shoes and socks off. "Not much snow. Helen, take off your shoes. The earth is almost warm."

Arthur pulls the collapsible hood down on his car. "Don't say a word Helen. It is the perfect night for open air travel. Wear this." He throws a woolen poncho at Helen which settles down on her like a heavy parachute.

"Spring is an icy bullock. But look at the sky Helen—it's spread out before us like a hand woven serape. Stare at it or sleep through it but just don't think about anything."

They drive to Portsmouth, New Hampshire where they walk along the boardwalk and find a trailer-like hut of a restaurant called Eggs All Day Long.

Helen sleeps on the way home.

* * *

And this is the way their evenings unfold: Arthur picks Helen up at about six p.m. and then they drive through the night. "Choose some place on the map Helen; something with an uncommon name. No more painting bones by yourself, alone." They visit Meddybemps and Mattawamkeag and Grand Lake Matagamon. They dance in fields and picnic on heaths. Together, Helen and Arthur watch the snow retreat. Much of the snow is gone—but braids of snow, plaits of snow, ridges, shells, twists, knots and spines of snow still remain here and there.

Helen can tell Arthur's rhythms are slowing down. He is quiet, he does not sing, he drives slower. One night near Pocomoonshine Mountain, he sobs uncontrollably.

"Next week is the anniversary of my wife's death. May third. Five years." His eyes shine slippery bright.

"Arthur, I—"

"You must drive with me to Hardwick, Vermont next week. Where she grew up."

But Helen flees Eastport to avoid Arthur. She checks into the International Motel in Calais; she uses the money collected by the Commons Art Gallery where Arthur bought three more of her paintings. He leaves long weepy messages on her answer machine which she listens to from the motel phone. On May third, Helen drives to the Steer N' Stein in downtown Calais. A live band plays there a few nights a week the motel manager tells her.

Helen drinks Hula Hulas, vodka and brandy and rum with a splash of orange juice. She hulas a little bit herself on the dance floor.

A handsome boy hulas with her. A young man from Manitoba who has just enrolled in the boat school in Eastport. He will build boats.

"What is Eastport like?' He asks.

" Oh," Helen says. He presses her into his body. He has green eyes and black dreadlocks.

Every image prisms through a glass doorknob which wiggles and wiggles.

She follows him back to his motel room at the Airporter Inn although she knows she should not be driving. They grapple a bit and then Helen remembers a brief moment of penetration.

A few hours later, she sits in the motel chair and watches him sleep. His face is beautiful and innocent, so young that Helen's throat closes up. His penis is erect again, a deep mahogany color and his pubic hair glistens like black ice. At one time, Helen liked to look at her husband's naked body while he was sleeping.

Helen leaves without waking the boy up. She shivers in the parking lot in front of her Nissan. A pink neon plane above the motel sign flashes its flamingo light across the wet asphalt. It must have rained while she was in bed with the boy.

There's no airport anywhere near here.

Helen is still drunk. She slides behind the wheel of her car and thinks. She will drive just up the street and stop by the side of the road, tip her seat back and sleep until she is sober. Driving south on Coastal Route 1, away from the International, Helen does not pull over. She wants to go home; she wants to talk to Arthur. Fog swirls in front of her windshield until she feels like she is drifting on a white sea. She rolls down all the windows to let the cold air in. To sober her up. Mist circulates around her. The damp panics her some as her wet hands slip around the steering wheel. But she knows where she is going, taking the causeway over Carryingplace Cove into town, into Eastport past the IGA and the Irving Gas Station and the Bangor Savings Bank. The familiar landmarks calm her.

So the moment of impact takes her by surprise. The body clubs her windshield just as she turns up her street. She sees an astonished face and silver hair and two fists which bang the glass as the body flips over the hood and falls down the passenger side of her car and then under. The limbs catch and then drum the bottom of the car like sticks beating a percussion instrument.

Helen does not stop. Passing her house, she glances in the rear view mirror; the body crumbles in the middle of the road. She rolls into the Saint Andrew's Parish yard a few blocks away. She cannot breathe—the air slams hard against the back of her throat. Her hands tingle and tremble up in front of her face. She cannot control them. Every muscle in her body cramps up. Helen, think.

Manslaughter.

Had Arthur been waiting for her at the front of her street?

But maybe Arthur is not dead but dying now and this thought terrifies her more than anything. She must get back to him. She will go to jail.

Helen must save Arthur no matter what. The muscles in her body will not obey her. She can't lift her arm to turn the key in the ignition. Every second crushes her. She abandons the car and jogs back through the small dark alley and over the gravel and the unkempt vacant lot. Light from the streetlamp swarms all over the body. The torso is cut in two pieces. One rubber boot is jammed over the neighbor's fencepost.

Helen leans over the part with the head still attached to it. She does not recognize the face immediately.

* * *

"Fuck," Helen says. This thing has never been alive. The red pants. The flannel shirt.

She walks to her house and unlocks the door and turns on the lights.

She can't just leave it there. What if it is Arthur? She paces back and forth. What if it is Arthur? She misjudged. She did not see correctly. She runs back out into the night, leaving her front door wide open. She stands over the thing in two parts. The Santa from across the street.

Helen tucks a piece under each of her arms. The white wig falls off and she picks it up and loops it around her fist. Once inside, she examines the body. She removes the filthy clothes. How long had it been lying in the street and how had it sprung up at her? The body is made of wood and the arms and legs are segmented so they flop around a bit. Twisting apart a hanger, Helen wires the two parts together with it. The hips and legs are loose and unnaturally mobile but once again attached to the top half of the body.

Helen dresses it in her big plastic rain pants and her husband's seal skin jacket. The one she stole from him. The one that still smells like him. She combs the wig and ties it into a pony tail and fits it once again over the wooden head. She props the body up in the recliner near her art table. It looks at her.

No messages wait for her on her answer phone: the little red light does not flash on the top of the machine. Helen's house is darker than usual even though she has turned all the lights on. She can't figure it out right away. She opens all the blinds which have been shut since October. She can't tolerate the new darkness. Now, she sees that her neighbor's house across the street is black. No lights shine. The figures in the crèche bell jar are missing. Helen paces back and forth. Everything is changing once again.

Helen cannot stand the fake body propped up in the recliner looking at her. She pulls it off the chair and stands over it. Crouching down on her hands and knees, she slides one knee between its legs. She rips the beard from its chin and rubs the adhesive residue off the plastic surface which encases its head. It has a placid, simple face which lacks all desire.

Helen shakes it and then places it in a kitchen chair. She scrapes the chair and the body across the floor until it faces out a window looking to the east. A gray scrap of dawn crawls up the harbor. The body can watch the fishing boats come back from the open sea. It has the best view in the house.



Pin It       del.icio.us