HARD ON THE BEAVER

When I was young, I loved The Beaver. Family held by neat smiles. June kissed sons, brisk tenderness. Ward spouted genial wisdom. Beaver’s foibles were corrected with laughter.

No one could be hard on the Beaver.

I came from fusillades across constrained rooms. Bad mother. Lecherous asshole. I picked up ruined dreams and dreamed of dissonant chords I’d never play after the piano went out the window. 

Cocktail glasses littered intimacy. 

I got older. Dissected the Cleavers. Ward yelled often. He apologized but held brooding energy. I envisioned Ward a drunk, June a pill-popper. Possibly a drunk too. Her smile was too perfect.

Everyone was hard on Beaver.

I still want smiles. But only hear rehearsed lines. 

At least they’re neat.

\\\

Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. Yash’s work is forthcoming or has been published in WestWard Quarterly, Café Lit, and Ariel Chart, among others.

PISS ALL SUNS

Fuck the facts, there’s no romance in a parabola. You win.

Imprison me, you slime; ratchet up those hiccups / right and wrong 

Are dual suppositories of proletarianism / and I’m all that’s left.

Adagio, Adagio: We are the offspring of a chokehold, and I will double the carbon.

But the white-out is because of my love! Fuck the white-out.

/

Bubble, calm down, quiet the churn, covet the target off my gauge.

The meniscus of computational death is too black to fertilize my verge.

But what you did with your fingers, split me apart, infest me /

Go King. Step to the sum of the stars in the hairy shine / 

Gawker. Sub-Sumer Queen / jungle warps your schematics. /

Go you puss. Shine for me sweetish vibrating siren. Glow for me sun.

I walk into clouds / brass knuckled / screw you, such awful ache of white.

/

Harken up to audition as a freshly plucked calf / Yawn.

/ More jungle. Blood staining the leaves. Tutorial violence. BDSM. 

/ Shine up boy / Bloom up, good to go, shade of brambles /

Sprinkle your choice wherever your walk / Shine up, boy / 

musty linen and anesthetic grass / good to go, boy, shine up!

/ 

Skulked by akashic torques, bounded by versatility / 

So bleaked by the fissures of a deeper torpor / with and without host /

/ Uncovered, loathed, and then sustained / 

as a mélange of oxymoronic dance scenes / in kestrel wombs /

or under various subjectivist taxonomies of symbolic submission / 

Chorus, shower of frogs, choir, torrent of flames!!!

/ 

I’m on so much stardust that it’s quiet here, in the desert /

Larded up on action, mine isle is this, whose shimmer turns to sullen flame /

Crimson from the noose like parasitized fruit. /

Lord, I could dance any direction, could run any length of the stage. /

Everything is in my love! Fuck it, I’m delighted. I’m delighted!

/

And for a quartermillionth of a second, the romantic irony is back 

You would stoop and beg, or kiss me the same as a bullwhip /

But try you, or gurgle like a wound with the mucus of your lumen /

Sky / ye lapped my sabaton like a syringe / all your flounces open / 

Sure to incense the highly scarred rivers which veer and veer /

Through rows of bridal eyes trapped in compasses.

/

& soon all is blurred, as if the tadpole-self is moving to the mainstage /

Pulsating / as of a pale, gaussian mask crest forth from suicide / 

As if a cuntless manikin were a second heart, the stupor of trapezohedrons

Teeming with time patterns, vesical stigmas / 

Flopped upon the polished alleyways of music / I come / pale / new 

/ Vermiform 

/ An anesthetized little grub.

/

But, my friends, if you think for a moment about such things, then you may catch your own reflection.

/

It’s all color, it’s all play. Fuck. Guess it doesn’t quite tally up. 

Calculus killed the larks that once reigned in my stare like a place.

/

Blossom / and feral pearl / of bright happenstance eclipses / that

Novitiate “me” / that crawled in pyramidity / pre-Caligulated,  / at the 

Circle’s thin, invective slippage there, fully antonymous / damping on

Sucked-off flowerstalks / O no, the muss of the field impregnates me to tears. 

/ Come on. Rectal, then, oh, this is nauseous, on bonsai, I’ll do

Better, you come on my firecracker, your 

Exits are elastic / and this kaleidoscope won’t even smolder against 

My teeth. / 

/

Fried bug smell of I.

/

The voxels burn.

/ 

Clambered atop girth; and this silence only seems to gird 

The eldest of my egos, windowed from the wound of its peripatetic youth 

/ Ye murmur to the rustle of vellum / To hangover the poles of quadrature as a sign / 

Sham kisses belched over the blusher / pusillanimous shades / 

Nipping the slurge all thread-like, my pupillary piers pronged by susurration /

& wetted the inroad with sweat-thickened felts / all itchy-blue /

And zeroed along the footpath / I tore my umbrella to bits. 

/

King / prince / child / nectarated / reek of chiton / the pollens blaze 

And bob / the dullest princess roses bare their wanton weld-marks / and

Jest-out in offshoots of what they gestured once so sadly, in formaldehyde /

/ Click click click for a fast, vast vista / rabbit loops and kerosene quilts /

The mime outside uncoiling / jammed in overlaps / of other Queens / voyeurs / savants

Corrupted by the gaping metaphor of the poltergeist’s mind / 

Veiled or yawned, each eye /

Nuked.

/

By faith, my steps collide with sunflowers in arboreal fathoms 

/ Soylent compared to silent life in the sarcophagus

/ Machine set to meatboy sea / 

The psychosis created the phylum / So empty 

They reeked of sprezzatura /  

Flail / wretch / strangle / choke / swoon / spasm 

/ Inconvenient sermons in this lockjaw for hogging / bisexual venom 

/ On the crosshair’s maze and stooping derision smeared with scurf

/ Autodidactic figurations of narrative terms /

Hissing or glissading again. 

/

Part auteur semiotics. /

Part homogenous insect youth. /

Yes, the apogee, the apogee! 

/

White cactus juice, that furtive, runs from the pimples of a marquee

Of the cilice / of riddle / of all that one may suppose / of all that one saw

Tattling from the bottom of the mariner’s pyloric sneer /

I excised a scalding scrim of coherent adulation / ash-lapped 

For the fruits of algorithms, and the masonic orange-and-red stains

That grew on the mesh of the Cartier mirrors. 

/

Who am I, to connect my virginity to the faultline / the discount homuncularity? / 

Canticum / incipient technocratic government / this meat 

Doesn’t need any fucking help getting into your stomach. / Fuck / clarity for clarity

/ The leavings of flea shit / the nothing at all / the all en masseness of stoic 

Vertebrate mundanity / infrasound locusts tearing at the axon /

Beneath drooping sprigs of sylvan dogbane /

No plunge wells your perforations /

Piss all suns 

/

People will know the truth when they know it. Fuck it. It doesn’t matter. 

/

I was surrounded by miniature infernos. Fuck it. 

/

I pissed like a boson.

/

///

Evan Isoline is a writer and artist living on the Oregon coast. He edits an experimental publishing project entitled SELFFUCK. His full-length debut is forthcoming from 11:11 Press.

11 POEMS

SELF DEFENSE

At the sporting goods store we passed a couple faceless mannequins dressed in work out clothes. My brother mimed as though blocking a strike then ran his keys down the side of one’s neck. I followed, a few steps behind, having given up on the winter hat I wanted to buy.

FIVE GEESE FLEW BY HONKING

I was shoveling snow, when five geese flew by honking. And I slipped and fell, trying to follow them with my eyes. I went into the snow, like a body of water, and disappeared forever.

THE BORDER

Some people you can bring in and some must always be met at the border of you, and the rest of the world.

THE GHOST

I saw a roadside memorial on the drive to work. A cross, a basket, some flowers. And I imagined the deceased, reappearing as a bluish-white translucent ghost, bending to smell the flowers, then smiling and disappearing again.

LOVE POEM

I’m having a milkshake and watching the snow fall, sitting in the cab of my truck as it idles in an empty parking lot. And the only thing that could make it better, would be if you were farther away. Aging onward, the cold is a blacklight to past injuries. Dying apart, new as strangers, like we always were.

A THING

Imagined myself as pop culture personality on TV show, and I say, ‘we turn now to the world of my brother’s dog, where the mini football is IN and sticks are OUT.’

U.S. 12

One day, after I’m gone, my ghost will return home to U.S. 12. And you might see me there, in various forms on that stretch of road. Yes you might see me there in various forms, when my ghost returns home for good. I might be someone who helps you change a tire. I might be a deer you barely miss with your car. Or the moon, behind some clouds. I might be the dark, draped everywhere. Or a hawk circling high, midday. I might be none of those things too, but I will return, to U.S. 12. And you might me see there, when my ghost returns for good.

BUGS

Been enjoying feeling visited, rather than (whatever) when a bug is on or around me.

IN MY CHEAP WINTER COAT

When I see the horses out in the cold in their dirty wraps/capes, it reminds me of how I feel in my cheap winter coat: powerful and fuckin awesome (and fast).

LANDLORD POEM

I applied for an apartment. They wanted proof of income. I gave them proof. They said they needed something else. I told them I had nothing else. They said if you pay up front for 6 months then no problem. I said ok fine. They said ok now the rent is 50 bucks more a month too. I stared at the email. I imagined a group of shadowy people on the other end, laughing as they keep changing shit around. ‘haha he bought it, now say it’s 50 more a month.’ Another says, “haha yeah yeah, and tell him he has to wear a party hat the whole time he lives here.” ‘tell him Wednesdays are walk backwards days.’ I closed the email. I closed my eyes and focused on the sight and sound of the moment the tip of a knife goes through human skin. The moment the skin says ‘I give up’ and the knife says, ‘I’m coming in.’ I opened my eyes and looked at the snow outside. A squirrel had just leapt from branch to branch, knocking off a beautiful wave of powder.

THE HAWK

I saw a hawk circling above me, on a bike ride. I thought it didn’t notice me but then it swooped down into a tree just ahead. It shook the tree and a dead limb fell onto the road, barely missing me. And I thought, ‘holy shit, bro, relax.’ To be honest though, I liked its approach.

///

Sam Pink’s latest book, The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories, is available now at Soft Skull Press. Follow Sam on Twitter at @sampinkisalive.