Revolution on Canvas, Volume 2

by Rich Balling

  “There’s no need to get nasty.” I truly didn’t know what to say. We just sat there for a while waiting for the world to wake up.

  “Look, I gotta go to work in a few hours.” I got the hint, put on my jacket and left with my bagel. That was the last time I saw her.

  * * *

  She uncovered the lid on me. It’s true. I used people much like I used the drink. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with what I was doing since we weren’t fucking each other, but emotionally I was just one in a long line of rapists. It upsets me that she had me figured out on day one but said nothing. It makes me think I’ve greatly underestimated the human race. I tried calling for several months, but she never answered. I left messages while on tour but never got a response. One day, almost a year after our final incident, I walked into Gringo’s. I hadn’t had much time off as it had been a good year. Super Dave was still there and bad music still played. He brought me my scotch and water with a little wave of the hand like a magician, for effect. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I sat and I drank and I waited. I drank and I drank and I drank. It was nearing eleven or twelve something and I asked Super Dave about her, if she still came around or what the shit the deal was with her.

  “Oh, she’s dead,” he said, “yeah, like two months ago they found her in her apartment. She’d hung herself.”

  He went on to help someone else. I could feel my hair growing. That’s strange, I thought. I drank until I could no longer hear myself think. The next morning I was shaking. Strange, I thought. I drank a few shots to calm down, and eventually the bottle was gone.

  Whether you know from personal experience or not, whether in bar rooms or meetings across America where people chain-smoke and devour coffee—the stories are always the same. If and when you become a part of the drinking life, you step into a world where people you hardly know become your best friends and your best friends become people you hardly know. I didn’t know her, but I knew her and to this day I still miss her. It’s funny, the deeper you swim, the harder it is to surface. Eventually you just want to stay down there at the bottom and drown. As diverse as we in the drinking life are, there is truly only one thing we all have in common: a lot of dead friends.

  —justin pierre.

  JONAH MATRANGA

  Speech to Text, Thought to Action

  Disease is vote reinsurer

  hundred sure her hair ornament a gonna a a a a a a a

  on auto are high

  I’m Donna and Pat at of the average of

  of what

  of the shorter the learned

  of the

  of the date

  of revenue creative

  of the current climate

  of and as the deal will result

  of those voting machines so

  of the causes

  of the vote

  of this everyone within this set of

  of what with was so excessive in the above of

  and I was a kid going back and forth.

  The those in Idaho, and of the drugs of the vote

  and partisan now

  Steven of is extremely close it down

  and tell the bereaved of its heavy overseas valve in the matter

  how close is as one died or been given until next president of

  United States with her family

  and if he’s the these there is evident from the House official

  how I think he’s love

  of is that what with his resolve the be debated forever

  whose shadow of legitimacy of this House and all we have to

  help him

  REBEKAH JORDAN

  Dreaming Ferns

  I am right-handed. I wish I were ambidextrous. I can only wink my right eye. I prefer Twizzlers to Red Vines. Fall is my favorite season. I had a love affair with the leaves. I liked to collect them, trace them on paper. I liked to step on them and hear them crackle. I loved to jump in piles of them, newly raked and red and gold and copper. I have always envied trees. I like trucks and vintage cars. I do not like the smell of new cars. But I do like the fruity car fresheners you get at the car wash. The ones you hang from your mirror. They make me feel like a kid. And a pimp. I loved music before I was even born. My mother played the piano the whole time she was pregnant with me. She played for the church choir. My father was the choir director. They were like a gospel Peaches and Herb. Because my parents were in charge of the music, we were always in church. But at least there we knew they couldn’t fight.

  We went to a tiny all black, Baptist church where people regularly got the spirit. Whenever that happened, the big-boned women dressed in white would rush to stand on either side of the spirited person to try to contain them, so they couldn’t run up and down the aisles. The organ player usually tried to instigate once he knew people were getting excited. He would play faster so people would want to shout. The big-boned women would use the fans from the local funeral home to try and cool the spirit down. The big-boned women were a part of what was called the nurses guild. They always had peppermints, which they passed out like medicine. If you were fidgeting, one peppermint. If you got hungry, (which was inevitable because church could last long after the football games) two peppermints or maybe even a butterscotch. I later found out the big-boned women weren’t really nurses. Just the wives of the deacons. I was disappointed. Why call them the nurses guild? I always wanted to get the spirit. It looked like fun. Instead I would get a headache.

  My parents separated for the third and final time when I was nine. It was an ugly divorce. Fitting for a volatile marriage. Even still, I did not understand why they thought their lives should look different. I did not understand about dreams. And what happens when they don’t come true. I took my dad’s side. But I had to live with my mother. We moved into a house after she left my dad. My two older sisters, my mother and me. For me, this new house was a big deal. It was all ours. And I had a room of my own.

  My mother loved to sing jazz standards like Nancy Wilson. She taught me how to play “Someone to Watch over Me” on the piano when I was ten. It was the first song I learned to play from beginning to end. Then she taught me “Don’t Go to Strangers.” On Saturday mornings when she thought we were asleep, she would sit downstairs and play those songs and also “Good Morning, Heartache” and “My Funny Valentine.” I would tiptoe from my room to sit on the stairs. I would lean against the wall and imagine she was singing to me. I had never heard her sound so much like the truth. On Saturdays, she made me the most proud. She never knew I was listening.

  But the other days of the week weren’t like that. I didn’t speak much. And my handwriting had gotten so small it was illegible. I used to close my eyes and concentrate really hard, trying to become invisible. It didn’t work. But I eventually scared everyone enough that they called in my dad.

  I went to live with him before I turned eleven. My mother gave me her piano when I was twelve. She was moving to California. It must have been hard for my dad to hear me play like her. But he would always ask me to. And he would point out where I wasn’t as good. I started to hate playing. It was too much. And so I stopped.

  My dad had to rely on his old records. He had hundreds of them, dusty and in stacks in the corner. From James Brown to James Taylor, Frank Sinatra to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Earth, Wind and Fire to the Four Seasons by Vivaldi. We had a musical library in our living room worthy of the Smithsonian. He played his records every night, educating me on whoever we were listening to. And that was how I got to know my father. And eventually how I got to know myself.

  Music became a haven for me. An escape. Music was a promise. It whispered to me. And taught me to dream. I would go to my room, turn off the lights, and turn on my music. I would lay on my bed, and listen. In memoriam for the end of a horrible day, in appreciation of a beautiful one, to know my feelings when I was too numb to find them on my own. I would listen. I still do that. Maybe you do that. Maybe you’ll play one of my songs sometime when yo
u do. And maybe you’ll dream with my dreams in the background. And so for a moment, neither of us will be alone.

  JOHN TRAN

  Home Grown/Red Panda

  About Me:

  I’ve drank my own pee, shit my pants, seen most of the world, lied, told the truth, been on Singled Out, switchstance heelflip to noseslide, broke my wrist and collarbone and a head concussion from a 2ft jump snowboarding, got arrested for skateboarding, rode my bike into a basketball pole, traveled to and through the four corners of the United States of America which are Hawaii, Alaska, Maine, and Key West FL, pop shove-it late kickflip, been caught masturbating to porn by my mom, made friends, lost friends, made enemies, had sex with friends that became enemies, crashed my first car into a transit bus, fakie hardflip, jacked off with Ben-Gay, and had a top-10 hit in Hawaii. What the fuck have you done?

  BRENDAN BROWN

  The Receiving End of Sirens

  Of ritual and habit I opened my mouth

  to find the prisoners inside had made their way out.

  A verbal vestige where nouns once played

  sits empty and lonely and still on my face.

  Soon ended the clawing at my cheeks and gums,

  as I searched in my molars for words but found none.

  Within me a well of speech had run dry,

  so I tried to siphon language from people nearby.

  But nothing they said could seem to console

  the fact that my mouth was naught but a hole.

  SCHUYLAR CROOM

  He Is Legend

  Letter to a Gypsy

  Guard your comfort my dear, guard your heart,

  as the sailor takes locks of hair,

  and prisons a piece of cloth or picture.

  The wealthy have overbought and undersold their memories.

  Even if they duplicate your treasures,

  they still will never love them

  for the reasons you have learned to love them.

  It’s a painful mistake on her part,

  to try and become someone just because that someone may

  be happier,

  prettier, truly more free.

  But she will not learn that.

  And out of everything you can give her, you cannot teach her

  to love herself.

  She is Midas in a world of unpolished gold.

  And you are a goddess with no care for shiny things.

  Be flattered my dear. Because your beautiful soul is sparkling

  never the less.

  And she sees it.

  And can’t stand that with all of her riches she can’t by your

  happiness.

  I think you are the kindest soul I can’t ever meet.

  And if guarding your simple joys is the only wrong you are doing

  then I think you are more noble than I.

  You deserve your treasures,

  And a true gypsy would never let them out of sight.

  I will give you a chest with lock and key.

  And I will help you fill it with goodness.

  If you don’t want me to know where you have buried that, I will respect that too.

  Just remember that no money can buy a shovel long enough to

  dig down into your heart.

  Hell or high water my love.

  You are so big in my world,

  yours,

  —Schuylar

  VINCENT REYES

  Create!

  Lao-tzu and a Friend Play a Game of Marbles

  They danced all night to the sound

  of bird beak and cedar wood.

  In the morning they boiled green leaves

  and shared a pot of honey for lunch.

  They talked all day about wind and water.

  They talked about the good manners man

  may receive if he sits alone and quiet on a dead log

  for three days straight.

  At sunset they sat under a pine tree and played

  an ancient game of glass marbles that goes

  like this:

  One sage strikes the yellow marble

  with his fingernail in order to move

  the other’s crimson one.

  The entire game is played in silence

  for about a hundred years until the yellowy

  marble, the one with the sun inside,

  hits the crimson one, the one with their blood.

  Their glass shells eventually will shatter and two canaries

  one yellow,

  one crimson,

  and both with black beaks

  will be revealed shortly before they all fly away.

  Dalí

  “Strange fish, pulled by an invisible thread”

  writes Leo Leonni to explain the science

  of amphibious migration.

  Today a humpback whale washed up on

  a Spanish seaside.

  Today a train derailed near Osaka killing seventy-one

  and on this day a powerful flood took hundreds

  of children away from their mother’s grip

  in the Pacific Islands

  Tomorrow marine biologists may discover,

  upon closer inspection of the washed up whale,

  that it has waterproof pocket watches for eyes.

  Maybe it will live,

  Maybe we will live,

  if you could call the sound of seconds

  ticking the beginning of some sort of vital sign.

  MEG FRAMPTON

  Meg & Dia

  For the first time, this sickness is no mere natural invasion is no consequence of an ugly decision to let myself go for one … lonely … night is no punishment for indulgence of any particular pleasure

  This sickness is my price I pay for the submission of my life to a promise.

  For the first time A must be A. I must believe and rely on this factor with nothing more than my tottering judgment.

  The weight accumulated on my mind is worth conjuring the impossible. The fatigue gathering in my spine is a bargain!

  To wake each morning becomes more and more difficult but it doesn’t matter … not much.

  There is no pre-destiny and if all this is some sick accident I am forever indebted to free will and cause and effect for allowing me a chance to be sick. A sad, sorry product of the twenty-first century. Swept along with the masses in one huge hypnotic festival. I refuse. Refuse!

  Which is why I choose to be sick …

  If there is no cure, no medicine, I hope in the end all the pretty pictures will make sense, and at least to some, itchy Picasso merges into the finality and solid defiance of Da Vinci.

  “Oh, I see! She breathes!” they’ll say in wonder …

  and that, dear sir, is all I ever wanted them to say.

  DIA FRAMPTON

  Meg & Dia

  Hospitals Always Smell Like Decaying Hair

  I waited outside for almost twelve hours. I kept thinking of everything I wanted to tell you … dear best friend.

  It had been over a year since we had known your future. You dropped your interest in horoscopes, while I still desperately searched both of ours to see if they would end up running parallel. I still needed a palm reader, while you quietly and politely asked for more pain reliever.

  Sure darling, and a cup of water, too.

  They wouldn’t let me see you. How could I ask for any compassion anyways. They cared more about seeing their secretaries or patients in sedatives then their own wives.

  2 p.m.

  2:01 p.m.

  “Yes, please. No sugar. Black. Decaf.”

  2:02 p.m.

  There was a funny purple stain on the carpet next to the fish tank.

  2:03 p.m.

  You’re dead.

  I stand up. I didn’t take the cup from the lady in white. Her unnaturally stretched face looked concerned, but her overly extended eyebrows were pulled so unevenly that it failed to give her any real sympathetic look. You were an angel in pale blood and strugglin
g skin, while she was already a corpse to me.

  My neck hurt from sitting so long. You would have apologized about the wait if you would have woken up and walked through those doors: an ugly angel in an old grey T-shirt, escorted by bastards from Harvard in white, needles protruding from the angles of their hands.

  Well, it turns out I waited for nothing.

  You never came.

  Outside it was sterile and dry. The clouds seemed to shift slowly over my head as I walked toward Fifth Avenue. They looked like giant fingers of bedsheets on blue, kinda how your eyes looked only in winter when your skin was a light silver. I had known this outcome and I had prepared for it, thank God.

  I lit a Parliament, my last one, and began to blow strings of smoke into the air slowly.

  I saw your neighbor five doors down, standing in a huge red dress, watering her plants on the side of her walkway.

  She stopped when she saw me, inquired curiously, and I told her the news.

  She started to cry.

  I knew she cared more about her fucking garden than you. Somehow she got it engraved in her head that it was a sin not to cry at the death of a person much younger. It was proper for a God-fearing Catholic to cry at a death.

  What a sorry piece of shit she was.

  I felt more apathetic for her than I did you.

  I know you would have, too.

  I went inside and poured a scotch and water like my old friend Cho from Japan had shown me. The water settled on the top until I mixed it with my bloody nails.

  Had I really been that anxious?

  JOSH PARTINGTON

  Firescape/Something Corporate

  27 Hours

  These pieces of conversation have

  left me dry and hungry

  for tethered remains and

  catalytic addictions that I can never hope to shake.

  I’ve been up for 27 hours

  the only hope I have in me now

  is that I can make it to 30