“The Right Spot” by Toni Mirosevich

“Haleakala” by Rosemary Griggs

“Bridal Shower Postscript” by Rosemary Griggs

“Seismic” by Susanna Kittredge

“aftershocks” by Meg Day

The fifth installment of BANG OUT Reading Series was held at San Francisco’s annual Lit Crawl — the culmination of the weeklong Litquake literary festival – on Saturday, October 17th. This year’s Litcrawl was on the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, and our theme for the reading was “Seismic Activity.”

BANG OUT Volume V also marked the one-year anniversary of the series, and featured new work from a great group of local writers:

Toni Mirosevich is the author of a collection of nonfiction stories, Pink Harvest, (Mid-List Press, 2007, First Series in Creative Nonfiction Award, 2007 Lambda Literary Award Finalist) and three poetry collections; Queer Street (Custom Words, 2005), My Oblique Strategies, (Thorngate Road, 2005, 2005 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award), and The Rooms We Make Our Own, (Firebrand Books, 1996.) Literary awards include the Astraea Emerging Lesbian Writer in Fiction Award, fellowships with the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Blue Mountain Center and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. She is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at SFSU. www.tonimirosevich.com

Rosemary Griggs received her BA from University of Iowa and her MFA from San Francisco State. Her book Sky Girl was published in 2003 by Fence Books. She has recently completed a provocative, political new manuscript of poetry for which she is seeking publication.

Joe Cervelin’s work has appeared in 14 Hills, Bay Nature magazine, and elsewhere. He’s currently working on his first story collection, Kissing the Bomb Dogs. For more info, check out: midnightpudding.com

Susanna Kittredge holds an MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 14 Hills, Sidebrow, Parthenon West Review, Shampoo, 580 Split, and the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006).

Meg Day is a poet, spoken word artist & arts educator who hails from San Diego but is currently earning her MFA at Mills College in Oakland and teaching young poets to hold their own at the mic with Youth Speaks in San Francisco. Her poems have appeared in PULP, The Greenbelt Review, Outspoken: An Anthology, Temper Magazine, Monkey Puzzle, and Flaneur Foundry. Meg is a Southern California Poetry Grand Slam Champion & was recently named by OUT-ART Magazine as one of 2009’s “Top 30 Under 30″ up-and-coming performance artists. She lives & writes in Alameda with her sweet, dumb dalmatian.

And I did, at a college bar, where the crowd howled from the patio.  After a few slices of lime I found her, floating on the dance floor.  It was a Howard the Duck party.  She wore her beak sideways.

“I noticed you.  Your beak is styling,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Look, it’s my last night,” I said.  “Ever.”

The song washed away, and she thumbed behind her.  “Sluts are aisle 2.”  She pulled the beak over her face.

“Aisle 2, I like that.”  I took a step and caught a beak in the eye.

She cupped my chin.  “You okay?”  There were flashes of white static – the disco ball, she deduced.

“Deduced?”  I rubbed my eye.  “Dude, you’ve got thorns.”

She slumped.  “Protecting against parasites, maybe?”

“That’s so venus flytrap,” I said.  I leaned again, more cautious this time, and told her I should’ve been this bold years ago.  But I’d be dead by noon.  I didn’t want to bore her with the gory details.  Some things just end up one way.  “You won’t have to deal with it.”  I’d sneak out, I reassured her.

“I feel a weird pressure, being your LAST.”  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, that doesn’t sound right.”

“I just need company right now,” I said.  “My only desire is cuddling.”  I patted her hip, as if it were a crosswalk button, made of soft metal.

We didn’t take a cab.  It was warm, and moony.  Memories stenciled the streets: I climbed the roof there; that pharmacy had been a diner with perfect sweet potato fries; I’d never pee in that alley again.  Or that one.  But I hushed.

I snuck out at dawn, with a headache and a tiny hop in my step.  I ate a hearty breakfast, in the gray light.

###

A few months later I attended a Teen Wolf party.  I wore a giant moustache.  I queried the girl by the skeeball machine.   She was having a crisis over her senior thesis, so I recited the titles of some useful articles.  Her neck stunk of vanilla.  “I hope the candles at my funeral smell this awesome,” and then I added,  “Is that TMI?”  She asked where it would be held, and I said I didn’t know.  Her cuddle transitions were so unprecedented, so technical, it was hard to leave.

Lawn mowers blew mating calls through fences.  The sun pulled the clouds over its head and turned over.

###

I stumbled into one of those outdoor festivals where girls wear underwear and wigs.  Every costume was a masterpiece, accentuating the best feature: the neck, a calve, delicious feet, a face.  The embodiment of using what you’ve got.

Sunshine and crunchy beer cups.  Medicine cabinets shaken by their ankles into backpacks.  The music wriggled, like an airplane going down.  That wobble wobbly bass.

The girl with the cartoon fox mask smelled familiar, like cantaloupe.  She may have been with me on one of my last nights.  The crowd was cut into large cubicles.  The sunlight was disorienting.  Backed against the gate, I felt the need to apologize.  “I never really thought I was worth enough to hurt anybody,” I began.  Something started to release.

I told her my real name.  Told her I’m a serial cuddler, that I suffer from acute anxiety over impending doom, and I have intimacy issues.  Dr. Drew speaks to me over the radio, and still I don’t fix a damn thing.  I should sign my goodbye notes, The Zodiac  Snuggler, or maybe Son of Cuddler, and jot on a sticky note about the 25,000 day calendar, and wish them the best.  Admitting this gave me tingles.  It reminded me of the last segment of a TV sitcom: a group hug with Urkel, pants jacked up to the heart.  I don’t know what she heard.  Her eyes weren’t tuned in.

Perhaps selfishly, I continued.  There was always someone who would listen.  I saw myself as a distributor of information, and passed it along, like pollen.  Here’s an example.  Fruit flies live a day, a science girl told me once.  She had a learning disability and was tired, so that may not be accurate.

The ground fidgeted, because I was standing somewhere I shouldn’t be.  My instinct was to climb the fence.  The floats bled into one another.  The plasma of white noise, rising.  Everything tilted an inch.  And then glass rang.  And port-a-potties toppled.  And kegs rolled.

Something hit my head.  I felt offended, then at ease.  I dreamed of the earth opening; kids rushing in with Sharpies and spray cans to tag the raw pink flesh first.  It didn’t melt their markers or blow up their cans, but I could taste it, the scent of recess.

The girl rustled me awake.  Butterfly wings and wigs mashed together.  Papier-mâché road kill, snug on barbwire.  A dude in a water-tube fiddled with a high heel stuck in his forehead.  Fire hydrants rehydrated the murals, their peeling complexion, spraying the bricks.  Devil and bunny tails popped under our feet.

The girl, smelling of maple syrup, asked if I’d meant what I said.  Her sunglasses had lost their frames, so I could see her eyes.  Clumps of hazel and blue, two layers of a jawbreaker met.

“I think so.”  This may not have been – no, this was not the other girl, not the fox mask.  And I couldn’t stay out of her eyes; they didn’t appear to take me serious at all.  No man can step away from that.  “So, is this an earthquake or war?” I asked.  Who knows what we really heard over the gooey noise that poured from the spilled speakers in the street.  That rumble, it could have been the world turning onto its side, deeper into sleep; or stirring late in the afternoon.




Copyright © 2009, Joe Cervelin

I pull out of the driveway, into the street, just as a truck roars up in my rear view mirror, and I lay on the horn, fool. He narrowly misses me, I narrowly miss him, what a jerk to not slow down, then I recognize it’s my neighbor, his big sunny head behind the truck’s steering wheel. I honk and wave, a wave that says, Oh forgive me, I didn’t see you, and he waves back a wave that says, Oh that’s all right, no harm, no foul.

I notice how different he looks on his way to his work; his white chef’s jacket, clean shaven mug. I know he’s wearing his black-and-white checked chef pants, is headed for the homeless shelter in the Tenderloin where he’s the head cook. He looks so different on the weekends, out in his front yard in his faded jeans and holey t-shirt, just a homebody mowing the lawn, the back and forth across the green grass as imprinted on his DNA as that wave.

Last Sunday he and I were standing in the middle of the street, I was complaining about my boss, what an asshole. He turned to me and said, if you let your boss get to you then you drink the acid you meant for him to have, you drink that poison. My neighbor’s a big man with a big heart, yet as I drive away he gets smaller in the rearview mirror, with each second he diminishes. His big truck turns into a toy truck and I picture him driving to a shelter that’s as tiny as a dollhouse, with little cots and blankets the size of tiny hankies, where the homeless drink their soup out of itsy thimbles.

Years ago, I worked in a soup kitchen, I, who can’t cook. Once I was asked to warm up buckets of frozen split pea soup. That night, the families lined up and I ladled up the soup, smiling, proud, as if I’d made it myself from scratch. One by one, people brought their bowls back, each thick green sea barely touched, the split peas floating around like capsized life boats. The stuff was burnt, inedible. They who were very, very hungry, wouldn’t even touch that soup.

By the time I get to the freeway their sad faces fade away, they diminish. I’m on automatic pilot all the way to the hospital and start to think about the ones waiting for me in that line up; first, the heroin addict, who’ll have a story, who’ll tell me how he lost his script for methadone , it must have fallen out of his pocket on that rainy day we had last week, and I’ll think back to 5^th grade science class, the lesson about where rain comes from, how water evaporates from the ocean into the clouds which rain down and flows to the sea and then it all starts over again, the cycle begins again, just like his story does.

Next will be Pain Man, who’ll start up the minute he walks in, who’ll say, “Will you check my labs again?” “I’ll say, “All of your blood work is normal” and he’ll shout, “You’re wrong, all of you are dead wrong.” The diabetic will answer no, no slip ups lately, she’s been staying off sugar, but on further questioning will admit, “I have jam on toast five times a day.” I’ll ask Goth girl if she’s been taking her anti-depressants and she’ll say she’s way too depressed to take pills, anyway, they’re not a natural. The young Vet on anti-anxiety drugs will hold up his cell phone and say, “Here, look, I took this shot when my pills dropped on the wet bathroom floor,” and he’ll show me a tiny grainy photo showing grainy white dots on a grainy public stall floor and am I supposed to believe this, to count this technological post- it-note as irrefutable evidence?

I accelerate with each story, and it’s as if they’re all in the car with me, as if I’m the driver of a bus full of the noncompliant, the drug-seeking, the cannot-hold-a-job, the sign-my-disability form. Miles of freeway blow past, the Dow’s been up and down and up again, get up for the day, that’s what I need to do, get up. Every single morning this is how it goes until, not far from the hospital, two blocks to be exact, right after I drive by the children’s park surrounded by a barbed wire fence, there is a spot I come to, a spot in the road.

There’s nothing on the asphalt to mark it, to locate it. There’s no big red X. Nothing tips me, no pothole or speed bump or dip, but I know when I hit it for it’s as if the spot makes a sound that trumps all the others-the street sounds, the sirens, the chorus of need. Is it the sound of some distant bell, a memory, a warning, reminding me of something important, something I’ve forgotten to pay attention to? Like when a newscaster at a military memorial says, “They’re about to have a moment of silence for the fallen, let’s listen in…?”

Then again, maybe I’m inserting a sound where there is none, maybe at this spot there’s an absence of sound, a Bermuda Triangle of soundlessness, so all I’m left with are the words inside my head, a voice from somewhere deep inside that whispers, Okay, stop it now, stop it, judge not lest ye be…To hear the voice better I turn and tell everyone on the bus to pipe down and before you know it we’re in front of the hospital. I pull into the parking lot, wave to the parking attendant, cross the dying lawn which never needs mowing and enter the building, the unsafe building, the building that will crumble in the next temblor, what a sound that will make. We’ll all go together, we’ll go in a poof. I start the day, pull the chart off the exam room door, go out to the reception room and there he is, the heroin addict, slumped in a chair. I signal him with a wave that says, Come on in.

Eight hours later, I push open the hospital doors to the street and it hits me like a wave,  the sounds and smells that have accumulated around the building, that create their own atmosphere, made up of human sweat, urine, curses, exhaust. Before I get in my car, I take off my white lab coat, longer in length but not so very different from my neighbor’s white chef’s jacket. That’s when I look down  realize I’m wearing my good slacks and if you look real close you can see a tiny black-and-white check pattern in the weave.

We could be twins, my neighbor and I, in our matching outfits, and we have something else in common. I’d lay bets we’ve seen the same people today, they’ve gone to him for food, food that tasted good for he is a good cook and didn’t burn the soup, the bowls came back to him as empty as the scooped out bowl of this white sky, and they’ve come to me for medical care, for I know when to listen hard to what is below the words, all the words. I get into my car, thank the parking attendant, and as I go to pull into the flow of traffic, he waves and signals “No one’s coming.”

I drive down the street, and what do you know, they’re all on the bus again; the heroin addict who just today told me his mother was an addict and whose father was an addict and when you think about, who is he to not carry on the line. Here’s Goth girl who looked pretty happy when she said she still wasn’t taking her meds, it’s the first time she’s brightened in months, some spark in that small defiance, and isn’t it one of the best in life, jam spread on toast, strawberry jam and apricot jam and marmalade with tiny orange flecks of rind, my diabetic is in heaven when she spreads it on, I can taste how good that would be, how one tablespoon or five of that sweetness could fill each day. The vet told me he’s in rehab and thinking of taking a photography course, he’d be good, I can tell by those cell phone shots that he’s got a good eye, and sitting next to him is Pain Man, who has a broken heart nothing will fix, we’ll never find a test that will lay his search to rest, and judgment won’t find a seat on this bus, it’s already full, there not one empty seat.

I keep my eye on the road, we’re coming up to the children’s park and that’s when I hit it, the same spot, the spot I hit coming in, but now, there’s a different sound, one you can barely hear, soft, like sighing, I hear them sighing, everyone is sighing, and all those small exhalations become a breeze that sings and is cool and clears the old air way. If there were words to this music, if I were to write the libretto for this breeze the refrain would be: what diminishes thee diminishes me. This is the right spot, where no bowl is left unfilled, no acid is poured, where every story is offered up and is received. Further on down the road the steering on this bus could go or a careening car, coming from the opposite direction, could miss the stoplight and plow right into us. “I didn’t see them coming,” he’ll say, when the cops question the man behind the wheel, “They were right in front of me but I didn’t see them coming.”




Copyright © 2009, Toni Mirosevich

(thank you Lizzie for deflating the brown, shrinking penis) (and the other penises for that matter) (having penis balloons and straws made me feel like penises were there) (even though they weren’t) (it kept me thinking about them) (like maybe they’d show up) (with love) (but I didn’t mention them) (because I wanted the most pins) (to win a prize) (like a juicy penis) (or a nice sugar scrub) (or whatever was left on the table)

Copyright © 2009, Rosemary Griggs

Hiking through the volcanic crest we didn’t know
if we could make it out before dark. I liked to feel the fear of
relying on the sun. In the slight shade of a rock we hid and sucked oranges, people on horseback passed in the distance.

We traded stories as we went, Tell me about a Christmas
tree, Tell me about an allowance. It didn’t look like earth.
We were small, dusty, and hot. You thought you saw lightning,
the state bird eats horse shit, I took a picture, smitten as we were.

Copyright © 2009, Rosemary Griggs

I’m starting to think we’ve gone too soft and stilted
to move the earth.

It happened once in 1808 when the Franciscan fathers
were shaking up the natives, causing great clefts
between the Ohlone and their earth.

And in 1906, no surprise, as Mayor Schmitz & Co. were shaking down
the populous; change loosed unceremoniously from pockets,
the clatter of corruption loud on every street and sidewalk.

And even in ‘89 it made some sense – still a hint of hippy left,
looking to shake up the establishment. So many people swaying
to the Dead at once were bound to move the ground.

But now we are so staid. Entitled to the iWorld at our fingertips,
never needing to pound pavement, we are soporific
and the earth is bored and still.

I say I don’t believe in quakes, then bite my tongue to stop the jinx -
the Big One quaking up to prove me wrong.
Except, of course, an earthquake doesn’t care if I believe in it or not.
It is no Tinkerbell, who’ll die without our clapping;
no God with eyes enough to keep one on every soul.
More like a hibernating bear who sleeps until it’s faded to a rumor -
and then in the spring, as I bend carelessly to smell the first flower
that blooms sweetly by the bear-quake’s cave, it wakes -
comes romping out and tramples me. Or sinks its teeth into my neck.

Earthquakes believe in nothing but destruction.

I don’t want to be so dire all the time. I could say the quake will be like
the explosive rocking of my neighbors’ bed, knocking against the shared wall.
I could say that I’m the only one who’s bored, and with myself;
that the quake will shake me from my stupor.
I could say the quake will be salvation because that’s what poets say;
and maybe some part of me believes it’s true.

Copyright © 2009, Susanna Kittredge

here we are again. i am lying still & breathless under packing blankets in the tent, the earth curving up against my back in lazy corrugation. you, you are ground-fitted & limp, hourglass hints tailored to sand like a body built for gravity. your breath is shallow; sleep rolled out hot & even onto the fork of my jaw. i do not turn to look at you in this dream, do not paddle against your current, do not dust your scales with the colic of my own fear in hopes that you will pull the lure from my lip. no, in this dream i hover wide-eyed in the dark & do not tip the scale. your knees are knocking invitations & the canvas eaves of the tent bend inward as i expand.

aftershock 2

here we are again. i am holding seaglass to my eyelids, the tidepool in damp sepia behind us. you, you are boney wetland moonrocks cloistered tightly to the ground as if gravity were quitting. your feet are hoofed; dark cartoon propellers shuffle, not made for water landings. i do not turn the page in this dream, do not open my eyes to the ceiling, cannot find the glove box in which your folds should try to fit. no, in this dream, i am cixious’ donkey & our numbers will never intersect. your bed goes unmade & the heat of the windows bakes earth into the seams of my knuckles.

aftershock 3

here we are again. i am striking rocks against each other like a wind-up monkey, the sparks making pupils snap. you, you are wind-chilled & gustoed, crouched low against the sand holding both ends of my wick ready & still. your nose is dripping; small marbles perspire, sliding down the incline to pool in the divot of your top lip. i do not pull the bark from your belly in this dream, cannot find corners to fill with kindling, do not rub rope against the birthmark of your upbringing in hopes of sending up smoke. no, in this dream our bodies cower against the cold & i do not notice the flare when elbows collide. your flint is well-bedded & my strokes char tallies down the wrinkled face of the cliff.

Copyright © 2009, Meg Day