“Baby” by Lizzy Acker

“Alien Vacation” by Lizzy Acker

“Heat” by Maria Suarez

“Heat” by Paul Padilla

“Cooling Off” by Jim Nelson

“LESSON 68: USAGE” by Christine Choi

“timelt” by Diana Aehegma

Visit the Video Library to watch our readers’ performances.

The eighth installment of BANG OUT Reading Series was held on August 14th at Amnesia in San Francisco.  The event featured a hot collection of readers and work inspired by our theme, HEAT.

Joy Lanzendorfer is a writer living near San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Superstition Review, So To Speak, Rumble, Word Riot, Salon, The Writer, San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. She is a four-time judge for the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards and is co-founder of the writing group Word Pirates.

Lizzy Acker’s work has been published in Nano Fiction and Tramp Quarterly. She was the co-creator/curator, with Amira Pierce, of the San Francisco reading series Funny/Sexy/Sad.  Her first book, Monster Party, is forthcoming from Small Desk Press.  She recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State and she blogs daily at lizzyacker.com.

Maria Suarez’s work has appeared in Story Quarterly and the Anthology Voices. She lives in a tiny metal house in Sunnyvale.

Paul Padilla was born in San Francisco and is a graduate of the English: Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. He can think of no place greater than San Francisco to be published for the very first time. Paul hopes that when his future screenplay, novel, and comic book are published, that he retains the same feelings as he does now: a sense of excitement and optimism, a sense of raw and wild abandonment and hopes those feelings remain pure and everlasting. But he also knows that sometimes things in life are just quick and dirty and that’s just fine by him.

Jim Nelson’s work has appeared in We Still Like, North American Review, Instant City, Switchback, SmokeLong Quarterly, Watchword, and other fine literary venues.  He is a Floundering Skeptician of the Flat Earth Collective, which recently went international.  He can be reached at barbecuingpeople.com.

Christine Choi passes days puddle-jumping in matters of the heart, investigating human/animal/machine relationships, and producing unusual sounds, images, or texts. She holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts, and her writing has appeared in literary journals such as In Posse Review and Paul Revere’s Horse.

Diana Aehegma is a poet and sometimes printmaker/book artist who lives in Oakland, CA. She holds an MA and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She grew up in Hawaii and so spent the majority of her childhood sunburned, but would still rather be too warm than too cold.

The second question I get asked is why we’re mining Mercury in the first place. The company has authorized me to say that in addition to petroleum oil, tests indicate that Mercury is a good source of iron, natural gas, and gold. It’s an exceptionally dense planet with a relatively big core, and that bodes well for us.

Third, I’m asked how dangerous the job is. I’m forbidden to talk about any accidents that might have occurred, but mining is always difficult, as you know. I will tell you, however, that when things fall off the platform toward the surface of Mercury, solar winds tend to blast the object into the atmosphere. On Mercury, the sun appears three times bigger than it appears on earth, so that it looks like a small clock in the sky.


3. Jack London After His House Burned Down: The house was almost finished. The workers had come that day and wiped the wood with linseed oil so that it smelled like the inside of a lantern. As I sat on the wall of the third floor, watching the sun set over my 1,400-acre ranch, I found myself wishing that I could free myself from writing 1,000 words every day. Here I am, the highest paid writer in the world, and all I care about is the working of the land, and this house, the legacy that I thought would stand long after I am gone.

But then that night, the servants woke me to say the house was on fire. I ran the mile up the road, and it was true. Flames rolled out of the top of the house like a flag in the wind. We threw buckets of water on the blaze, but the house was lost. It was made from redwood trees thousands of years old, and it was gone in an hour.

I told the reporters that I would rebuild, but I know that I won’t. I’m tired. I have a million dollars in debt for a house that I’ll never live in, and more than a million words to write before I get myself out of it.


4. Sadie in Hell: I wish I had paid more attention to Buddhist pain theory when I was alive. I would be better equipped to (ow) endure this endless fire (ow) that is consuming me. I spend most of my time (ow) trying to escape (ow) into my mind by remembering life on earth (ow) which I thought majorly sucked. But here I am, sitting in a lake of fire (ow) and by comparison, my mom being kind of a bitch doesn’t seem that bad. I think she might be in here somewhere with me (ow) but I don’t want to open my eyes because somehow, seeing your body—if you can call it a body anymore—on fire (ow) makes the pain worse. In any case, all that petty earth stuff doesn’t matter in here. We just try to remember cool things, like snow and shade and the soft gray body of water. (Ow.) They say that after a few eons, you can’t remember water anymore, but I try anyway.


5. Me in DC: In the Smithsonian, my boyfriend and I got in a fight over the flavor of water. He was trying to get me to drink more water because the DC heat—105 degrees, high humidity—was getting to me. I explained that I don’t like the flavor of water and he said, “What are you talking about? Water doesn’t have any flavor,” and then the fight turned into how I shouldn’t have said something that I said to his mother and he walked off, leaving me standing in front of Julia Child’s kitchen. I bought a soda from a hotdog vendor outside and drank it, the sugary fizz scraping down my throat.

That night, I woke up in his sister’s bedroom and found that I couldn’t open my eyes. The eyelids had cleaved to my eyeballs and I had to use my fingers to pry them open. With only slits for vision, I stumbled to the bathroom. There was no glass by the sink, so I shoved my mouth under the tap and let Washington DC’s mossy city water flow down my throat.

As soon as it hit my tongue, my body let go of the moisture it was holding hostage, and tears began to flow under my eyelids and out the side of my eyes. I stood there in the bathroom my boyfriend had used all his life, water running in hot rivulets down my cheeks. Crying had never felt so good.




Copyright © 2010, Joy Lanzendorfer

After the whole thing went down, the tidal wave, which we told you about and the earthquake, the fires and the meteorite hitting Germany, we sold all of our water for guns and flak jackets and walked North during the nights when it was cool enough to be outside. Right before daybreak we would find basements or dig caves and then one of us would find a sleeping person and steal as much of their water as we could, without killing them if possible, and then we would hide.

We were having a lot of sex back then. The condoms had all been used as germ shields for amputees but we assumed neither of us could get pregnant due to all the radiation from the bomb the English dropped when they couldn’t think of what else to do and the fact that your father was a man.

Of course, we all know what assuming gets you.

We couldn’t have known then, in those early mornings when we would share the stolen water and then tongue kiss as quietly as possible until even in a basement it was one hundred degrees, and we just couldn’t handle the skin feeling of each other anymore but we couldn’t handle the sad feeling either. Because by then we knew our families had been murdered for their Earthquake Preparedness Kits, and so we would take turns mercilessly pounding each other until we were so hot and so tired we didn’t feel sad anymore and then we would sleep feet to feet until nighttime. We couldn’t have known then how much you wanted to be born.

So we walked for weeks. We shot some people, honey; we had to. Those reflective blankets turned out to be so useful while we were crossing the fires in Eastern Oregon and your father and I were young back then before the earthquake so we had scorned those preparedness kits. You can’t buy kits like that now. I mean, you can’t buy anything. And we would just go at it, as hard as possible, for as long as possible, all morning, every one of those days. And then of course your dad started feeling sick and I just thought it was the airborne fast acting syphilis that had mutated and was killing everyone still alive but then his stomach started getting bigger and that was never a symptom and your father was always so skinny and I just didn’t know what it was.

One night, we were up almost to Washington at this point, I was on my hands and knees and your dad had been slapping my ass and giving it to me pretty hard and I felt you kick. He had just come I think and he gave me one last slap and sort of slumped over on top of me and there was this movement from his stomach on my back. That was you baby! Kicking your adorable little leg!

When we finally accepted that this was a new world and we would just have to learn to adjust, that procreation was probably our purpose, especially now that ninety percent of the rest of the people were gone, well, we just embraced it, and made sure that our machetes were sharp enough for surgery.

I’ve never told you this sweet pea but I delivered you with my own hands. And your father’s machete. I found some books at a high school outside of what used to be Walla Walla. I never took Biology but after some studying, I decided you would be somewhere in your father’s stomach and then I figured the best angle to cut at and then I shot a man for a needle and thread.

I’m sorry baby. Things were different back then.

I remember pulling you out of your daddy’s abdomen! All glowing. Yours was the first face I had ever seen with three eyes! Even though I thought you looked kind of like a monster, especially with that one central leg and no discernable genitalia, I loved you and knew I couldn’t shoot you for food.

Of course, you were only a couple weeks old when we made it to Canada and your dad finally succumbed to the airborne syphilis but by then you had reached maturity and were bounding around on that one perfect leg, sucking up cockroaches so quickly we never had to worry about breastfeeding. Yes I miss your father but we always agreed it was better to be dead.

I am so proud of you honey! The way you figured out how to asexually reproduce, the way you tenderly show your babies how to pull the trigger on a gun so carefully with one of their seven fingers, always aiming for the knee caps, never the throat. You are so gentle with them! The world you repopulate will be a beautiful one, if devoid of any language I can understand.

Now you know baby that I am thirty-two this year. The oldest human being left on Earth. We’ve had a good run sugar but I know the symptoms of the airborne syphilis and I feel that these are my last moments with you. Remember me, if you have memory, when you hum your monotone tunes to your babies at night and when you find an old cache of bottled water. I love you baby. Good luck with planet Earth.




Copyright © 2010 Lizzy Acker

The two aliens are at a Bingo game.  They are confused.  They are not used to Bingo games and they are trying to understand Earth culture but Earth culture is very hard to understand.  One of them buys a ticket for a side game and starts chewing on the cardboard.  The other makes marks with the dauber on his hand.

Let me tell you something about these aliens: this is their honeymoon.  The word is out about San Francisco as a number one tourist location, not just in French speaking countries but on other planets too.  Alien tourists love this place.  How you can tell an alien tourist is that they look like a German but they speak perfect English.  Also they don’t have the Lonely Planet.  They have this other guidebook that directs them to the Outer Richmond, the Taco Bell on Third Street and always, Bingo.

The aliens have been at Bingo for a few minutes only.  They paid in cash.  They love each other very much, in an alien way, which is completely different from a human way.  The alien way of loving someone else very much is: they are one hundred percent sure that the other alien exists.

The aliens are in love.  So they have sex.  This is how: first they look each other in the eyes.  They do this for a long time, ten whole minutes.  This is considered highly romantic.  Sometimes they blink.  After ten minutes Alien One spreads her fingers out on the table.  Alien Two does the same thing.  Alien One inches her fingers over a little toward Alien Two.  Alien Two also inches.  They do this slowly.  The Vietnamese lady across the table from them doesn’t even notice they are moving.  She doesn’t even think they are strange.  She is very serious about Bingo.  Alien One inches her fingers more.  Then Alien Two.  They each inch some more until their fingers are touching.  Alien One lets her hand glide over Alien Two’s hand, slowly.  She feels the texture of his skin.  He feels the texture of her skin.  Her hand stops.  They hold still like that, one hand on top of the other.  They are having alien sex. It is totally appropriate to have alien sex in public, even on their planet.  Everyone does it.  Their parents had sex in front of them all the time.  Aliens even do it at work.

The aliens have sex for two hours and then the Vietnamese woman gets a big Bingo and she tells them they have been good neighbors and gives them each a five dollar bill.  They leave the Bingo hall and walk to the freeway, another hotspot in the alien San Francisco guide.  At the freeway, they throw rocks at cars and Alien Two shoves the bill up his nose.

After a while, they teleport home to their planet.  The guidebook says the cops will be coming. It’s true: the cops will be coming any minute.




Copyright © 2010, Lizzy Acker

Last night I wanted to rip my body open. We lay in the dark, both naked with no sheets, and I listened to the old metal fan blades swing and creak their way around and around. Matt was already asleep, but I couldn’t possibly, not even close, so I just tried to breathe and think about the room around me. This room like a hot dark closed thing, like a sealed thing. The inside of something horrible. So still and thick it seems like even air can’t get in, but the moon has managed to slip a line of light in between the curtain and window frame. I can see part of the wooden boards that make up the wall. They have the original stain, and you can tell they were installed still wet because there are hand prints on each side where someone held it, fingers wrapping around like a ribcage. Is Matt descended from those hands? It was built in the 20’s I think. Did his great grandfather pay people to help? It could be a stranger’s hands. Maybe there is a girl out there somewhere, a relative of his, and she is walking around with no idea that her history is marked out here. What choices could she have made to be lying here instead of me? Breakfast cereals, part-time jobs, t-shirt colors, I Love You’s. Choices that don’t seem big on their own, little paving stones that you can pick up, throw, place down anywhere, stones that seem entirely under your control until you look behind you and see them as part of the road that’s been steadily pushing you here, so far from where you started. So far from anywhere else you could be. If I were my mother, I’d have a six-year-old child right now. I will never be an Astronaut, or a child actor,or an overly accomplished 23-year-old. Or 24, 25, 26…

Matt rolls over to me and I can feel his skin touching mine, but we’re both so hot, I’m not even sure where. Can you ever make a decision you don’t want back again? Can you hate someone and still know that you don’t deserve him? This room is a dark, hot pit. The hand-printed walls are steep and slick. I will die here. I will lose all of my chances. Matt’s Humming now. Some water song. Cold-water song.

The light around the window frame is turning bluer and I can’t think straight, so finally I will be able to sleep my way out of this heat, sleep myself into a different body. Maybe even get back some of the things that have been boiled out of me. In the morning I will remember what it feels like to be the person I have become. I will remember that the dirt by the river is so fine it feels like talcum powder. That it gobs up and reddens on my wet feet. I will remember that we have coffee flavored ice cream in the freezer, and that I like coffee flavored ice cream. Matt’s starting to wake up a little, speaking, but clearly also still dreaming. You can wait all day, he says. I saw you first, he says. It doesn’t work that way, he says.




Copyright © 2010, Maria Suarez

My other friend is heavily annunciating a love ballad from the seventies and spraying sweat on a skinny and pale malaria-infested mother of three with a tattoo of a red butterfly spread out on her sagging butt cheeks in an amateur porn flick in Glendale, Southern California. He is not using protection. She does not feel a thing as she looks away from the camera; remembers the night with the disco ball lights, the first time she kissed a man.

Oh and my other friend has just taken a sniper’s bullet off of his head on a rooftop of a deserted Arabian brothel. He wasn’t looking. He was reloading. When he opens up his eyes, he sees his helmet laying there with a dent in it. His buddy from Stillwater, Arkansas smiles and spits. Dimples underneath that helmet drove the girls wild back home, especially at the Okey Doke. Bar and grill type. Where he lost his money and a beer and a bet on a dart throw and had to enlist. Lost his girlfriend that night too but he didn’t care. He heard you could meet elegant women overseas. He looks down at my buddy. “Lucky sumobitch.” About to spit again, then a bullet rips through his dimples leaving oil-drip holes, his tongue splats on my friend’s forehead and teeth fall clinking into my friend’s helmet pirouetting like the ballerina dancers he dreamed of loving.

One of my other friends is digging up the dirt by the freeway exit to find skeletons of dogs for an art project. Bones and fangs and shit. I think she’s looking for her mother who was a cashier at Safeway or some place like that. That’s where she disappeared. Last person she talked to, a co-worker by the name of Wilbert, said she was aching for adventure, took off without saying goodbye but gave him a kiss on the lips cause she was so excited. My friend said she was kidnapped or killed by Wilbert under orders from the upper management for infringing on store protocol which states that employees should not have intimate relations with upper-management, employees, and/or customers. My friend says the CEO of Safeway is in on it. “My mother was loving and carefree and romantic, should those be reasons to die?” Still, she says she’s digging for dogs, which doesn’t make sense, they make her cry. She had a puppy as a child and it was killed when her mother ran over it and the guy in the passenger seat rolled down the window, drank from a bottle, and said something like “dog eat dog world” or “it’s a tough world” or “you have a girl?” Something like that.

I walk outside and lie down in the grass. No shade. I’m wearing a baseball cap with a snake eating its own tail because it’s an interesting conversation piece. I’m also wearing flip-flops and swimming trunks but I don’t have a pool or anything and have no shirt because I’d like to complete my farmer’s tan. There’s a vulture circling above me in tiny dotted lines. I left a burrito in the microwave. It’s boiling out here. It’s the heat. Makes us crazy. Maybe not. Just the way it works. Feeling burned by the sun makes me feel like getting up and doing something spontaneous. Travel. Meet someone new, an air flight attendant maybe, share a laugh, share a cola. A better job. A newer truck. Volunteer. Help somebody. The sprinklers come on and I get a sense of things starting over as I tuck my hands behind my head. Eyes feel good closed. I feel part sun and part water. Half heat and kinda cool. The vulture is not for me. Can’t be. I’m just getting by and I’ve got too many problems to be dead. I’m alive because I want a lemonade with ice and an umbrella.




Copyright © 2010, Paul Padilla

It was the heat.  By that evening he couldn’t take any more of it.  The radiator was off and the room was a dry sauna.  He ran his hands over the walls and located the steam pipes behind the plasterboard.  They ran like arteries inside the skin of the building.  His room was a hub of steam converging on him from the bottom floors and climbing all directions to the upper.  If anything, the desk clerk said on the other end of the phone, you should be so lucky.  Most rooms in San Francisco are freezing cold this time of year. He told the clerk about the noise, the pinging and the clanging that the radiator made all day, even though he hadn’t turned it on.  That’s how they are, the clerk said.  Radiators talk to you.

Fuck this, the man muttered and hung up.  He grabbed his jacket and flew downstairs to Geary Street and the cool night air.

When he returned at quarter after eleven, the room was broiling.  He threw off his jacket and kicked off his shoes.  He threw open the windows as far as they would go.  Then he flopped back on the bed full of the electric numbness of too much lite beer and tequila.  The radiator click-click-clicked and then banged twice, like someone was in the boiler room hammering on the pipes.  Shut up! he called out.  The radiator banged like calling court to order: bam — bam — bam.

He startled awake in the dead of night, lights ablaze.  He was still in his shirt and jeans, and he was shivering.  He slammed the windows shut.  The radiator was cold and chirping like a satisfied cricket.  He ran his hands along the walls for the steam arteries.  They were gone, or dead, or hibernating.

God damn this place, he mumbled.  God damn this and everyone else.

In the morning he made the bed and fixed breakfast.  The steam was already coursing through the skin of the building.  He sweated through the meal, soaking the armpits of his pajama shirt.  He dressed and, with no plan or direction, began walking, making it all the way to the end of Golden Gate Park.  The conversation in his brain went like this: God damn if I — fuck, if this isn’t — how can she say — I damn well worked and slaved — twenty-two years — he thinks he can, I’ll show him — God dammit — how did I not see — how did I deserve this? He didn’t see couples and children and balloons at Stow Lake.  He missed the paddle boats and ducks and ice cream sandwiches.  He only saw the water.  How did I deserve this?

He made it back to the hotel no different than when he left it.  He dreaded returning to the superheated room.  He thought about going to a bar, or Mitchell Brothers, but he hated the idea of sharing space with anyone, even if they were naked.  He bought cold beer and took it upstairs.  He opened the door to his room and heat poured out like packing peanuts flooding out of a shipping crate.  He sat in the reclining chair and clicked through the TV stations.  He turned the volume all the way down.  It was better without.  The radiator banged and creaked and acted up all evening.

That guy reminds me of my son. He pointed to the television set.  My son can draw anything.  His art teacher thinks he’s great.

The radiator clicked and clicked.

Sees something once, and it goes right in the bank. He tapped his temple.  A week later he can draw it like a photograph.

The radiator banged, hesitated, then banged again.

Yeah, and knocked her up!  Got the money to pay for it from me.  Like I wouldn’t know.  How fucking stupid he takes me for?

The radiator made a hollow booming sound.

Oh, I know it happened.  Good and well I know.

The room seethed with heat.  He took a piss and got another beer.  A fast food commercial came on.

My wife makes good tacos, he said.  We have taco night every week.  She grates up the cheese, cuts up an onion.  She even has that little tray that holds all the warm taco shells.

The radiator pinged.

Everyone likes taco night.  You get to make your own.

The radiator pinged once more.

Goddamn I know what she’s up to. His hand began to crumple the beer can.  It wasn’t empty.  What’s his name, and his fucking hair plugs.  Coming around all the time, like I don’t know.

The radiator clanged.

What kind of wife sends her husband off to San Francisco?  For a weekend?  ‘Cool off’, fuck, I know her game.  Wants me gone, she’s got it.

He snatched up his jacket.  I’m going to see some trim, I don’t care about her. He threw the jacket back on the bed.  Fuck that, I’m not going waste my money. And he sat down again.

The heat came on harder, and in waves.  The radiator banged out.

Fucking bones!  He rubbed his fingers together.  Down to the bones!  For what?  For this?

The radiator banged out again.

Oughta show her.  One phone call and our marriage is through.

The radiator banged out a third time.

He got up.  His hands were shaking.  He searched the walls.  They were warm with the blood of steam.  He closed all the windows and stuffed a bath towel into the crack under the front door.  The radiator was clanging, clanging with the urgency of a Sunday morning church bell.

He said, I’m talking to a radiator. He wrapped his hand around the floor valve.  He twisted it open, twisted it for the first time.  Maybe this’ll shut you up.

The valve hissed and the radiator glugged in steam.  It devoured the stuff until its belly was full.  It began to glow.  The radiator went from gunmetal gray to red to orange to hot white.  Heat poured forth.  It made his eyeballs feel like cracking paint.  The heat clamored up his nostrils and plunged down his throat.  It baked his lungs from the inside out.  The air pressure soared, enough pressure to crumple his skull, but the heat inside him pushed back with equal force.  He was at an equilibrium, more of a truce than a peace, and the noise was finally gone.

Copyright © 2010, Jim Nelson

2. Many animal parents (teach, learn) survival and hunting skills to their young.

3. Coyote cubs can make noises that sound (like, as) human babies crying.

4. Predatory birds won’t (leave, let) their young move out of the nest until they’ve been prepared for life; “prepared” as a state happening to everyone’s predatory bird children.

5. We quickly (learn, teach) to recognize our limits.

6. Can you think of two animals who build their lives around (these kinds, this kind) of limitations? What keeps them from altering their environments?

7. A tiger may (lay, lie) its catch in a protected spot.

8. A tiger senses it should (lay, lie) in the shade of a tree on a hot day.




Copyright © 2010, Christine Choi

on snow days         I would warm

my toes on your  stomach     outer edges

always freezing      you called/call it

your furnace center      grimace merely

for effect      but hold my feet in your hands

beneath      your t-shirt           where

and younger      in the girls’ dorm

when   we  discovered     what we could

lying       with one ear   pressed

head rested    on roommate’s belly

internal churning    quiet       gurgle

a kind of glass  to wall     listening

where all the  parts   are flesh

scratchy blanket    beneath your palm

someone else’s ankles    your horizon

summer now         that weird chill gloom

after July 4th     unwise   to wear a skirt

to work and  back   wind peeled off the train

sunset breeze blown    legs cold walking home

I stand close  to the oven   near midnight

where two potatoes  have been baking

heat dissipates      fast rolling waves

round calves    can’t get warm enough




Copyright © 2010, Diana Aehegma

Lizzy Acker

Maria Suarez

Paul Padilla

Jim Nelson

Christine Choi

Diana Aehegma