Daniel M. Shapiro

She had wanted to see his environment, the stage that holds its breath before the dive. Only the owner was supposed to know she was coming, to look for a woman in head scarf and mirrored glasses, deep blue Gloria Vanderbilts masking a limp. But Hilly Kristal hadn’t kept a secret since he sneaked Miles Davis in to scout the backbeat of Blondie.

Walking through an unhinged doorway, she grabbed a notepad from her sunflower satchel, wrote the words she saw on the wall: gabba gabba hey. She didn’t want to forget to ask about that later. She shook hands with Hilly but didn’t know what to say to the men setting up on stage, the men who weren’t supposed to be there. She was especially curious about the spiky-haired ginger in animal-print spandex. Tongue-tied, he introduced himself as her “biggest fan: Cheetah from Ohio.”

“Let’s use our real names,” she said. “I’m Frances from Tennessee.”

“I’m Eugene,” he whispered.

As if continuing an ongoing conversation, they started talking bands. She described what it felt like to sing a Cole Porter tune with Cole Porter in the front row, asked Eugene why his group was called The Dead Boys, if nihilism was a marketing tool for punk rock or something authentically dangerous. She wanted to know if she could help him.

“We’re about to tune up for tonight,” Eugene said. “Will you play my favorite song with us?”

“I would like that very much,” Frances said.

Eugene and Steve, who typically was called Stiv, ground out two bars of D minor chords, followed by a measure of A7. Johnny the drummer pounded a syncopated fill as Jeff plucked eighth notes on a bass adorned with unidentified red splatter. Frances recognized the chords despite the distortion and elevated tempo. Her hit from 1940 always remained backstage to her, ready to step out for an encore. This time, she would have to shout the lyrics into the microphone to hear herself.

I’ve gotta be good or mama will scold me emerged in a voice that lacked the usual Doris Day polish. For the next 2 minutes, 10 seconds, she would keep looking over at Eugene, who would continue to nod like a dashboard ornament, who grinned like Big Boy when she spat out the line, What if he’ll persist, mama darling, doing things he hadn’t oughta.

Throughout the jam, she had deviated from her typical mindset when taking the stage. She would picture herself in a velvet-trimmed ballroom, far cry from the girl who had sung for customers at the family store, the girl with the deformed foot, the girl who always asked too many questions. She had always imagined what turns a freak into a star. Here she stood under a ceiling with exposed rot, surrounded by graffiti, walls and floors decorated with unknown fluids that might not have dried properly. Here she sang in the smoke, aware her hairdo and makeup would not survive the sweat, the near unhinging.

As she left, she resisted the urge to reach for the notepad again. She no longer needed to write down questions about rolling in broken glass, arching a back effortlessly, being the loneliest person in a crowded room. She had discovered why an exclamation point belonged on the title of her TV show, why gabba gabba hey required no explanation, why Iggy is called Jimmy when he sinks into a couch.

Italicized lyrics sung by Shore are from “Yes, My Darling Daughter” by Jack Lawrence.

“Gabba gabba hey” is a phrase from “Pinhead” by the Ramones.

DANIEL M. SHAPIRO is the author of How the Potato Chip Was Invented (sunnyoutside press, 2013), a collection of celebrity-centered poems, and has written series about KISS’ worst album, disagreeable ventriloquist dummies, etc. He is a special education teacher who lives in Pittsburgh.

Danielle Nicole Byington

I model for the artist, my hair unwashed,
His brush massaging it with exaggerated grime,
An anxious texture to intimidate gallery gaze.
The hours slowly falling behind the scene
Begin to bear streams of cluttered-sunset hues that
The portrait cradles behind my body.
I pose in a corn stalk row,
The background going on forever
Like a hotel hallway.
Worms fumbling for their key
Mate on the dangling silk,
Leaving larvae that browns the artist’s canvas.
His paintbrush phantomizes a Native American
Sprawled on her stomach,
Elbows perching her interested head
Above a Shakespeare text, her Anglo-painted eyes
Looking at me as if I know what I’m doing.
My arm falls asleep leaning on the hoe,
My fingers shaking from clutching the corncob pipe,
And in his intermissions I smoke it,
Chasing the tobacco with
Bourbon I stashed in the set;
I pass the flask to Anoki.
She squints when she swallows,
And drops of the power
Spill from her lips,
Blurring orbs of words in Hamlet —
As if she needed those anyways.
His strokes dress me in an American flag
Cinched on one shoulder like a toga,
Compounding intellect and freedom,
Assuming I can cook and reproduce.
He chooses chosen colors for my pallor,
And lightens my hair to imply tradition.
Standing so long, I burrow my toes in the soil,
Kicking back at a sharpness.
He instructs me to be still,
And my toes gently bleed on something beneath the canvas.
He waves his hand and paintbrush in shock,
Cursing the corn as if it has ears.
I look back;
Crimson runs up the stalks to the tips of their limp leaves,
Dripping on the ground with a tribal patter.
Anoki shuts her Shakespeare book,
Standing to approach me, relieving my arm of the hoe,
Placing a hand on my shoulder,
Untying the toga.
She swings the hoe with a broad stroke,
Brushing my neck and chest with the tool,
Its heavy, metallic head collapsing into the dirt.
I want to clutch the wound, but she reaches first,
Her warm, brown hands catching my blood,
Her eyes looking for something inside me.
Disabling my portraiture, she finds it;
I know because her lips part,
The reward of critical gaze painted on her face,
And she says, . . . that is the question.

DANIELLE NICOLE BYINGTON‘s work can be seen in The Camel Saloon, Black Mirror Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, and Rust + Moth. In pursuing her English-MA, Danielle’s academic work focuses on the boundary between creative writing and literature, such as appropriation and ekphrasis. Danielle enjoys life with her three cats and Shakespearean better half.

David Spicer

Not What We Expected

I’ll reveal this: when she and I felt
like gluttons and punished ourselves,
we ate and drank in The Purgatory Café,
a dive where pictures of dolphins
and unicorns floated on walls
and Cuban fishermen argued
about terrorized islanders. The place
pleased us with the faint smell
of fried sausage, and a blind woman
in a cotton dirndl decorated with daisies
played the oboe on a small stage, a pail for tips
next to her. Suddenly the door opened to voices
obscured by smoke and fog and revealed,
in a white robe, a bearded child
with a few followers. He carried a cross
carved from a wooden rocket and a dancer’s
pole. My skin tingled and we scoffed
for a moment before he spoke:
I’ve returned to the fires and jungles
of your world, I’m the rebel you’ve
waited for, so kneel and pray, run
with me, scrounge no longer,
the mathematics of this scorched
planet will arrive soon, but I am here.

Termination at the Crime Scene

We salvaged the wheelchair
and one shoe in a ditch at twilight
on the Okie-Texas line. Where was the vic?
An enigma. Somebody phoned me.
A woman who wept every other word.
I was the lead, Green the secondary.
Climbing out of the drooping earth,
we organized a search party,
found the corpse under the moonlit maple
next to an old horse with a bullet
in its head. The stiff had a gunshot wound
to the brain, swelled like a cocoon,
playing cards rolled up and stuck in his nose.
A hypo in his big toe. The stink astonished
Green with its wicked texture. Ah shit,
between you and I, it’s a heroin OD.
You’re not paid to think, moron, I admonished,
banishing him then and there. After his bad
grammar, for all I cared Green could’ve been
vines sprouting from a tea kettle
or a papoose with a pacifier in its mouth.

DAVID SPICER has had poems accepted by or published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yellow Mama, Bop Dead City, unbroken, The Curly Mind, Slim Volume, The Naugatuck River Review, Yellow Chair Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of one full-length collection, Everybody Has a Story, and four chapbooks. He is the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.