Issue 24 | August 2014 www.bodegamag.com
Contents “Myth of Trailer Bride Cicada” by Liam Hysjulien
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Poems by John Sibley Williams
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“That’s My Green Grass” by Britt Melewski
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“Paid Vacation” by Peter Kispert
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Myth of Trailer Bride Cicada Liam Hysjulien
Bodega | Issue 24 | August 2014 Poetry
Lie flat on your back for ten days, kudzu starts at your feet, devours you. We have our own mythology. Gods in the South small enough to fit into a soda bottle. Smaller than the atom. Smaller than the freckles in your eye. Smaller than the nubs of your teeth. Small enough to shed your skin for skin of damned dogs. Of snakes. To be lifted off a ladder in a backyard wrestling pit, crashing to the earth, wings fused into your body. The mythology of a broken body means no shit work for a while. Means a check for every month, cash straight into your body like oxygen sucked from broken marrow. Tell us again the story of the trailer bride, who turned into a cicada. Screamed her tiny wings together as her husband removed antlers from a buck. Played dirges on his saw, each note bent,
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Bodega | Issue 24 | August 2014 Fiction / Poetry
Title | Author
breaking timbres against the animal’s warm body. Tell us the story of the young hicks who were copping, and found their way into the backwoods. And the mountains begged to be put back together. And the shit jobs never returned, and the hicks never got straight. The bride with her breast placed to her child’s lips, tell me how a howl becomes a dumbing, endless hum, how a child can grow a silver crown, head shaved the next morning, flakes of silver petals thick enough for feet to disappear, thick enough for sprouted wings to fan patterns on a pleated linoleum floor. A bruise on the face slowly heals. A split lip has time to be sewn shut. Your wings itch like phantom limbs from a phantom body.
Liam Hysjulien’s poetry has recently appeared in The New Republic, The American Reader, Brooklyn Quarterly, All Hollow, and elsewhere. www.bodegamag.com
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Poems by John Sibley Williams
Bodega | Issue 24 | August 2014 Poetry
A Dead Boy Fashions the Grand Canyon from His Body
Snow melts and the ensuing river begins
to wear down the mountain
drop by infinitesimal drop—
a process of hollowing.
* Nobody recognizes his own unbecoming, so the slow green slope of us
slopes slowly into blue.
* They say it takes full centuries to erode a body completely. I’m not so sure. I was once a single misplaced word that extinguished a family forever. * Stone must be easier
to revisit
with hindsight,
to love more in its absence. Stone must be easier to forgive. www.bodegamag.com
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Poems by Williams
Bodega | Issue 24 | August 2014 Poetry
* One day we’ll all have to travel a thousand miles and back in a car too small for its family — over stone and sand — just to stand awe-struck on the lip of some empty canyon carved from a mountain by a dried out river.
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Bodega | Issue 24 | August 2014 Poetry
Poems by Williams
A Dead Boy Undoes His Mountain The finite
enormity of it.
Everything
reawoken
by the absence of anything.
For once I can leave the grass unclaimed, sink into green and unmake each cloud from my image. The mountain painfully small above
pins a star on my chest.
Even now, you have never been here. And between spasms of light a tree loses its oakness. In undefined shadow I lose only the skin of us. Waiting in my ear
the thunder behind silence,
in the hollow of my ear
becoming silent.
John Sibley Williams is the author of eight collections, most recently Controlled Hallucinations (FutureCycle Press, 2013). He is the winner of the HEART Poetry Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart, Rumi, and The Pinch Poetry Prizes. John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and Board Member of the Friends of William Stafford. A few previous publishing credits include: American Literary Review, Third Coast, Nimrod International Journal, Rio Grande Review, Inkwell, Cider Press Review, Bryant Literary Review, Cream City Review, RHINO, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon. www.bodegamag.com
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That’s My Green Grass
Bodega | Issue 24 | August 2014 Poetry
Britt Melewski
Lookie here, it’s not every day
and hips and ass, but
that the sand kisses your lips. mostly stiff arms and sadness. Purple sweet potatoes melt
So much of the bouncing ball
in the basket. Lord, it rains, is about what it is not. but not where we need it.
Be thankful you’re not a bee
The sweetest fruit on earth because you’d quickly be a dying breed. hides on the cliff ’s furthest edge,
I could suck nectar from your neck,
away from our prickly hands. but I’m not going to. For now. Its name is Zeus Juice I feel you,
What I would give to have it back—
I feel you, I feel you. the time we danced together How short is the list? Move
in the thick of our own dust.
to New Orleans and change the scenery; shoot a deer in the dome and dance to the synthesizer: hips and ass
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Britt Melewski grew up in New Jersey and Puerto Rico. His poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Sink Review, Spork Press, Cura, the DMQ Review and are forthcoming in Forklift, Ohio among others. Melewski received his MFA from Rutgers University in 2012. He lives in Brooklyn. 7
Paid Vacation Peter Kispert
Bodega | Issue 24 | August 2014 Fiction
Two deer in the Detroit airport. One I could understand. They seized up like trophies when children ran toward them near the car rental kiosk. A bearded man tried to corner them against a wall of glass. I was holding my mother’s duffel filled with my clothes, rising on the escalator. There was the clicking of hooves against the marble floor, and I thought, I will never feel as strange as this. I used to play a game where I imagined everyone around me had just lost both their parents in an accident. Six weeks since my mother’s passing, her last breath drawn during a nap between episodes of Guiding Light, and I couldn’t imagine the people sitting next to me on the plane headed anywhere other than their parents’ homes. There was the sudden cut of a laugh track from the television that night as I reached to dial an emergency line, my vision blurring, my chest warming with nausea. When I get out of the taxi in Bermuda, I avoid my reflection in the revolving glass of the hotel door. It is night, and my bags seem heavier. I rise on the elevator and arrive at the wrong floor. I step out anyway. There is a beep, light and high, and the metal doors shut behind me. Peter Kispert’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, Tin House online, Slice Magazine, South Dakota Review, McSweeneys Internet Tendency, and other journals. He is the editor-in-training at Indiana Review and has worked with Electric Literature and Narrative Magazine. www.bodegamag.com
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Bodega | Issue 24 | August 2014
Submit Your Work to Bodega!
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Editor-in-Chief Emily X.R. Pan
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Managing Editor Cat Richardson Poetry Editors Lizzie Harris Amy Meng Prose Editor Melissa Swantkowski Web Developers Loren Rogers Eric Weinstein Editors-at-Large Julie Buntin Ben Purkert Maura Roosevelt Readers Miranda Holmqvist Brady Huggett Sasha Safanova Jacob Spears
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