Revelation 097
Gilstrap Warner With the kind of dad who handed me a pack of peach wine coolers when I was seven, I learned to drink early, to feed and bury my rage, to let it grow in my clenched jaw and bloom into chest pains. I’m fifteen, half lit, and praising Jesus for the color of the night sky, its bizarre iridescence. You’re walking on the hood of Rob’s Impala, lecturing me about drugs and alcohol, how much power I could have if I’d only leave that mess behind. But since I’m always looking down, I spot and capture a grasshopper. Though it’s too dark to tell for sure, I’m sure I see the profile silhouette of two triangles at the end of the abdomen—the best way to figure out the sex. I close my hands around her,letting her hop and panic. When I try to get a second look, I misjudge how far I can open my hands. She leaps into the grass, lost to me, but I crawl on my hands and knees,pushing back one blade at a time. You’re still droning on about wanting to make music with a message. I’ve given up meat. I’ve given up butter. I’ve given up ice cream. But I can’t force myself to care about my own early demise, the way I’m falling into society’s trap to keep me down, man and how I’m numbing myself into complacence. The jeans you’d written on had ripped at the knee and when I sit back up, I pull the fabric until it comes off, then pull the knife out of my pocket and get to work on the other leg. smallpox champion Rum coats her wine glass Revelation 059 Gilstrap Warner Before Christmas break, she tried to end it with you, handing you the perfect watch--army green and aluminum. She’d walked over in the rain and stood dripping on the travertine railing about bullshit and distance, false love and hunger, the whole time banging her fist on her hip. She knew you were on the verge of leaving like everyone before you. The radiator clinked alive, and you asked her to fasten the watch. Let me fix you some rice, you said. Let me dry your hair. We can watch Night of the Living Dead or Return or The Twilight Zone if you’ll only settle down. You knew her impulse was to flee. She had never seen you cry before so she borrowed a dry shirt and climbed up to the top bunk where she lay silent and fell asleep facing the windows, facing rain. You couldn’t have stopped the assault a few months later any more than you could’ve saved the peach orchards from the spring freeze that year, but you wondered if you had let her walk away that night, if she’d skipped the trip to Charlotte to see your friend’s band, if she had not gotten back to her dorm in the wee hours, if you hadn’t pulled away before she finished her cigarette. If, if, if. After hours of begging, she finally described the guy.Idiot wore his work uniform so you took it upon yourself to drop an 8-ball in a sock and head to the greek diner on Hillsborough Street. In perpetuity. She never asked what you did. But she held a frozen burrito on your purple knuckles. She never asked. Not even that summer when she met someone who could love her better. Daisies bathed in wildfire youth of today |
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About the authors:
Beth Gilstrap is the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. She thinks she’s crazy lucky to work as Fiction Editor over at Little Fiction | Big Truths. Her work has been selected as Longform.org’s Fiction Pick of the Week, nominated for storySouth’s Million Writers Award, Best of the Net, and The Pushcart Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Bull, WhiskeyPaper, The Minnesota Review, Literary Orphans, and Little Patuxent Review, among others. She lives in Charlotte with her husband and enough rescue pets to make life weird.
Jim Warner's poetry has appeared in various journals including The North American Review, RHINO Poetry, New South, and is the author of two collections (PaperKite Press). His latest book, actual miles, will be released in 2017 by Sundress Publications. Jim is the host of the literary podcast Citizen Lit and is a faculty member of Arcadia University's MFA program. Twitter handle: @whoismisterjim
Beth Gilstrap is the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. She thinks she’s crazy lucky to work as Fiction Editor over at Little Fiction | Big Truths. Her work has been selected as Longform.org’s Fiction Pick of the Week, nominated for storySouth’s Million Writers Award, Best of the Net, and The Pushcart Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Bull, WhiskeyPaper, The Minnesota Review, Literary Orphans, and Little Patuxent Review, among others. She lives in Charlotte with her husband and enough rescue pets to make life weird.
Jim Warner's poetry has appeared in various journals including The North American Review, RHINO Poetry, New South, and is the author of two collections (PaperKite Press). His latest book, actual miles, will be released in 2017 by Sundress Publications. Jim is the host of the literary podcast Citizen Lit and is a faculty member of Arcadia University's MFA program. Twitter handle: @whoismisterjim