literary journal x
“seeks submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and hybrid (daring!) forms that
astound with the complexities of the human condition, that assume nothing and give
everything, that will leave readers flabbergasted and desiring more, and that, in short,
possess the mystical power of a faceless surgeon-god performing in the dark.”
I can do that, I think, as I twist my body in the kitchen to retrieve a Dorito that’s fallen in
that underworld beneath the dishwasher. It’s disconcerting how much grease is down
there, dead ants and flies, a Popsicle stick, a raisin, a lemon rind, a hangnail, a 1985 Donruss baseball card (Steve Garvey, worth 65 cents), a tube of lipstick, a Madonna CD, a flashlight (oh, the irony), and much of my son’s 3rd-grade social studies homework. So much red ink that Stalin would be proud. And all the stuff I can’t reach, being 40 years old with knees that can’t do what they used to do.
I can do complexities of the human condition; I can even give everything, but I’m
wondering if Literary Journal X, whose editor-in-chief Susan L., really, absolutely, and
without reservation wants everything. Aside from the detritus beneath the dishwasher, I
have these strange affinities for stains. Tabletops are good, and the bathroom floor, the sofa cushions, but Susan L., you see, I give them names. I tell my girlfriend when she’s tired and just home from work, don’t sit on Oscar and leave Lucy for me tomorrow. I plan to give her my full attention because she looks like the state of Oklahoma, panhandle and all (or perhaps the shadow from the dish towel makes the shape thereof). At any rate, she’s a Western state and I love her. Hell, I dream of her. I get wet. Could that be a poem?
The Modernists broke down the doors with hammers and let the air inside, and everything
else. William Carlos Williams made us embrace the poverty-romantic, Eliot gave us
toothbrushes and prostitutes, oyster shells and sawdust, and Hemingway lounged in an
armchair with a glass of absinthe and fractured Dryden and Wilde until they died again. He enjoyed it, but he would’ve rather been fishing. What they mean is that I can do anything. What they left are the spaces where anything goes. But to flabbergast? That feels like
boxing or breathlessness, exposing myself to some well-intentioned editorial staff in Idaho
or Montana. I think I could write for the next thousand years and never flabbergast once. I
could tell of the streetlights in St. Louis or Aydın, Turkey, pregnant girls that linger near the basketball courts in Muncie, or certain cases of adultery in Jerusalem, but I could not
flabbergast.
My imagination’s fierce, but my space is where things fall and I’m too tired at night to pick
them up. It might be you someday, having fallen, having broken a bone, having stretched on the kitchen floor with one good eye gazing to where the oven meets the counter. Anything might be there. Anything that I’ve done or still might do, but the surgeon-gods have died and have taken their scalpels and masks to their graves. They never liked poems, anyway; they had other worlds to conquer.
Author: Carl Boon
Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.
Artist: Sherry Shahan
Sherry Shahan grows radish tops on her windowsill and eats them. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Oxford University Press, Exposition Review, ZYZZYVA, Mount Hope and is forthcoming in Gargoyle and F(r)iction. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and taught a creative writing course for UCLA for 10 years.
