Revolting Sofas

2008-12-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

QUIZ

When Crates of Thebes wed the lovely Hipparchia, she threw her inheritance away.

Agree or disagree: Modern Art is a joke and has absolutely no value.

They made headlines in Athens when they walked together in the street.

Celebrity couples disgust you.

He is said to have been deformed, with a lame leg and hunched shoulders.

Love at first sight? Doesn’t exist.

He was nicknamed the Door-Opener for all the good will he inspired.

You think most charity organizations are cheating their benefactors.

Crates himself threw his fortune away to follow the Cynics’ ascetic credo.

You believe that apparently altruistic behavior is always a mask for self-interest.

Hipparchia is said to have fallen in love with Crates’ life and his teachings first.

And as far as you’re concerned, no one has one true soulmate.

There is something about the root of the word “cynic” that is worth looking up.

You are suspicious of anything proposed by a so-called expert.

Crates is supposed to have initiated his son into sex by taking him to a brothel.

If you need something done right, you know you need to do it yourself.

And he allowed his daughter a month’s trial marriage to potential suitors.

Working hard is for suckers.

ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS

2008-09-29T17:22:00.000-07:00

In a year,
the king’s good son will bear his people
back into the current like a school of fish. Through
the gantlets of wrecking crews, up hill all the time
till we’re sweating with bitter vomit in our throats,
we’ll be giving thanks like a vibration in a magnetic
field, even in the final, burial-in-the-prison-camp
scenes. Most of our chain-gang disappeared years
ago, all the main characters gone, even the hangers-
on, the stunt doubles who loitered at the edges of
the night-time sets trawling for freebies—all hurried
away like ghosts, like wind through a dusty valley.
One old man still sat on a wooden box at the intersection
of the highways, playing a flute into the blasting traffic.

“He’s going to get hit by a car out there, or run his mouth
till somebody does something stupid to him. Do you want
to talk about funerals?” No. Well, they’re understood
to be coming, prophesied by the plague of squashed
toads circling out from the pools at the cool edge
of the desert, by our impulse to find their grave markers
and sing the memoriam. A camel stepped in among
the stones, silent black trumpets dangling from the
leather straps on his saddle, and finally my brother
showed up, on foot, his car and its bad clutch allegedly
bottomed out in the cul-de-sac behind the cemetery.
My brother had been the one to feed him his ensalata
negra, sauce packets, hop clover and crackers, anything
he could think of to keep him interested—in his mind,

good for nothing, a sprinkling of nutmeg. We decided
to let the grass around him grow back to seed, then
lurched back to my brother’s house like drunks, our
fields seeming to stretch before us like the jaws of an
alligator. We imagined ourselves swallowed, digested
by the rhizomes of swamp grasses, and within minutes
of our crawling up out of the cypress jungle, the first
of the old-town church ladies rang my brother’s bell.
She handed me a casserole spiced with some ancient,
unbearable vapor, and we smiled the best we could,
but another of them had already let herself into the
kitchen. She was reconstituting dried mushrooms
in a giant pot of water.

JASON VINCZE

2008-08-05T10:45:00.000-07:00

YES

Man: In four months I will say I love you and you will not say it back.

Woman: Give me time.

Man: In a year we will move in together.

Woman: I will ask you to move the furniture so I can paint the walls a different white.

Man: You will cheat on me with a man who has a wife.

Woman: I will be sorry. You will forgive me.

Man: I will ask you to marry me.

Woman: I will say yes.

Man: You look the most beautiful when you say yes.

Woman: Will we have children?

Man: We will have children and they will make you heavy and tired.

Woman: They will look like you.

Man: Say yes again. When you say yes you look the most beautiful. Like an early tulip, thick with frost.

RACHEL PELZ

2008-05-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

DRAG

Derryl is fat. And not just fat, but fat. His drag race car loses its sproing the moment he sits inside it. Fat Boyz is what the other team calls him and his fat, but less-fat brothers. These engines hold so much oxygen they could totally blow apart the state. Bob drives now; his weight is ok by the car. They call that rival team Nigger Racers, except when the liberal, East Coast cousins come to visit. Don’t say nigger for awhile, the Fat Boyz’ father said, and don’t go giving me shit for grilling Toe Phew on the grill machine.
Derryl had a fat and beautiful wife. She was blond and she yelled hard at the Sunday races. She had fat plans to have fat kids and live happily, fat-ily, ever after, but then she got the cancer. She died fast and unfairly, meaning someone should have stopped it, because she yelled so hard on Sundays, because she called that team the Black Guy Racers, because she was the one who looked online to see what east coast liberal cousins liked to eat.
Not because of that. Who cares anyway? They call themselves the Nigger Racers and they call themselves the Fat Boyz Racers and they come together at the end and ooh and ahh into each others’ engines like they are in some sort of hot hot love. And who’s to say what should happen in Arizona?

KATE HILL CANTRILL

2008-04-29T20:56:00.000-07:00

KEEP IT DOWN

Earlier today I was looking up information about hearing loss on the Internet. I’d had some ringing, and was worried. Heredity is one factor, I read. Exposure to loud noises another.
     A horrible racket started right outside my window. I got up and peeked through the blinds to see several construction guys in hard hats ripping holes in my street, shattering the asphalt with jackhammers, and yelling instructions.
     I opened the window and screamed at them to keep it down. Immediately, two burly guys in hard hats came over. They walked right up to my window and stared at me, eyes glinty as nickels.
     “What’s the problem, pal?” they asked.
     I wasn’t in the mood to mince words.
     “Can you keep it down with your cement mixers and plinth drills and whatnot? I’m trying to do some work in here.”
     This one guy’s chest was busting out of his wifebeater. He leaned over. “Look, I’m sure your beauty rest is real important,” he said in his accent, “but we’re working for the city out here.”
     “Just keep it down, you fucking fucknuts,” I yelled, and slammed the window.
     Most loss can be linked with damage to the cochlea. Hairs along the canal break or get bent, nerve cells degenerate. I could definitely hear a ringing.
     Two minutes later the racket started up. I started pacing around. I stood at the window and watched them breaking up the street with abandon. I went to the closet, got a bat, and started smashing everything in my apartment. I put holes in the wall with the bat, smashed the glass in the picture frames, ripped out the upholstery from the furniture, and stuffed it into my mouth. I jumped in the middle of the living room, contorting my body in impossible ways, windmilling my arms and bending myself in half. Agggg! I yelled. Uhhhhggg! Then I collapsed on the floor in a twitching, broken heap.
     I whimpered, “Keep it down.”
     There was knock at the door. I thought it might be the construction guys come back to finish me off. I crawled down the hall on my hands and knees, bleeding from the face. When I opened the door      I saw it was my friend Simon.
     “What happened to you?” he asked.
     “Nothing,” I said. “Everything’s great. Never better. Why do you ask?”
     Simon looked at me and shook his head. “Every time it’s like this.” His voice was muffled.
     “What?” I said. I went to the kitchen to get some grapes.
     “How come you’re bent to one side like that?”
     It was true: I was hunched over in a way that was positively inhuman. My shoulder was touching my hipbone. Jumping around had crimped my body in half. I made a claw of my fingers, scraped up grapes, and started popping them into my mouth. The ringing was much louder. I gave the grapes to Simon.
     “Thanks,” Simon said.
     I tried to straighten up. “If you don’t lower your voice,” I told him, “It’s going to get you too.”

ANTHONY TOGNAZZINI

2008-03-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

DEEP PURPLE

For almost an hour before he showed up, I’d been down in my cousin Gary’s basement soaking up the watery air, studying his paraphernalia, afraid to touch anything—to touch would be to know, to understand, to become. I wasn’t ready. The place stank of mold, spunk and marijuana, of sadness and a wild unstable power.

“Here’s the thing,” he said, as soon as he got there, “I didn’t sign on to babysit you all weekend. You can hang around if you want but…you know what I mean?”

Handling his records with fussy, nervous care, like they were holy relics, illuminated objects, he chose one by a band called Deep Purple. Their logo looked like it was ready to corrode. Then he slid back onto his waterbed. He stared at the posters on his ceiling and ignored me. The music was less a sound than a weight in the air. Its aggression was a pose, even I could see through it to the fear and sadness swelling underneath. I sat with my legs crossed on the itchy rug, picking at the nascent fuzz on my shin, wondering what was wrong with me and why everything he owned was some shade of brown.

Nothing happened for a while. We both just stayed like this. Then Gary flipped the record and another long time passed.

I couldn’t figure out what it was that I was missing. It nagged at me. The nothing going on contained some essential secret, but all I could comprehend was that I wasn’t equipped to understand it. He was mourning something I hadn’t known existed.

JOSHUA FURST

2008-02-24T08:28:00.001-08:00

HUCK OR TOM

Feb. 4, 2008, like summer for a day. We made love too fast, out of practice but we get up from it like it’s all the time. My feet hit the wood floor, our underwear on my nightstand, the one window that opens and the fan worked a breeze around, 80 degrees. 5:35pm light persisting, our bathroom more beautiful when it thinks I’m not looking. The dog makes his rounds. When Katrina happened, when the levees broke, when Katrina happened, the voice I could make said Look at you, you’re not even tryin’ to get a Camry, you never even tried to get a Camry, so now you can’t get out. Of course I am angry I don’t have my Camry.

Let’s be plain about it. It’s a filthy winter here. We are one day back in Dallas from Manhattan where I got sick, a snot that hugs the germs of my brothers and sisters tight in my head. I took all of us, the entire possibility of a democratic republic, together in my sinuses to the Blockbuster to get a movie. A woman and her daughters checked out ahead of me. The second youngest corralled the baby away from the jawbreaker machine. The little cop pulled her sister by the hand to a framed poster of a white infant wearing headphones and looking surprised, jig-a-boo. The older sister pointed at the poster and forced a Ha ha, loud, didactic. The little one mimicked. My friend said Don’t say the year. I want to know if there’s a documentary on Nina Simone. In the information age do such easily answered questions stand only, or, principally as a sign of the interrogator’s buffoonery?

I had summer with my baby today. Cornell West talks about the niggerfication of Jim (Youtube it). West says there is a moment when Huck tears up the letter, when Tom tears up the letter, when Huck tears up the letter and refuses to believe or be party to the niggerfication of Jim. It’s a moral moment. I remember a white man on the TV, when Katrina happened, he said they got a lot of people out, the roads were full with early evacuees. So when I react to this with the indecorous line quoted above, should I tell you about it? Ha ha. We got summer today. I don’t know anything, my black friend has an Irish name. So what the signs don’t work. To find the loa, to pass through the earth. I can only tell you about sympathies. I wouldn’t let you at the jawbreaker either. It was sweet to make love, affirm life. There is dignity in hard work, there is dignity in a Camry.

               Windows smeared in our own dust

        if you want to come in here

                     light

           you’ll have to get through us

FARID MATUK

2007-11-25T18:00:00.000-08:00

BRIDGE

To begin with
The unknowing
Of the not-to-be

-known, the not
-to-be-happy-in
-one’s-unknowing

After which
Would follow
A wanting-to-know,

A sort of rational
Leading-one-toward
The should-not-be

Out to which one
Strides knowingly
Pacing from

Thinking to
Thought, thought
To had, had to

Have not, to will-not
-ever-have-again
And to thereupon

Decide to make
The not-to-be
-known known,

And for the first time
And the last time
To raise oneself

Up before, raise
Oneself up above
All lookers-on

Above all
Unknowingness
To thrill to the

Making of
A knowing sign
Before throwing up

One’s arms and
Plunging backwards
Into knowledge.

MICHAEL KELLEHER

2007-10-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

A LETTER TO PALEONTOLOGISTS, FOUND ALONGSIDE MY REMAINS

Digging sorts and scanners of men,
by this filter of soil and livid, micro-life,
an osseous filament remains.

You’ll note my cavernous teeth—
I was a sheer cook and confectionist
just past initial maturity.

The form I once knew, now rendered
into final underframe,
has beaten a drum of Earth much,
and long ago married and fathered,
also perished.

Do not mind levels of hydrogen cyanide,
undecylenate, cadinene, or the benzyl family:
I smoked a pack by day, to the very Day.
Shortly into my vacancy, this cadaver
was defaced and ingested by tiny lives,
then decomposed and became dirt pure.

I stretched for love when alive, taut sinew,
but I never broke—psyche, no, heart, less,
and in bone... you plainly see no antemortem
fractures.

The right hand fascinated too sharply on a pen,
and often kept a thick callus.
When the body sang, it was in pitch deep,
and drew the falciform ligament hard.
There is no trace of hernia, nor poetry:
I offer no more than a corpse’s assurance
I had them both for some time.

Before my descent,
my oculus sinister wore intricate sights,
exhausted, while my right eye, far from sleep,
sat in red, though in pleasance.

Here are your skeletal remains of me.
My name was lost to document, but note
that all of my world was fulfilled.

RAY SUCCRE

2007-09-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

Lately, anytime I’m telling someone that I love them or
whatever,
it’s like I don't even know what that means.
I don’t even know or understand what I’m even saying.
It’s like I’m telling someone I love them,
but all it is is like burnt up peanut brittle with a
piece dangling in this heart shaped valentine’s shop
window, with fluorescent lights on somewhere in the
back room ‘cause the store is closed. and you can
hardly see in. and then the dangling piece of burnt up
peanut brittle detaches in a single moment and just
falls onto some tissue paper.
That’s all love is to me these days.
That’s all I know of it to mean.
But maybe that’s good.
Maybe it’s like the arrogance of saying you know what
love is is the same as the arrogance of saying you
know all about God and what God wants or wouldn’t like
very much and stuff.
Anyway I get really wrapped up in myself but at the
same time I have no contact with myself. I haven’t
seen or heard from myself in so long. I’ve just
drifted apart from myself; it happens. We’re all busy.
But let me start taking things away from people
and you’ll see a whole new way.
Not stealing, but confiscating.
Things that people shouldn’t have.
Because it irritates people, like
cigarette smoke
or noisy sloppy iced coffee. Telling people to quiet
down or whatever.
Too much coughing, disgusting spitting and
toothpicking also has to stop.
Just policing them. Disciplining them. I need to do
it.
And I am going to start doing it. Soon.

SYBIL KEMPSON

2007-08-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

A
Last week I set fire to your library. You came in and watched, silent like a dormouse, like a librarian. Shelf by shelf the volumes were engulfed. Those dusty crackling flames scarred the copper ceiling. They left stains I’ll never get out.

K
We don’t have sun porches in Vienna. We never did. In German a sun porch might be a sonnevorbau, at least that’s what I would call it, but since we don’t have them, the word doesn’t exist.

A
And then I undress you. First I remove your jacket, then your pocket watch, then your vest. I unbuckle your shoes, left then right, remove your belt, unbutton your fly, pull down your pants, peel off your bloomers. I say Here are your pyjamas, sir. Be so kind as to put them on. Be so kind sir, it is time for bed.

K
Some might say balkone, but that wouldn’t be right either. In the mountains you might perhaps see them, those balkones, in the mountains at sanitariums full of coughed up blood and drying lungs, but not in Vienna. Never in Vienna.

A
You say, It is time for my walk, thank you very much, time for my evening constitutional.

K
It is time for my evening constitutional.

A
I say, But Sir, in this state, now, given the circumstances, given the condition of your…person, would it really be proper to step out for an evening constitutional? Just stretch out I say, stretch out on the divan, yes, right here, next to me, we’ll pretend we’re on our very own sonnevorbau, pretend we live in a land without masters or servants or books that thrive under flame.

ANDY BRAGEN

2007-06-29T00:40:00.000-07:00

LET FREDDIE MERCURY DRIVE

I smashed your little brother’s Atari to build us a time machine. It’s got two banana seats and it’s ready like a sling shot to flick us back three decades. It’s dialed into 1976. I invited Freddie Mercury. To witness it. To believe it. To believe in me. He’s got his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel and we’re goin’ right for Tatum O’Neal. You remind me of her dammit and I hate you for it. Wearing baseball caps you guys your hair comes off your ears like perfect feathers, like angel wings. Any way the wind blows. I want to do it all over again. Better this time. More time heavy petting. More time under the Star Wars sheets. More time under kangaroo jackets with chapped hands on bumpy nipples. I called them mosquito bites and you called me a boner. But I was scared and I guess I still am.

Each morning I get up I die a little. I move words around on the computer screen for the daily paper. Make lies read like truth and truth read like lies. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Mamma oooo I want to quit. Quit feeling older, quit balding, quit dying. Sometimes wish I’d never been born at all. I don’t want to type. I want to scribble on that plaster cast on your arm with a blue Bic pen. Write over and over: help me get better soon.

Let’s close our eyes while Freddie twists the key and fiddles with knobs. Turbo blasters on super duper maximum, okay. Now imagine we are being whip-smacked into the past so fast we can smell smoking hot inner tubes. And hold on to me. Tighter. Tighter even. Like you could die if you ever let me go. And if we’re not back again this time tomorrow carry on, carry on. As if nothing really matters.

ROSS BRAGG

2007-06-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

She renamed herself Anna because of her obsessive love of symmetry. She owns two of everything and when she touches a piece of paper, she has to fold it in half. Anna lives at the beach, which means the view out her window is of an undisturbed horizon line, creating a perfectly divided composition. Unfortunately, Anna is also claustrophobic. So, when she met Otto, who also had a perverse desire for symmetry, it seemed perfect. The only problem is that Otto always wants to sit so close to Anna and Anna to close so sit to wants always Otto that is problem only The. perfect seemed it, symmetry for desire perverse a had also who, Otto met she when, So. claustrophobic also is Anna, Unfortunately. composition divided perfectly a creating, line horizon undisturbed an of is window her out view the means which, beach the at lives Anna. half in it fold to has she, paper of piece a touches she when and everything of two owns She. symmetry of love obsessive her of because Anna herself renamed She.

ERIN COURTNEY

2007-05-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

THE BLOCK-BLOCK

Dear mariners, Tastee Freeze.
As much as you dare to eat,
day after day. Dear astronauts,
spiraling microwaved burritos,
free-floating cans of refried beans.
Can opener pinned prone
to gritty kitchen counter.

It occurs to you, the woman in the drugstore
you thought you knew—
the sound of bent vinyl blinds
under beards of filth. Disturbance of wind
surrounding convenience stores
on the odyssey across the street
in exacting sunshine.

Dear beauticians, traffic lights.
Eyes look at you.
Eyes change as they look at you.
Coils, loops of change.
It happens when you’re walking
to the intersection.
Notice, the sound of everything,
everything together?
A rattle, a nothing.

KRIS BRONSTAD

2007-04-23T22:18:00.000-07:00

Nice Kitty a photo essay

2007-03-21T16:13:00.000-07:00

SHOWERS

Boys are showers or growers. In the first compulsory communal showers in the cinderblock grey square of my middle school, the boys shed their acid-washed jeans and fleece-lined jackets and rushed into the water. They kept their glances to themselves. And I believed that I could hide my nub. I was a grower. Grown, my penis was completely normal sized. I’d done measurements and checked the charts. My penis didn’t become flaccid. Rather, once stowed, it was the size of a marshmallow and the color and texture of butter left on the counter. I took solace in the idea of the Hulk, of a tiny man who grew into a gigantic veined muscle. He was a man-sized grower. However, in the hot steam of the shower, as the boys gingerly washed and kept their hands in motion, waving over their privates to keep them private—no one wanted to be caught glancing down—I was curious, because even these evasive maneuvers could not hide that I was surrounded by showers, flaccid hulks the color and texture of butter left on the counter.

MATT BRIGGS

2007-03-04T19:46:00.000-08:00

We were walking up to the potlatch a few minutes late
when you turned to me and said you are a giant drag.
I said what makes you think that when I’ve got this ass-
pocket full of gin and whippits. Oh jesus she said and
reached down to pet the pot belly pig we were bringing
to the potlatch after forgetting completely last month to
bring anything at all. What have you ever done to prove
you aren’t a complete faker she said. Nothing I thought
then said and said does it really matter I said why don’t
we just drop the pot belly pig and wool blankets off at the
potlatch, tie one on, and go do it behind the long house
on that sweet willow bench between the two totem poles.
We’ll save the whippits for dessert I said. I have everything
I want you said. I know I said and wiped an emerging tear
from your bottom eyelid with the corner of one of the wool
blankets. Me too. I led the pig into the steamy house
and shut my ears to the good time. We walked around the
corner of the long house and I spread out my jacket on
the bench like a real gentleman. I didn’t think there were
real gentlemen anymore she said. There aren’t I said as
I dug in my pocket for the whippits. You’re going straight
for dessert she said. I rolled my eyes and passed out.
The gallery on the two retired totem poles behind the long
house frowned disapprovingly, except for the low men,
a rabbit and a badger, who sort of chortled and winked
like rabbits.

GREG KOEHLER

2007-02-16T20:00:00.000-08:00

Gingerbread trim and views of the harbor can be found throughout the capital city. Still it’s chaos inside, an iron and chrome mix of the subaltern and late-1980s-Upper-West-Side, packed with roadblocks, vendors, rundown municipal airports, protesters, vandals, open sewers, and buses emblazoned with humorous sayings. Unlike our neighbors to the west, we do not produce ethanol or natural gas; we do not produce glass-coffee tables. Much of our economic activity is hot, noisy, and overwhelming.

The monsoon of 1978 shredded our infrastructure. AID packages crumbled like the hillside over the government highway. Nobody emptied the ashtrays. Cars were parked in precisely the same space night after night. By the early 1980s, sources friendly to US interests declared the city passé. We wore out our carpets. For those with enough rope and air, the ocean awaited. Unfortunately, historical consequence was not a strong national trait.

And yet we continue to believe in our potential: cobalt-blue pools joined by spectacular cascades, dialogical plazas, Palladian alleyways, our annual street urchins regatta, the mud flats. Dissolved minerals give our tap water the flavor of a proud people nobly suffering the wounds of civil strife. According to legend, mermaids live in our grottos but can sometimes be seen along the coasts on moonlit nights. Still, we are not welded to traditions. Imagine a woman slipping a blouse from her shoulders, as she turns to whisper your name. Imagine our nation button by button.

We are fashioning a supercollider from your old mufflers. We have collected change from between our cushions. Our children come versed in a variety of mathematical operations. Now, we have storm drains large enough to swallow a small man.

SUSAN BRIANTE

2007-01-22T09:50:00.000-08:00

I was often the last to leave, offering to “help clean up,” when everyone else was walking out the door. I liked being doted on by Kim and her sister. Kim was always positioning herself next to me during reruns, and snuggling closer than anyone had before. I had no idea what to do, and I didn’t have an older brother, I just knew I liked the smoothness and the fullness of Kim Olson.

The night it happened was a Tuesday, when her sister worked the closing shift at Rudolph’s BBQ as a bartender, until 2:00 AM, sometimes later. Not as many people came over that night to smoke pot and watch The Honeymooners— especially Frankie Vale didn’t come; I know this because he had balls for Kim and was always trying to break apart the bond we were forming. No one went out for cookies, everyone left after The Honeymooners, and there was no chicken carcass to clean.

I felt like I was being mugged. All of a sudden Kim went from being next to me to being on top of me: wham. And then we were making out. And then she was feeling me. And then I was feeling her. Her breasts fell out of her bra when she helped me undo it. She whimpered when I reached down her pants. And then she was unhooking my belt. And then she put me inside her. My socks were still on. And then I came. And then she looked at me, smiled halfway, got us dressed, and we went to the improv comedy show that happened every night at midnight at Dudley Riggs’ Comedy Club. I knew we’d run into a few friends there.

AARON LANDSMAN

2007-01-08T23:26:00.000-08:00

THE RED BOX

I have a little husband. Keep him in
a box. He sleep with rust about his meat,
his tender crust a clutch. His ten-fold skin
so roi. He want and vaunts I beat and beat.
I half a little husband. Keeps him in
a box. He sleeps with rust avant his meat,
his shiny crust a clutch. His two-putt skin
so viney. Vic and then he vow. I beat
him to a finish. Finish blood and blue.
I tell him, now flip over. He cannot
unpaste his shoe. To haste, to haste, to too.
To make my bandy slide inside the slot
I keep him well and oil. I make him stuff
the blade all down > he calls himself a knife.

ANNA MARIA HONG

2006-12-20T13:50:00.000-08:00

from THE SOFA: A Moral Tale (1740)

“It was apparently owing to my addiction to couches that Brahma conceived the idea of confining my soul in such a piece of furniture. He decreed that it should retain all its faculties in that prison, no doubt not so much to mitigate the horrors of my lot as to make me feel them the more. He further decreed that my soul should begin a new lease of life only when two persons, with myself as opportunity, should render each other the first fruits of mutual affection.”

...

“I remembered enough both of what I had done and of what I had seen,” Amanzei proceeded, “to realize that the conditions under which Brahma was granting me new life would keep me no small length of time in the furniture he had chosen for my prison; but the permission he gave me to transfer myself at pleasure from sofa to sofa somewhat alleviated the hardship. This freedom brought a variety into my life which could not make it less wearisome; and, moreover, my soul was as alive to the absurdities of other people as when it had animated a woman; and the pleasure of being able to ensconce myself in the most private corners, and of being a third party in matters supposed to be a dead secret, made amends for my sufferings.

“After Brahma had pronounced my doom, he himself bore my soul into a sofa which the maker was about to deliver to a woman of quality, reputed to be superbly chaste; but just as it is said that few men are heroes to their valets, so I may safely affirm that few women are saints to their sofas.”

CRÉBILLON FILS (Claude Prosper Jolyot)
Translated by BONAMY DOBREÉ

Entire text available at:
www.yorku.ca/inpar/crebillon_sofa.pdf
In Parentheses Publications, Cambridge, Ontario 2000

2006-12-08T09:39:00.000-08:00

HARBINGER

Why foreknowledge of death? Does it only help to plan funerals? (Not that we can bear it.) To ask the patient which dress she would prefer? To feel its absent presence, always, as we cross the street against the light, as we tear open a bag of spinach, as we breathe strangely flavored air? Is it the silent running engine of ambition? A reminder to love fully, despite our primitive memory? Honestly. Why know that, and forget so much else? Or is it a dripping faucet in the kitchen of time, repeating, with maddening indifference, that one day, all experience will end? Is this simply bad taste, a bug in the program, a sneak peek at the playbook?

Some things I wish I couldn’t ask: Is it really rest, as poets say, or more like a job?

JAMES HANNAHAM

2006-11-05T23:08:00.000-08:00

DATING LEE:

He said, B is like the 8 that quit, but she wasn't listening at all, she was thinking about parachutes. If only there were a soundtrack for these types of things!

Soiling was such a bad habit to begin with; the first parents could feel only the most blue alarm as to what this precipitated. And to think, this is how affection began: cement like lovers sleeping, the mannish mammal thrown up against the sky, nine men on a single couch arguing about volleyball and bedsheets.

At noontime disaster and lemons became agreeable again. Lobsters began tiptoeing and the wind beatboxed ceaselessly. Miniature dogs lurked behind theories for scat singers in mittens and we kissed again and again and again and again.

Tapdancing would have been such a fabulous way to settle WWII. Imagine Hitler and FDR up there in vibrant slacks Fred Astaire-ing off walls onto pool tables—singing in the rain—a tremendous Gene Autry automaton in the foreground and Churchill in the first row with the biggest bucket of popcorn.

Rainbows vs. Carpenters

Round One: Rainbows
Round Two: Carpenters
Round Three: Draw
Round Four: Carpenters

I swim to the surface, pissing on streetlights. This is so sudden, you say, I never knew you felt that way. If only the sun weren't exploding. Wait no, hurrah, it was only oranges. Fantastic!

DANNY LYNCH

2006-09-21T00:04:00.000-07:00

“May I kiss you on the lips?” That’s what Dickie asks, away from prying eyes and out of earshot from his wife. He needn’t bother to ask—Bitsy is secretly thrilled to ﬁnd him waiting for her outside the ladies’ lounge. During cocktails at the club, they neck on the couch inside the powder room. That night, her green blouse and pink skirt match the colors of the cushions perfectly. “It’s a Monet,” Dickie whispers huskily in her ear, as she ﬁnds herself eagerly pinned and sinking lower. “A work of art, just like you.” Afterwards, an angry hickey blooms on Bitsy’s neck, a bruised flower with a broken stem.

For months, the scandal is all anyone can discuss—at brunch, on the golf course and in the cotillion. “He’s such a charmer!” all her friends gush. Bitsy feels dizzy, intoxicated, lucky. Colors seem brighter, laughter flows, the conversation turns raucous. When Bitsy gets pregnant, Dickie’s wife ﬁles for divorce and decides to move her children to North Carolina to be closer to her parents.

After the club closes, Bitsy ﬁnds the couch in a church basement 17 years later. Transﬁxed, she thinks she might sink into its forgiving softness if she could, the cool, frayed fabric feels so intimate and knowing. Now that Dickie is sober, he doesn’t care about cocktails at the club, giggling girls, or Monet. Well, Bitsy would remember for him. And sit there, remembering.

SUELAIN MOY

2006-09-12T11:16:00.000-07:00

WANDS

When I was young
and had the power to put
power in my hands,
I built magic wands out of Legos.
I used the square blocks (four pegs)
and used only two colors,
alternating,
until all those pieces were in
the wand.

Yellow and black in a small
stack is the bee’s flag.
Fear and the sting, fire
and the ash. The letters
on plastic police tape.
Its colors came in
and mixed a drink
of power and remains.

Blue and white is the wand
of snow and ice, solitude
in the easy, empty world.
I turned it over and over
as if you’d find a tooth
frozen inside. The air
it turned it was soft
and patient.

Red and blue moved
against my eyes
like the colors
wanted to leap
off the blocks and melt
into violet light.
Boy and blood, water
and lava. Cardinal
and Jay—the ones
that hopped
on my grandma’s lawn.
This is the one I carried
most of the time.
I melted down its power
only for the building
of enormous,
temporary machines.

ERIC DUTTON

2006-08-31T23:10:00.000-07:00

You really should have seen the rest of the house, and the neighborhood, Richard. And the neighbors—my god. They were all out on their porches or working in their fucking yards or whatever. It’s horrible, unbelievable the way people will live. Identical houses and little squares of “nature” and it goes on and on forever. How can they tell who lives where and what is what? And they looked at me like some sort of criminal when I pulled up in my rental chariot. This one GIGANTIC woman watched me very carefully as I let myself into the house and I kind of wanted to STAY there for the rest of the day just to make her wonder what was going on inside. I wish I had been wearing long silvery gloves or a hat with wires that connected to my neck. But really it was just too depressing—completely empty except for IT (the couch), and you know how your voice and shoes echo in an empty apartment? It was like that but louder. Worse. It’s really a very sad little house.

SCOTT PRENDERGAST

2006-08-09T10:09:00.000-07:00

mapS

Bear! You know our tribes are hostile.
When you give us consent
You grant the terror of the nations
And disgrace your tribe by crying

Bear! What can you do about Joe Lieberman?
Miscreant at sociology
In his heart one sorrow had he
Not for triumphs in the battle
That terrified his companions

He could shoot ten arrows upward
And listened with one foot uplifted
Till the sun dropped from the heaven Bright before it beat the water.

And he loved a lonely maiden

Bear! You know our tribes are hostile.
What can you do about Joe Lieberman?
Shall he hold supreme dominion?
Shall he hold supreme dominion?

NELL HANLEY

2006-08-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

Each week the regime would send out catalogs to show us the new forms, the latest geometries. We would thrill to the harmonies of living areas conﬁgured according to scientiﬁc principles. And there they were, the perfect sofas of the future, uniformed in twill slipcovers and caressed by the manufactured sunbeams that slid like empty stockings into those ideal, depopulated rooms.

Gone were the paperbacks, game controllers, potato chips and bodily ﬂuids, the laundry, the ashes, the sobbing spouse: the animality of the old couches had been banished along with the couches themselves. Our new sofas were sublime! Patriotic, streamlined, in mocha or moss or stone, they submitted themselves for nationwide delivery.

Of course this was after the ﬁrst round of purges, when all the lumpy degenerate sofas had been ﬂushed out of the cities and imprisoned in basements. And we'd already seen the early resistance, those ragtag Goodwill units, decimated by the counterinsurgency (with its highway checkpoints, its rec room raids, its interrogation warehouses.) Driven
underground, the rebels recovered themselves gradually. They stockpiled weapons and yard-sale tchotchkes, and inﬁltrated several of our largest moving companies. Furtively they grew stronger, while we were distracted by the spectacle of the housewives marching daily in front of Headquarters, holding up pictures of their missing furniture.

This is a photograph of one of the reputed rebel leaders, who during the crackdown had been taken into custody and questioned—the resulting lacerations are clearly visible here—and then mysteriously released. Surrounding the sofa are all the squalid hallmarks of a degenerate living area. The picture was posted on the internet by a group claiming to be afﬁliated with the insurgency. It cannot be determined whether the image is authentic or doctored. At the present time we cannot even say for certain that this sofa still exists.

KAREN OLSSON

2006-07-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

2006-07-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

1. I used to count squares.

4. A chessboard grid seemed like an endless horizon of possibility.

9. In the hallways of my high school, I would walk diagonally along the tiled floors.

16. Careening from one side of the hallway to another, I bounced off the wall and continued like some wayward electron or pinball.

25. There were lots of squares everywhere, but not in the sky.

36. Except when I played Tetris.

49. That was most of my sophomore year of high school.

64. People said I didn't have any friends, but that was the way I
liked it.

81. When I watched television on the couch, everything seemed blurry and out of focus.

100. Until I pressed my face up close to the screen, when I could see the perfectly stacked pixels.

GAVIN EDWARDS

2006-07-11T00:12:00.000-07:00

Haunted by terrible furnishings...

2006-06-22T09:03:00.000-07:00

For twenty years I applied for a muse, but the waiting list was as long as a phone book. They gave muses to more established writers, who used them up like double-A batteries. I knew one overhyped screenwriter who went through 30 muses. Meanwhile, my work suffered. I wrote sestinas about my therapist. When I finally got the call, I wept.

My muse was named Jim. He had a tattoo of a Mondrian painting on his back. My favorite painting, he said. He then wondered what it would have been like to be Mondrian's muse. Modigliani, Mondrian, whatever. It's time to work! I said.

I hadn't expected my muse to be sporty. Jim lifted weights. He also had his own apartment. It wasn't much. Card table for a desk. Kitchen cabinets bare except for boxes of Shredded Wheats and tubs of protein powder. Then he had this sectional couch. Once a glorious pink, it was now faded, the color of a sick dog's tongue. It's Michiko Kakutani's couch, he said, She gave it to me when I used to be her muse. Critics have muses? I asked. They need us the most, he said.

I saw Jim every morning. I sat on his couch and watched him lift freeweights while sweat beaded on his brow. He'd finish a set, and ask, breathless, Well? Are you inspired?

In 1327, the poet Francisco Petrarch spotted a 19-year-old beauty named Laura in the church of St. Claire and spent the rest of his life addressing his sonnets to Laura. And this was based on one sighting. Perhaps a muse inspires best when absent. I said, Maybe you should be more absent. Sure, he said.

I didn't see him for a week. I sat at the computer without writing a thing. Then I allowed myself into his apartment. He was in the shower. I stood in the kitchen and ate the sugar side of a Shredded Wheat. Jim came out and sat on that couch, a towel wrapped around his waist. I sat next to him.

Well? He asked.

CATHY PARK HONG

2006-06-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

ELEPHANTINE

As if a god.
       (And I say it as if, because I am)
the aging Alpha, the oldest Omega. Because
       I roll my crushing bulk through puddles
of miniscule worlds, making waves
       and hold the wheel that turns the wheels
that are in me. As if these were your eyes
       rolling back in my head.
As you were here behind my iris,
       the rusted flower that tears me its petals.
Because I am the gnarled root the pistil
       grows from and the stamen giving.
As if spring were eternal here.
       Because I tried to be in that wrinkled cloud
and be that cloud you believe in,
       I’ll hide myself and only sing one finger
into sight for you, to spin the wheel
       of stars. Because I am able.
Because the shudder and twitch of weather
       makes us withered, makes us whole.
Because we are most
       at home in front of flashing boxes,
our homes, boxes within us. As if a shoe
       like a leather face, empty by the door.
Because I am that shoe and in it,
       omnipotent, and because I am
the one who cannot walk away.

SHANNON BORG

2006-06-11T18:20:00.000-07:00

For a change of pace, here’s The Sofa, a rather chilling little horror ﬁlm made by a gentleman named Tony Cane-Honeysett in 2001. In a rather Chaplin-meets-Popeye style, the ﬁlm recounts the Herculean efforts of a chubby Everyman to rid himself of a putrid country-style chesterﬁeld, played with a menacing aplomb not seen since DeNiro in Cape Fear by a simply appalling brown plaid couch with one of those foul little skirts attached to the front. The ﬁlm’s terrifying impact emerges from the universality of its subject matter: we’ve all encountered at least one couch so dreadfully tacky that it seemed capable of supernatural acts and unspeakable crimes, haven’t we?

STARTHA

2006-05-24T21:07:00.000-07:00

DOUBLE BACK

Rose said love me harder. Rose said like
an Elysian Mary. Bloody her. Spectacle
rising like gloat. Salt on the rim, shot like
a pucker. Rose said I’ll tell you what: a spell

like the smell of him, ash between your breasts.
His chest a hero. Say it, lovey. Black cherie,
bête blanche. Pin me simple, my breath, my breath.
Pass me, Angel. I’ll wear my best.

R. said a rip in the fabric is a honey-bone
cry, and I am a grassy Negro hum de
la dee. I was never ripped, cried she,

cried she. Ach, c’est la vie. Say it, say
it, Rosie. Split the difference, vive la, vive la be.
Gray tone. And I am singing: baby, homo, home.

ANNA MARIA HONG

2006-05-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

You said: In an empty room the mind may wander.
I said: But my legs are tired.

When you left nothing changed, but the junk mail piled up on my doorstep—first two pieces, then three, then whole bundles still warm, then cartons then truckloads—hundreds of skinny women in sweaters, in smiles, asking, begging, won’t I won’t I just come out to the balcony come down to the street come in and purchase, purchase what only I was missing?

            Objects forgotten like sound fading.  Objects discovered like echoes.   
            Listen to this box of clothes and hear your restless bedmate.  Hear this 
            gibberish, this mumble, this foreign language of what once was.          

            Please hide me from the plastic comfort of things. 

            And from stagnation: time absorbed by furniture.

Before we met I had no idea where I was. Now my head is full of timetables and maps and pictures and plans, and I don’t know where to be, don’t know where you are.

            Though somewhere a banana flower opens to the light; somewhere orchids     
            fall from the canopy like discarded smiles; somewhere a million insects 
            walk the surface of the pond.

ABRAHAM BURICKSON

2006-05-08T00:15:00.000-07:00

“This was back when we lived in San Francisco. My friend Yma was trying to plan a party and complaining about the difﬁculty of getting the gender balance right. She said the women in San Francisco were so manly, the more of them you invited the more “male” the party became. Her roommate Darnton decorated everything with paisley and ﬂowers and mirrors and old instructional manuals for busted electronic antiquities he and Yma had purchased at ﬂea markets. To pay for anything was embarrassing. Anything you dragged off the street you’d count on someone eventually telling you had been in their apartment before. And anything you put out on the street was gone before you could get back up your stoop. If you visited your parents you dragged along an empty suitcase and raided the attic. The whole Bay Area was majoring in Thrift Store. People even bought used drugs. And every time you broke up with someone you knew you were just making them more attractive for the next person. Up to a point. Ever see the movie Logan’s Run? When you turned thirty you ﬂoated up towards the ceiling of the discotheque and exploded.”

JONATHAN LETHEM

2006-04-28T20:03:00.000-07:00

His place was on the way to mine. The movie was fine, dinner less so. But at least he had a sense of humor about the dinner. What were we thinking, going to Cafeteria?

Our laughter then was the only moment that I thought we might have a future. But a few bites later I decided it was the future of the friend, not the lover. The friendly acquaintance. He wasn’t right pheremonally. I can usually tell right away. If I have a type, it’s ineffable and pheremonal.

We stopped at his door. “Wanna come up?” And I hemmed, a bit, and hawed. I’d steeled myself for this moment by talking, early at dinner, once I knew he was all wrong, by talking about having to meet my trainer in the morning.

“Sure,” I said. Why? Why was I so weak? Was it politeness? I hated myself immediately. He offered to play a “potpourri” of funny video clips he’d gathered over the years as we climbed the stairs.

I’ve never been one of those fags who knows shit about what goes with what and where. I always figured I’d fall in love with one and he’d do all of that. But I knew the living room was all wrong. I’m not the creative type, but I can judge. And the sofa was tiny. He got a couple of Sam Adams Lights and I stared at the flat-screen television that was way too big for the room.

He sat on one end of the sofa. I sat on—well, the rest. Our legs touched. I tried to adjust the red velveteeny pillow, but it had nothing to grab its little tendrils onto—it just slid me toward the center, like a satiny sled. Into him. His arm went around my shoulders, maybe because there was nowhere else it could go. Did he plan this when he bought the sofa? I wondered as he put his face close to mine, and I felt my lips part, in spite of themselves.

JEFF WHITTY

2006-04-20T08:58:00.000-07:00

The house has been empty for months now, and neglected before that. Dark windows stare out. She looks up. The roof is missing shingles. One step, a shuffle, really, the past dragging at her heels, down the front walk, concrete cracked down to crumbles and a fistful of brambles. Her mind skitters across the back porch, her eyes wander to the horizon, shuttle back into the shade of the shuttered window eyes.

Lady-like she pats her hat, looks around. Her stockings are laddered and patterned with marks of poverty, her shoes carefully polished but the wear shows through.

Two more steps, still hesitant, but becoming more confident. She keeps her eyes fixed on the gravel rubble beneath her white white shoes. She stops again, rubs her hands, noting with vague surprise the raised map of veins announcing itself. Somehow she has forgotten her age. “Ashy,” she mumbles, and tumbles back in memory—a flash of sunlight and the porch is full of people, a woman rocking and fanning herself; a group of children laughing, two men smoking on the steps and a small girl sitting in the corner, looking on.

The house belongs to her. She wants to fall and keep falling. She closes her eyes and, frightened by the darkness behind her lids, immediately opens them. She looks down again, smooths the white skirt of her uniform, reassured by its crisp brilliance. In the dark dusk, it shines.

from “Living (4. House)”

CLARINDA MAC LOW

2006-04-11T12:50:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure exactly what I’m being accused of whenever anyone finds out I can watch Forensic Files back to back for hours. But it says something about me that doesn’t sit well with people. That I know where all the famous murders have been committed. Where Sharon Tate had her last meal (Mexican at El Coyote).

The blood isn’t what attracts me. I can’t watch ER or Nip/Tuck without covering my face. I can’t bear Scorsese or Tarantino, because to see violence acted out is agonizing. Even the decimation of computer-generated characters in Grand Theft Auto upsets me deeply.

The murder itself doesn’t interest me. It’s the aftermath I’m drawn to. The clues that reveal people and their behavior. People at the end of all hope, driven to end everyone else’s hope, or that of one person in particular.

The aftermath; when all is in repose. When the crime becomes stately, and minutely observed. The ritual of investigation. The solemnity of interrogation. To me, this seems like grace.

TOM DONAGHY

2006-03-30T10:21:00.000-08:00

The guys in the upstairs apartment announce themselves with every step. They are often barefoot or in sneakers, but it doesn’t soften the sound much. A girl up there in hard shoes sounds like construction work. I picture her on her hands and knees with a patent leather pump in one hand, using the tapered heel to hammer nails or maybe smash roaches.

I never say anything about it. I guess other people would. A guy who’d met me not an hour before at the Red Light and hadn’t been in the door ten minutes took a broom handle to the ceiling.

“Shut the fuck up!” he screamed, and he smashed the ceiling with one, two, three, four perfectly symmetrical indentations. “I’ll come up there and slit your mother fucking throats!” The heedless footsteps went on, crossing and re-crossing the room. “You think I’m kidding? You think this is a joke, motherfuckers?”

BamBamBamBamBamBamBam—he brutalized the ceiling. When he paused for breath, I handed him an opened can of beer, and he took a couple long swallows. More footsteps. “Goddamnit!” He hurled the can shot-put-style into the ceiling, and it fell back hissing and foaming onto the tawny fur of the sofa, about where the cat would have been curled up if I didn’t have company.

“They’re just walking,” I said softly, in awe. I rescued the can and wiped its edge with my jacket, handed it back to him. Another quick swipe at the sofa wicked up the spill, like beer off a duck. Worse things, I promise, have tried to stain that gorgeous beast.

SHERI JOSEPH

2006-03-13T11:20:00.000-08:00

SPRING CLEANING

It may disappoint many readers—even fans of this site—to learn that worldwide, the ratio of bad couches to good writing is skewed dramatically toward the former. A recent study published by The Office of Public Information indicates that for every cracking good poem written in the United States, some 35,906 unbearably tacky home furnishings are manufactured! Over 40% of these are things one can sit on (including hope chests, wicker baskets, and those outdoor chairs that give you waffle-butt), and a whopping 25% of those are "couches." The study does not even include creative non-fiction or prose poems, so you can imagine how many more nasty settees see the light of day than, say, excellent short stories that do not involve cancer. As a response to these devastating statistics, I encourage readers to turn the tide by responding to these photographs of truly disgusting furniture. Let's send a message to our country that we'd rather stand up for original voices than sit down on stuff we can't bear to look at!

STARTHA

Send your responses to the pictures below to starthamewart@gmail.com. Please indicate to which photograph your piece corresponds. Some responses may be subject to future publication.

1

2

3

4

5

2006-03-06T09:56:00.000-08:00

Naah, Kid, let me tell you something. I wouldn’t take her back now if she begged me. Came back and dropped her suitcase and cried and begged.

Came back as she was then, I mean. It’s been a few years.

She left me the house—can you believe it? I came home one day, it was empty. I wanted to send her boyfriend a goddamn gravy boat. The house is twice as big and half as loud. Twice as quiet. Not so loud, I mean. Quiet.

You ever mix a goddamn drink before? The ice goes in first, kid. You bruise the bourbon, it’s like kicking in the teeth of a bulldog.

That’s better.

Can you even see me? There’s room on this thing for two, you know. I don’t have goddamn rabies.

Relax.

I was the best damn thing that ever happened to her. And that’s like being the scariest duck at the cockfight, buddy.

ROB SHEFFIELD

2006-02-27T12:43:00.000-08:00

SONNET TO A RANCID URN-EMBROIDERED SOFA

If I were on this sofa, say, to fuck
Another human being or to read
A gorgeous book, could I by that mere act
Redeem the noisome stuff upholstered here?
Might this sofa some salvation fear
In comforting a butt untimely cracked
Or pillowing a brain inclined to feed
Or would it still be free to simply suck?
The urns embroidered here, have they the luck
To hold embroidered ashes, myrrh or mead?
Or are they merely pointless; or in fact,
Are they not urns at all, but faces leering?
Answer to these questions? Yes, it's sad:
An object can be absolutely bad.

DOUGLAS ANTHONY COOPER

Dysmedia

2006-02-20T11:59:00.000-08:00

Twenty-four years ago, my father would have relaxed on a sofa like this. Of everyone in my family, only he could have napped and dreamed against the dazzle of a wildflowers-on-lattice pattern, and after he woke, twenty bucks says he would have covered it with a plain green sheet to protect it from the frequent Kool-Aid accidents of rampant grandchildren, or coffee spills from nine-year old me (as a child, I loved Brim).

Twenty-four years ago, he never got the chance.

We were sofa-shopping on the second floor of Montgomery Ward when we found my father sitting on such a sofa. He “aahhed,” sinking into it, stroked the fabric like a pet. This was a man whose favorite color was goldenrod, and who forever reminded the Pizza Hut waiter to make our pizza “thick and chewy, thick and chewy.” We knew the graveness of our situation: in our family, the one with no taste was the one with the money.

A salesman approached. He put his knee on the arm of the sofa, touting its textures—“So velvety!”—and color—"Goldenrod!"—its ingenious design—“Three cushions, four cushions. You choose."—and best of all, its price—marked down already, plus an additional 20% off. As he and my father talked, I longed for sofas from TV soap opera penthouses and Levitz catalogs, sky blue and plush, geometrical and sleek.

Days or weeks later, it came: a $1200 sectional comprised of more sections than I would be able to remember, plus two ottomans we’d one day sell for twenty bucks apiece. On his Navy pension and Social Security checks, it was more than my father could ever afford; my brother—19 years old and working full-time—was the one who had chosen it, the one who had paid. Now, at last, there was someone in the family with money and taste.

We didn’t know at the time that this would be “the living room couch,” a place to sit only on special occasions and in the presence of guests; we would have to nap and lounge about elsewhere, in other rooms. But for the rest of that afternoon, we would arrange and rearrange the sectional into L and C and even G formations, laughing and reminiscing about the near-disaster of the sofa that almost was, all of us together except for my father, who had gone somewhere else to sit.

LYSLEY TENORIO

2006-02-13T13:30:00.000-08:00

Casey came back from summer school one day and his parents had their bags packed. They were going to a hotel across town. They hadn’t told him they were having the house painted. Casey got upset and they fought. His mother shouted at him loud and close, spraying him with spittle: “You goddamned fuckhead piece of turd!" His father shrugged. Casey decided he’d rather stay on the enclosed porch for the next week. On the day they painted that, he would sleep in the garage. The next afternoon, a couple of guys in crinkly white jumpsuits invaded, moved the furniture into the centers of all the rooms and coated the walls with colors like Toffee Crunch and Quaking Grass. Sleeping on the porch frustrated Casey, but he always stuck to his principles, even when it made him look foolish. His gangly legs could barely fit on the sofa, and the house didn't have air conditioning. That Friday, the temperature broke the 1949 city record. Casey woke up hung over on Saturday, his naked limbs rubbery-slick with sweat and tangled with the legs of a girl he barely remembered meeting. Someone's cousin from Tuscon. Trying to get more comfortable without waking her, he flopped over and fell off the couch on his butt. A car pulled into the driveway, but he didn't hear it.

JAMES HANNAHAM

2006-02-06T14:12:00.000-08:00

FARTING COUCH

My tenants have a green vinyl sofa to give away. It’s in great shape and unbelievably durable.

Since it's vinyl and everything wipes clean, one can only imagine sitting naked on this thing while farting since the splatters will wipe up with no problem. You can even dive in to a messy love making session without the worry of pesky little pecker tracks left behind. They should come off easily.

Many people have concerns when taking a second-hand sofa from strangers since you never know how many bare asses and other body parts have used it previously. Since everything wipes up, it can easily be sanitized for your hine parts to sit comfortably farting away.

ANONYMOUS from Craigslist.org - Baltimore

2006-01-30T19:28:00.000-08:00

GOLD RUSH

What natural or man-made wonders will we
Prospect in those crevasses and gulleys,
Boulders blotted blue as soggy lilacs
With lichen and cloud shadow? It’s all free:
So dive a palm down into warm valleys
Of cushion, sift through crumbs, lint, and old snacks.
Ore shed by decades of simple couch life:
Dental floss, Scrabble vowels, such nostalgia!
Monopoly hat, racy red brassiere,
Condom wrapper, super ball, pocketknife;
Star Wars action figure (a lost Jawa),
A fist of loose change, enough for a beer,
Proof that nothing in life gets very far:
The mother lode, an unopened Mars bar.

ERNEST HILBERT

2006-01-23T09:19:00.000-08:00

"Read it again!" someone shouted.
As the laughter continued, Ben re-scanned the napkin's scrawl.
Four lines of blank verse. Mostly iambic. Elliptical structure—at least the author had some sense of form. But otherwise totally opaque.
"I am," he read aloud. "We taught it." Pause. "I am Sofa King," he continued. "We taught it." That was it.
But the ensuing roar from the assembled—tattoo-mottled biker types—gave Ben a chilling sense of ritual, perhaps a gang invocation to a beating.
"Again," said the huge guy on the musty purple couch, possibly the Sofa King himself. "Go ahead."
"I am. We taught it." Ben swallowed. "I am Sofa King. We taught it."
Pitiless guffaws sent ice up his spine.
They had tolerated him thus far, these hard guys who hung out at the dim Oakland drug flat Ben began frequenting after flubbing his orals and losing interest in Chaucer, grad-school, and life. From his first visit, he'd known to keep his mouth shut, no matter how his cortex sang with coke-fueled loquacity. These guys could smell bourgeois. They knew he was a punk-ass college-boy. The beard, Newports, and conscientious double negatives hadn’t fooled anyone. Now was his comeuppance.
"Again!" someone yelled.
Ben repeated from memory. "I am. We taught it. I am Sofa King. We taught it."
"Again!"
Ben felt himself leave his body. "I am. We taught it. I am Sofa King. We taught it."
He said it three more times, the room receding, air getting thinner.
"I am, we taught it…" He heard himself abstractly, through the ears of a stoned or half-interested biker.
"Sofa King, we taught it…"
Then it clicked.
Ben gasped. Then laughed—explosively, doubling over, squinting as he did at the guy next to him, who was extending a golden can of St. Ides.

CHRIS NORRIS

2006-01-16T17:20:00.000-08:00

The Settee of Iniquity,
Colonel Cochran would
call it, or perhaps the Divan
of Abomination, though the
colonel wouldn't know a divan
from a chaise longue from
a hole in his ass.

He'd sit pantless in the
middle of the sofa digging
in its crevices, searching for
loose pennies and dimes with
his right hand, holding a copy
of Spinoza's Ethics in his
left, reciting bits aloud.

God, or substance, consisting
of infinite attributes, of which
each expresses eternal and infinite
essentiality, necessarily exists.
Then, PHOOEY! and off he'd go
to Fayette County, still pantless,
with a chicken for Miss Jessie.

GREG KOEHLER

2006-01-09T12:21:00.000-08:00

I had gone back home to Baltimore with my boyfriend. It was Christmas, or Thanksgiving, and my boyfriend was allergic to dogs. So, as my mother had two dogs at the time, we stayed with my mother's friend, this woman with the loudest voice you have ever heard, a woman I had never liked, and will never like, ever since the time she loudly mimicked our Chinese waiter at the Golden Dragon on Liberty Road when we were all there celebrating someone's birthday or graduation or whatever. What's more is her husband drank his soup instead of using his spoon, and my mother's friend screamed out, You were not raised in a barn, and then my brother threw up on the table from the MSG, and that, thankfully, was the end of that night.

On the way home, my brother lying across the back seat clutching his head, I told my mother that I couldn't stand her friend, and I called her a racist, but my mother convinced me that though, yes, her friend was, in fact, a bit of a racist, she was also a damn good friend who was there for her after the divorce, etc., and she reminded me of this, again, when I was visiting twenty or so years later with my boyfriend, when I bitched about having to stay with her friend, and my mother called me ungrateful and said her friend had even gone out of her way to stock her refrigerator with vegetarian things for me and my pain-in-the-ass allergic boyfriend. So be good, she said. Well, the vegetarian things, I must say, at the risk of sounding ungrateful, turned out to be, like, not even vegetarian. Like, there were these hotdogs made of chicken or something, which, in my opinion, was still meat. Anyway, it didn't matter, because it felt weird to be walking around the kitchen at night, in a strange house, when everyone else was asleep, and we could hear her husband snoring, and it was impossible not to laugh.

We were staying in the basement, and it was really cold down there, and, as it snowed that week and hard, we spent most of our time in that freezing basement, where there was, thank God, cable TV, and this hideous couch on which I slept. My boyfriend, much taller than I, slept on the floor. Anyway, what's important is that the basement was starting to depress us, all those crooked framed photos of their blank-faced kids, some yellowed diplomas, half a set of the encyclopedia Britannica, and so our last night there, we sneaked down a bottle of peppermint Schnapps from the makeshift liquor cabinet in the kitchen and drank nearly the whole damn thing, and my boyfriend fell asleep almost immediately. I was drunk, but not tired, and watched TV, and I managed, somehow, to find some porn, and I watched it from that pathetic couch. I could hear my boyfriend breathing, and this woman was on the TV having sex with two guys at once, and what's more important is I was sitting there, like any dumb pervert, like any old fuckup, a drink in my hand, the TV flashing on my face, sitting on this hideous couch in a hideous basement in the hideous Baltimore suburbs, feeling a type of power I had never, before this, felt.

SUSAN STEINBERG

2006-01-02T07:37:00.000-08:00

They sat on the couch. They talked about movies. She had seen Sideways on cable and enjoyed it. He asked if she would like some wine. Yes, she said. That would be nice.

While he was getting the wine, she thought about the couch. It looked like a craft project. Had it come from a kit? Maybe he had found it online. Why not, she thought. She had found him online.

The couch reminded her of firewood which reminded her of her childhood. And of the time her father had gone to get firewood from the porch and chased away a strange man who was lurking there. She remembered her father telling her mother what had just happened. Throughout her life she thought about the man on the porch. Who was he? What was he trying to do? What would have happened if her father hadn't gone outside for the firewood? Often her imagination assigned celebrity faces to the man on the porch. During her high school years he was frequently Duff from Guns and Roses. With their talk just now of Sideways she started to picture the man on the porch as Paul Giamatti.

Her date returned with the wine. She thought about how her life had led her here, to the man with the wine and the unusual couch. They toasted. She drank, thinking about the future and about the couch, her father, the man from the porch, Paul Giamatti and Duff.

JAMES URBANIAK

2005-12-16T09:46:00.000-08:00

Was it friction or frottage? You look Velveteen.
Like that storied Rabbit, you're worn to a sheen.
But you're rather TOO real, and you're (shiver) unclean.

Can a mind comprehend all the germs, crumbs, and menaces
Covertly ensconced in your folds, nooks, and crevices?
And do they send unpleasant olfactory messages?

O Sofa! You poor whore, age one hundred-three.
Those who wreaked havoc on you still roam free,
Yet you endure, stolid, with puce dignity.

COLLEEN WERTHMANN

2005-11-18T09:56:00.000-08:00

Aaltje Adrie Aleene Aleta Alida Anke Anki Annemie Anye Arabella Betje Brandy Britt Dael Dieuw Dyveke Edda Enika Famke Francisca Fokke Froni Geertruide Gnishilda Griet Griseldis Grishilde Gust Gusta Gustaafa Hanneke Haven Hendrika Hendrikje Jette Kaate Karianne Katrien Keren Lene Lidwina Liesbeth Lieselotte Lijsa Lore Mahault Marieke Marien Marta Marysa Maryse Miep Mina Neel Nelleke Nienke Rozamond Saskia Schyler Sibylla Skyla Skylar Sofie Sybylla Tryn Wigburg Wilhelmina Willeke Wilma Yonne

JAMES HANNAHAM

2005-11-07T16:31:00.000-08:00

Sectional of lethal marshmallow, who has been swallowed by your ampleness? Who still moans from within your mammarian cushions? How could anyone have withstood the pungently sweet reek of decay that must waft from your puffy being? Take note of this couch: for now it grows in the back of a basement speed lab, but one day we will see tiny white flower-patterned ottomans rising from sidewalk cracks and baseboards, and one day entire cities will be stuffed with this very cancer of comfort.

KRIS BRONSTAD