Poetry That Otherwise Will Never Be Heard (for better or worse)

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THE FATAL HOUR

by Graham Swanson

 

I found you in the rivers at the bottom of your heart

A screw driver in your windpipe

I'll grab you by the roots of your hair and make you eat garbage

I walk in the daylight. Where else could you see me?

I walk in the middle of the day. Where else could you find me?

I know where you pray

I'll let the air out of your tires and hit you with a bike lock

I know where you sleep

I'll let everyman out of prison

I know what you love

I'll open every grave and swallow your children

I can see from here that you're all haunted

Some good. Some bad. 

When I sleep I see dead bodies

They are my dearest friends

I AM THE CRIMSON DRAGON THAT PULLS THE PALE MOON'S SILVER WAGON

Crossed by double silver handled twin daggers

Alone on my pedestal 

at the center of the world!

Drink the blood from my golden chalice

All your wishes will come true. 

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CLOWNS AND JESTERS

by Graham Swanson

A Clown performs in the street

in the dirt

That's why he is dressed the way he is

To distract from the fact that he lives in the filth of Parisian streets.

A Jester, to the contrary, 

performs in the King's Court.

He is respected, noble. He knows the room

better than anyone. He knows

the secrets. He holds political power.

He whispers into the King's ear, and makes him laugh. No one

fucks with a jester. Because he will

Unviel them in front of the entire court.

In song. 

A Jester can SEND MEN to the dungeon.

A Clown watches the mirth of a castle from the cold alley ways.

When  YOU are alone in a dungeon-

when you're awoken by a rat gnawing

on your ankle bone

And all you had to eat is moldy bread,

it'll be the face-the mask- of a Jester smiling back at you.

The Clown, sad and lonely, plays sticks in the alley. He spins bottles, honks a horn.

The Jester sharpens a knife on his tie-

Shatters windshields with the sharp end of his cane.

A Clown stumbles into the frozen mud to chase a lost balloon

A Jester will laugh in your face because you will never know who he is.

A Clown slips and falls in horse shit.

A Jester will always be in the dungeon. Watching and laughing, making googly eyes, and inventing new ways to torment his prisoners.

A Clown sleeps in the cold, takes his wig off, his gloves off, and make up off.

I CAN'T FIND HAPPINESS

by Graham Swanson

It's okay to have feelings that *you* don't like

When I see a smile its a mask- I feel your sneer

those trees are prison bars

the sun shines with hate

and burns the supple flesh

Under that mask I see the scorchmarks of the sun

I see freckles, rashes, and cancer.

From wild Green hills to my hometown- it's a bus 

ride full of desperate fugitives escaping the ever 

widening void 

                    Ever hungrier- moving at the speed of

                    Light

They smile at me but think I am strange, crazy,

a serial killer- why- just ask them why? They shudder.

    I walk the streets alone in search of those neon

monsters of mirth and I drink believing merrymakers 

find happiness in the gas 

Only to discover adulterers, men who punch glass, and drug dealers. 

    I search the mist and alleyways for love. All I 

find are games of Russian Roullette

    Meth addicted, beautiful women- kiss me, then I drop them off at dark apartments or RVs

once the sun goes down

They are the Valentine's Day Muggers- we share

one similarity, that we'd rather find elusive death

yet something drags us forward into the dark-

with no hearts, we share a strange hour

Neither one is alone- yet crushed by the 

Moon, and joined by the chants of

10,000 screaming banshees

A heart beating in a drawer

Lungs wheezing in a glass

Smoke burning at midnight

swollen knuckles, fist warmed inside 

pockets.

    I am the man alone walking from alley to alley.

I cannot find happiness in this 

world.

    To me, its only a moment on TV

when they're trying to sell you shit

you don't need.

Or a moment when you get too drunk to remember

that you have work in the morning.

I walk between monsters and rows of dead stalks

I sleep in abandoned houses, 

and burn books to stay warm.

Stella's Graduation

                                         Stella's Graduation

Graham Swanson

Written in 2020

On the night of Stella’s graduation she rented a room in the big fancy hotel to spend a night with her boyfriend before they moved away to the bright hanging cities over the river. She went there alone with a basket of perfumes and a change of outfits, checking her phone in anticipation of her lover arriving. He texted her in the morning, so she left him another message reminding him and tempting him to come to the hotel that night. She provided a template of her figure in an accompanying photo taken by the bench among the trees. He didn’t text back right away.

From outside she looked to the top of the hotel, saw the clouds swirling across the stars and the moonlight, and the spires over the highest windows. Lights filled the rooms above except for two windows. Against the sharpest edges of the roof, a hooded figure loomed down from between two broken chimneys. Even as Stella saw the glimmer of its eyes met with hers, it did not retreat, but offered a gentle wave. The cold blew freezing gusts of frozen mist into the streets and against Stella’s bare legs. 

Stella figured her boyfriend might be stuck at work or at practice, so she went inside to avoid the cold. She couldn’t wait and looked again at her phone on the elevator. The message was sent. The doors blew open and she hurried to hide her phone as she pulled luggage onto the orange carpet. The maid pushed a cart into the hall with her mouth unsmiling mouth hanging open, her spinal cord twisted into a large knot at the base of her neck, and missing teeth that she tried to hide from the young pretty girl swinging her hips down the hall. She went into the red door by herself. The maid lifted her head into the light, her yellow eyes dull and sunken, her balding head losing strands of hair, and when she thought the young girl was gone into her room, the maid went into the cleaning closet and lifted the back of the cabinet. 

A short opening fell open, too short to stand up in, but just snug for the hunchback. It led her down narrow gaps in the walls to small lenses which revealed the interior of each room. She went to the room the young girl just checked in, and she watched her undress, put on silky underwear, and checked her makeup. She constantly looked at her phone, each time with heavier disappointment. An hour passed, so she sent a long grueling voicemail pebbled with angry insults and threats. 

Stella paced around and looked out the window down at the empty parking lot. A few lonely cars sat still. A group of vandals lurked from the darkness of the park and smashed a car window, smashed the tail lights, and smashed the windshield. They left a note on the steering wheel and lit a fire in the back seat. The hooded figure watched from the bench, but did not notice the vandals, but instead kept searching for something in the windows. She closed the blinds as the vandals scampered back off into the dark in the direction of the old factory. 

The maid scratched the fine hairs on her chin. Never had she seen a young girl so upset and it 

made her feel depressed, but also less lonely. Just then a knock came at the door, the girl gasped and dropped her phone to the floor. 

In the bygone times of broken wheels and violent street whipping there loomed a huge smoking factory under where the viaduct is today. Thirty buildings all boarded up and stacked full of belts sculpted from the scales of endangered animals crossed the middle of the village. This place used to be busy and flowed train carts of soup and pudding to cities all over the country. families built mansions around the outskirts of the factory and one thousand other people got jobs working there. It did not last, as the village elders agreed in a secret meeting to sell the factory to a shadow who came at sunset and left at sunrise. 

No one knew of the secret meeting or the plans the elders made. They took the money, stored it in a castle of a bank, returning only to rob the bank and go back to their golf courses on the sweltering coast of alligators and tree snakes as the village fell to squalor and ignorance.

The once glorious mansions remained devoted castles to the families, but not the kind that brings up children to do great things. They became hoarded with garbage, packed full of strange folk, doors always locked and curtains always drawn to keep the fumes from escaping. The sons and daughters of the elders live in these places to this day, all D students who live in the lap of never ending gold, and each one in the pocket of drug gangs from other states. They live alone for the reason of cooking strange potions with gems, propane and chemicals, selling the refined experiments to the enforcers, and selling the bottom of the barrel to the peasants across town. 

The old factory itself became a gruesome outlet for gas squeezed from the cracks of the earth, and for strange creatures who followed the escaping rats up onto the factory floor. These things did not look like you or I. They had the form of a human, but they did not evolve from the apes that climbed down from trees and walked everywhere to hunt their food like us. They evolved from poisonous frogs that lived in pools underground. They can't turn their heads because they have no neck, their eyes are yellow, and they eat molten coals and bathe in hot paint. 

No one came near the factory. Those few crackheads who sought shelter from winter found themselves dragged through grain chutes, then clamped by the head in the clasp of bow hooks, and carried into the air as the rail delivered them to the otherside of the factory. They hung like angels going to heaven, blood gushing from their temples and mouths and soaking their shoulders and feet. Rats followed the trail of blood droplets. The frogmen tore the clothes apart and devoured them for the mites living inside.

Fun Fears, Being Watched

What's In The Attic?

 Whats in the attic?

By Graham Swanson

1: instillation, cobwebs, mouse turds, asthma attacks, heat. Shit. 

2:big teddy bear

3 the control panel for all the towns roads and explosives

4: a floating magical eye that sees all

5: the last evil gnome with the family shotgun

6: my secret pack of cigarettes.

7: my weed plant operation

8: the sniper rifle that *really* shot jfk

9: a ladder to an observatory on the roof

10: gold bars protected by a nail bomb.

Nebraska Gothic: Last Meal at a Highway Sonic in Bellevue Nebraska This November In Cold Rain

Nebraska Gothic:

Last Meal At A Highway Sonic In Bellevue Nebraska This November In Cold Rain

 

by Graham Swanson

        written November 2020 

Cold fog flowed over the highway from the mud fields but the van driver knew police trucks followed him. He kept an untriggered bomb in a baby carriage in the back. They’d catch him soon enough, maybe before he even gets to his destination. The cops already arrested the movement’s leader, and now they searched for those on the forum with him. They all talked about blowing up the capitol building.

Covert trucks and suvs talked on radios and the van driver’s scanner picked up the whispers into their shoulders. They followed him out of Omaha and pressure built up in his rolls of fat with each passing car on the speed lane. He saw no cops on the highway, but the scanner sounded like a party. He left his apartment unlocked, his computer on, and everyone he talked to expected to see fireworks for the movement. He gasped in defeat, but then a shimmering light in the fog saved him.

All the driving made him hungry. His wrists so fattened that they swallowed his hands, and his fingers like short stubs in a potato. Every doctor told him to eat better and quit smoking. Butts spilled from his ashtray, and got lost in the stomped carpet of fast food bags. The van down at the press of a pedal, and the SONIC sign beacon lured him from the dangerous high speeds of the highway to the safety and warmth of those red and white colors of the logo and the smell of salt and oil, but the feeling of hot grease burning his fingertips remained in his starved memory. He counted a few dollars, and looked behind him to make sure the FBI saw him. To his surprise they didn’t close in on him while he hesitated in his van, therefore not even a shred of doubt entered his mind.

    The van driver pulled a shotgun from under his seat. He left the heater run in his van with the drivers side door wide open. The weapon leaned against his shoulder and the scanner swayed in his pocket. Voices echoed in the sand and fog of static about a trash can with a bomb in. He had time while they scurried away.

    Echoes fluttered. The sounds of the highway traffic, the burning furnace of the Sonic, the patter of shoes on wet pavement, the windy rain beating the van driver’s neck, he pulled the gun from his shoulder and crossed his heart with it. He kicked the door open and stopped in the middle of a line of masked people coughing and sneezing into the fabric over their mouths. So many good days spent driving past this place, without ever stopping here. Maybe in some world he used to work here, or perhaps he spent someone else's money on 100$ worth of hamburgers and corndogs. Of all the people inside, he saw old grumpy clerks from Omaha in their suits and ties, weary travelers resting, people talking on phones. It was the Sonic workers who he decided deserved to die. 

The van driver took one glimpse behind his back. He assumed the wires malfunctioned and instead of exploding and taking them all to hell to be with the movements leader once again the bomb just lit his van on fire. People sipping coffee and using the wifi to send job apps on Indeed sat by the wall sized windows noticed first. Then others chimed in "Hey, call the fire department". Right in front of the van driver sat four fast food employees on break. Each one young enough to perhaps enter a bar to buy a beer at the most, otherwise will in high school. They sat together eating, drinking MONSTER energy drinks, and laughing over each others phone screens. They looked pale, polite, vapid and thin if a little out of shape, but washed up, colored stylish hair, smart kids talking bout their classes in school, or articles concerning the state of pandemic lockdowns, and the election sealing the fate of movement’s political ambitions. Yes, yes, the van driver though this, "these are the enemies of the righteous. I am the last of a noble line of conquerors, a family of tribute denied to him by the fake news the sheep consume and vomit back up. Yes, yes." The more he thought of it, the clearer it became who around here deserved to die. 

Some say a man who carries out such a mission must be insane. Completely false. The van driver never felt more at peace, more in tuned with nature and the universe. He accepted his destiny, but some cowardice prevented him from facing his adversaries. He just needed to know that his leader watched him, and that he loved the leader no matter what. In that moment before he blew the arm off one of the young girls in their sonic uniforms, he knew exactly just how competently and cleanly he delivered the burst of shrapnel fire, and no crazy person can do that. 

The van driver coked his shot gun. A shell simmered on the floor by his crocs. Everyone stayed stifled in silence, like a herd of cattle, powerless behind a fence, the danger of their phone screens suddenly up close, so close that they smelled him on their tongues. The second shot blew a young man's head over the table and into the eyes and ears of his friends. The third shot hit the middle of the table, but pieces of table pierced their necks and cheeks as pieces of metal b.bs bounced around on the laps of the people waiting in line. The fourth shot came as the van driver stood directly over top of a young girl. He killed her off with  a wild grin spreading his neck apart. The fifth shot came as the last one crawled through a gushing pool of shimmering blood. The van driver shot her in the spine and her final breaths bubbled in the crimson on the tile. By this time the police lights shined in the parking lot, and the FBI pulled armor and assault rifles out of the back of jeeps. They waited for him to come out. 

The van driver felt sleepy. He looked around with the gun at his hip. It looked to him

like he killed everyone, he took the movement one day further as its enemies trembled in

fear, as any devoted warrior against the dark world order would do. If anything else, he

valued the love of the world more than any of the police out there behind their flashing

lights and jackboots. He expected them to storm in and take him, but instead they hid behind

dumpsters and walls, waiting for him to leave. He left his gun inside by the final struggling

body shivering on the floor. Outside he found Christmas music and the smell of burning

plastic. He laid face down in the parking lot, and let the police arrest him, because he heard

the news cameras rolling, and he knew that his story would be a lover for the other would be

spree killers to find, and get inspired by. So in his mugshot, despite the jail cell shared with

hardcore gang convicts, he smiled to let them know, Mission Accomplished.

related article

https://www.wowt.com/2025/02/04/bellevue-sonic-shooter-still-not-competent-be-sentenced-doctors-say/

The Whispering Bridge

The Whispering Bridge

By Graham Swanson

For S,

Sareena Corteza took her dad by the hand. He gave her the keys to his car.

“Maybe I will give you a ride.” he reconsidered, his factory work shirt unbuttoned and cooled by the fan.

“I’ll be fine, dad. It's just downtown for work. Kylie and Brandon will be there.”

“And you will come straight home?”

“Of course dad.” Sareena thought of Brandon in the backseat of the car. “Don't worry so much. Nothing will happen to me.”

“Yes. I am taking care because I worry. You know that. You know what happened to that other girl.”

“Dad, it's not like I'm meeting up with strangers on the internet. It's just work. It'll be okay.”

“I do not think your grandma is well, she might go to the hospital soon, and if that happens and if something happened to you...” 

“I’ll come home, dad. I promise.” She smiled at him with her fat cheeks and shiny black eyes.

Her father smiled back at her and let her hand slip away. She put on her little earth-colored boots and went out the moonlit door.

Sareena shivered in the wet dusk. She stepped off the porch of her hilltop home. The moon turned bright orange as it hung over the truck stop at the bottom of the valley. Branches of darkened trees reached for the light and shivered as their leaves dropped onto her windshield. She listened to the chirping critters scurry away from the brisk pace of racing coyotes. They reminded her of her own cat.

The theater she worked at showed no cool movies. American movies about how hard it is to be husband or father. Animated movies for children and families about goofy cartoon characters lost in the big city. A movie about someone getting shot, or another superhero movie. Only old people and weird nerdy loners with no dates came in. She sold tickets and snacks, stood by the door when the movies got out, cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed the floor, then they all played hide and seek. Kylie hid behind the curtains by the fire exit. Brandon hid in the ticket booth. She almost couldn't find him, but when she did they held each other tight and started kissing in the dark.

Both of them left together, but when they came to her car, they stopped. Someone sat inside the car. A shadow sat still in the backseat. A head with long white hair and a pair of shoulders outstretched across the backseat. A pair of pale eyes looked at them both.

The two of them ran back into the theater, told the manager and told Kylie. The cops drove by when the manager made a call to them, but the patrol found no one in the car. Some broken glass on the pavement, maybe, but no person. They let her ride in the back of the cop car back home. She kept telling herself, it couldn’t be. The girls that went missing, they were all someone, rich blonde girls, popular girls, why her? Why go after her?

The cop mid-ride received a distress signal. She stopped her cruiser and responded to the radio. She told them she had a 9A-90. Escorting a minor. That’s when Sareena felt her phone vibrate. The number called her came from a three-digit number, and the location was from some country she never even heard of before out in the ocean between Indonesia and the Philippines. 

The next day she went on a walk with Brandon and crossed the weeping bridge. Ghost stories about the bridge spoke of a weeping woman who lured men to their deaths. They'd look under the bridge, and see a woman in white with a broken leg, or a baby wrapped up that she held under the creek water. Sometimes she’d be naked and would offer men a drink of liquor. Either way, when she whispers to you and you look over, she takes hold of you and pulls you under.

When Sareena got home, she discovered lint and broken pencil lead in her pockets. She dug further and further and discovered a folded-up note that she didn’t know about. She unfolded it, feeling her heart gush hot blood. She swooned at the thought of Brandon sending her a love note, but instead, it depicted a detailed sketch of the whispering bridge and the creek beneath. A red arrow pointed to a small cave beneath the bridge. She tore the note apart and left it in the sink.

After work, Brandon picked her up. They parked by his house and undressed each other. Night came fast and they both sweltered on the seats, pressing their feet and hands against the fogged windows, breathing into each other's mouths and licking the fluids they spilled on each other. She ran up, her shirt ripped and her pants unbuckled, blood trickled from her vagina.

“I dropped my phone.” she told him as they held each other under the swirling clouds and watchful planets under the stars.

“Really? I was getting some weird messages from you. Are you sure about that?”

“I couldn't find it last night or today. I think I dropped it at the bridge. What did these messages say?”

“Come find me at the bridge. There’s something I need to show you. Stuff like that.”

The next day, they recruited Kylie, her boyfriend Memphis, and they went looking together under the bridge. The creek waters almost completely receded. A few muddy rocks remained covered in footprints and slime, lots of garbage because the people living around the creek lived in poverty and dealt in meth, they tossed all their garbage down the hill when their cans got too full.

Crude, artless graffiti coated the bottom of the bridge and its columns. Birds nested in the steel beams underneath. A small fire lay extinguished on the cement platform amid a ring of glass bottles that reeked not of alcohol, but of candle wax.

“I found your phone.” Kylie located it right on top of a flat rock by a blue flower and a small ray of pale daylight.

The phone looked perfectly normal. No dust. No bugs. The battery was fully charged. Kylie gave it back to Sareena who thanked her friend and rewarded her with a big hug, and then they all went back to Memphis’s house to smoke a bowl and watch DRAG RACE.

Sareena hardly noticed the text messages coming in, and she left early to make out with Brandon. She showed him on her phone all the pictures she had of herself and her cat, but on the day she didn’t have her phone, a dozen or more photos went missing. The numbers went from #19, #20- straight to #33. Those pictures had been blocked by an encrypted password. She didn’t know what it was, nor did he.

That night, when she was back at her dad's all alone, she started wondering again about the missing girls. She heard the last one appear crucified on the lights of the new softball fields. She was the park commissioner's daughter and before that, the banker's daughter, and before that the principal's daughter, and before that a young girl went out while her parents fought and smashed bottles over each other's heads, and they never found her body. The others turned up floating in the carnage swamp, hung over a tree branch, or on the roof of a water tower. But that first girl, she never turned up. Some say they saw her last at the parking lot of the abandoned mall. Others say she ran away. But Sareena wondered if maybe she had a secret that no one else knew about.

That night just before she fell asleep in bed, her phone shook on her lap. It was a set of numbers from the strange number from before. She almost fell back onto her pillow, but then she realized that the numbers fit the set of numbers in the encryption key. A password.

She entered the numbers. 0.7.4.0

The pictures began to process, and they came in blurry and dark, but she recognized the felt of her seat covers, the staples on the ceiling of the cab, the digits on the radio of her favorite song, and her bare breasts in the pink lips of Brandon. She swiped through the dozen or so photos. Each one, of her naked body and his sweaty lustful hangs and lap. Her pale exposed flesh, his red beaten skin gnashing into hers. They were taken from the windows, the windshield, even the front seat. Then the last photo came in, not dark at all, but framed in a halo of light. She saw the flat nostrils and pale eyes of a ghastly face happily peering out from a hole in the dirt.

Nebraska Gothic 3

 

                                                                                        

Written by Graham Swanson

to My Friend J

Hasel Kenny Lee used to get pulled into the teacher’s office after school. The educators moved 

mountains for her to graduate. Her father owned The Imperial Dragon, the only restaurant in town 

around since the 1980s. She was the man’s only daughter, but she seldom came to class, when she did 

she never turned in any homework.

“You're such a terrific writer! You’re so smart, you could get into any college you wanted, become anything you wanted. A doctor, an Artist, anything you want, but you have to finish your classes, Hasel.” The teachers tried to reason.

Hasel passed out onto the floor and when they tried to grab her she bit and kicked at them. She didn’t give a fuck. Her boyfriend waited outside and he had meth for her. She knew that as long as she held her legs open he’d give it to her. She hated school. She hated her teachers. She hated her father too.

All night long her boyfriend, fresh out of jail, drove her around in a beaten up truck with no back window. They made sloppy, yeasty love, feeding each other rocks and breathing in the fumes from paint cans.

“Will this hurt your baby?” He asked her because she was 7 months pregnant.

“No. It's okay.’

They made each other angry to turn each other on for more sex. He punched a hole in the wall and screamed at her. She called him trash and made fun of his shitty truck and a little house. She liked stupid men that fell for it. They didn’t care how many felonies she accumulated or that she would drop out of school later that year and have her first baby. She was a hot, hot mess with black hair and blue eyes.

Mr. Lee, her father, suffered a brain fissure. One night, something exploded in the folds of his brain, and he had to close the restaurant. He woke up in the hospital. Too much work, too much stress on a man getting older every day, almost 70 years old, orphaned in the Korean War, saw his family die, and came to the States where he made lots of money.

Girls are not supposed to run Asian restaurants, and the Chinese already didn’t like a Korean man learning their recipes to serve Krouts out in the Midwest. But he needed Hasel to take over.

Mr. Lee snuck Hasel into the kitchen one night and taught her to cook the food. The first thing he did was drag her from her friends smoking pot in a barn in the flooded river plains where the animal carcasses hang all year.

Hasel turned on music so she could work to something she enjoyed. Her father turned it off with one long finger and jabbed at her with it.

“Concentrate. I need you to cook this.”

Hasel kept burning the food and piling waste behind the sink. The old man about tore his hair out. He kept his voice down this time. His ears rang, and she gritted her teeth at him.

“fuck you, dad.” she scowled at him.

Mr. Lee would’ve slapped her, but he didn’t need anyone finding out that he was teaching her how to cook. If the restaurant next door found out, or his cousin who lived next door found out….

“I'm sorry, sweetheart. Just concentrate.”

Despite her indifference, perhaps Benzo withdrawal, she did put her brain to use and finished each dish on the menu. Her dad turned the lights on and took her to his office. He poured her a shot of whiskey.

“I'm so proud of you right now, Hasel. But you must come to work for me. The Doctor says one more stroke will kill me. He said that if something hits me in the head, or if I take a hard fall, I will die. Please. After school on Friday. Can you do that, Hasel, my love? Will you?”

“Sure, dad.”

Mr. Lee hugged her and for the first time in her life, she heard him cry. She hated the sound of it. She hated his restaurant- his sweltering dungeon. She had her own choice in mind.

Hasel didn’t go to school at all that Friday. She watched a guy named Alois cook meth in the basement of his family’s house in the majestic plains around Welles village. By the time her shift started, the party started. Everyone there let needles hang from their arms, and she let three guys fuck her, yelping and belching, fat tits hanging from their chests, toothless and scabbed, she let screw her as long as they kept the free drugs coming.

That night the Chinese man who ran the Imperial Dragon Enterprise sent an emissary to check out Mr. Lee’s restaurant.

“Mr. Lee, we’ve heard some troubling rumors about you teaching your daughter how to cook our food.”

“Yes. It's true. I can't run this place anymore. I had no choice.”

“Condolences. Where is she right now?”

“Not here.” He hung his head.

“Is it true your daughter has been in jail, Mr. Lee?”

“She made some mistakes but she’s not a bad person.”

“Mr. Lee, we’ve decided to let Mr. Zhang run this business in your absence, or you must sell it.”

“I've been the owner here for more than forty years. I’m sorry. I beg for your forgiveness.”

“Begging from a man of precarious honor means nothing. You were going to teach your girl to run our restaurant, and now she’s out there with our recipes. You will show Mr. Zhang the ropes, and then you will retire.”

When Alois got out of prison, he had lost his farm and house, so he had to move. Hasel, with her second child, Trace, a boy that Alois claimed was his, though, no one knew for sure, wanted to buy a shaded spot of land where the grass turned purple in the sunset and she could listen to the sound of the creek running in the back.

“Maybe when dad dies, we can move there.” She said. She had a felony too now. They bonded over jail and meth, and stayed close despite constant fighting. Best friends for life. They moved into an old house next to Kznucls Lodge in Prairie District- where all the old slave houses used to be who worked in his house and his farms.

The owners never came to town except to collect rent. 950$ a month for a house with one bathroom, several rooms with no light fixtures, and only one sink with running water, so they did their dishes in the bathroom. Sometimes in the bathtub.

“Please take care of this house. It's very old, and is historic.”

The landlord showed them the panels that opened to secret passages from room to room and basement to basement. Even one too small to stand- only crawl in. They had huge rooms hidden in the basement and papers going back to 1838.

Trace kept yelling about the purple lights in his closet and under the floor. he’d heard laughter as someone kept turning his night light off. Hasel screamed at him for she believed he kept getting out of bed, so she locked him in the closet for the night while the purple lights danced overhead, unlocked the door, and covered him in a blanket as he slept.

Alois drove around his cousin’s farm. He held the phone live streaming the footage to social media. He wanted to hold the AR 15 but felons can’t have guns. If they caught him holding one, he’d go right back to prison.

“He’s there.”

“Got ‘em.”

They sped up on two deer in the dew of morning. One a doe with a thin coat of fur and a younger buck with tiny antlers. They rode up along the deer in their go-cart and ran one over, backed up, turned around, and shot the other one in the back thigh. Alois cousin unloaded the entire clip and blew the animal to pieces. Then they went back to the injured doe and crushed her skull with the butt of the gun.

When Alois got home, Hasel was passed out from drinking a concoction of Absolut Vodka and NyQuil. The baby girl screamed in the crib and Alois took his “son” out of the room to show him the footage in the garage.

“We hunted them!” he explained to Trace.

“You like to hunt?”

“Yeah, they came onto our land, so we hunted them.”

“Can we eat them?”

“You can’t eat these ones.” Alois laughed and laughed. “When I was your age and your bitch mom hadn’t gotten me in trouble 'n lost my farm, I used to have a shotgun.”

‘You did?”

“Yeah, and I’d go around and shoot the cats, the goats, and the sheep. It was fun! One time I cut a cat in half and it crawled on the barn floor so I cut its head off with a machete.” Alois laughed so hard that he couldn’t articulate anymore.

“What’s that?”

“A real big knife" Alois caught his breath. "Maybe someday I’ll show you how to use one since the damn government thinks I can’t have my guns anymore.”

Trace liked to fix things. He walked around the house with a toy drill and a screwdriver. He took a break from playing with trucks outside and in to inspect the damage. He went around and found cracks in the wall where one of the bricks went missing. He applied his toy drill, it made a sound and lit up. Then he twisted his screwdriver around a little.

“All done. It’s fixed.”

Then he’d go to the sink that only ran cold water. He applied his tools.

“Fixed it.”

Then to the part of the floor where the board came right off the nails.

“Fixed it up.”

Then he saw his mom’s phone left where she hurled it against the counter during last night’s fight. The glass of the screen still shattered from when she slammed her fist into it.

Trace picked up, pressed the keys on the side, pushed his screwdriver into the auxiliary port, shook it around, and pressed the drill into a fragment of the screen, the screen turned purple and it turned on. The screen went from purple to pink, to green to orange, bright and blinding, and a burst of happy laughter came from the mic. Elated, he set it back down and told his mom that he fixed her phone.

“You got onto my phone?” She hit him over the head with a bag of sugar and pressed him against the wall by the throat. “You little asshole.”

Hasel ripped the drill from his hands and tossed it into a heap of garbage, dirty carpets, uneaten fast food, and cold pizza boxes.

Outside Alois tore the grass out of the backyard with a shovel. He told himself there would be a sandbox for his “boy” to play in, but he almost uprooted the entire yard and hadn’t gotten any sand yet.

Trace pointed at a light bulb burned out in a lamp.

“I fix that, mom.”

“Fuck you.” She got down to his size and bore her eyes into his head. “There’s nothing wrong with that lamp.”

One night, Alois brought home something special from Tractor Supply. A box full of chirping, and full of movement. A dozen little yellow baby chickens. The kids cooed and applauded them in joy. 4 died under the heat lamp that day. 3 more died of infection spreading from their lungs into their heads. 2 more got carried off my cats, and one more got eaten by a rat. Only two remained.

One night Trace followed the purple aura from his closet, down the low tunnel. He crawled on his hands and knees beckoned by a bright singing voice and the impact of a power drill. He pushed down the tunnel until it ended, and he saw the purple aura glowing along the cracks of a trapdoor overhead. He pressed it open and found himself in the garage. He stood over the two surviving chicks sleeping in their box of straw.

He grabbed one like he always did, he petted it and kept trying to grab its wing. It didn’t like that. He only tore out some feathers, so the chick pecked him so hard that it drew blood.

Trace grabbed it by the neck and flung it around until it stopped making noise and hung there in his fingers. Then he tore off its wings, tore out it's feet, and tore the beak. Then he reached inside of its wounds to tear out some organs. Then he moved to the next bird and did the exact same thing.  

Art: CrOPPED, Xelanoj Art, 2022.

Nebraska Gothic 2

By Graham Swanson

To Loren, 

My childhood in Nebraska went something like this. Cold winters, no furnace, walked to and from school everyday caked in snow. My best friends were blonde kids who helped me fight the Mexican kids who hung out by the abandoned grocery store. Once we beat them up and threw their sleds over the snow drift, we moved on to the big tree hill to fight the Irish boys. All rednecks the lot of them. We righteously steered forth with hard knuckles and swift kicks. We broke their teeth and cracked the bridges of their noses. We took their pot and smoked it. We celebrated our triumph on the battlefield that day and thought ourselves akin to the Vikings of Olde washing up on shore in dragonheaded longships, dressed in silver, armed with spears and swords, becrowned by horned helmets that sparkled in the snow.

After entering the hallow streets of the big city I found myself wandering aimlessly with hopes of killing myself. They always said I’d die in the big city, but despite everything I tried, death did not find me. The creepy, worndown men addicted to alcohol or crack only had things like “God bless you” to say to me. This is because I often gave them money and food. They would never harm me. One time a man in black jumped out from the bushes to accost me. I told him I’m keeping my bike, and he ran away without a word.

Downtown streamed with bright faces and red flags high over the banks and hotels. Even the State Tower glowed red like a crimson tombstone over the tireless foot tracks of a defeated sports program. Yet they still reveled in the hopes of reclaiming the last glory from almost 30 years ago. School just started at the University. A new fleet of fresh young, wealthy faces celebrated all night. I watched the frat houses alone, casing their parking lots, looking into the windows of their sports cars. Uninvited to any occasion, no friends, all alone in this cold circle, as a helicopter from the sky scoured the dark alleys in search of a kidnapped girl.

I took my walks nearly daily. After I learned that no one would attack me, I decide to try jumping in front of cars. This is easier said than done because they have a wide field of vision and can see someone coming from quite a ways off. All my attempts ended with the vehicles slowing down at a green light so I could pass illegally.

Then I went to the tallest parking garage I could find and hung over the edge for hours every single day watching the sunset by myself. I stepped back downtown to my favorite restaurant and I lifted a Barqs root beer. Later I stole another drink from a smoothie bar. While working at a sports bar, I stole Red Bulls nightly. One day I left the parking garage and never came back. I started making friends and focusing on my school work.

As the years went on, these friends started disappearing, but the professors took notice of my work. Unfortunately, I liked to argue in class. I liked to argue with the students and the professor, even if I agreed with them. Sometimes I’d even split the class in half and get them to argue with each other. Sometimes I didn't want to say anything, so I'd get someone in the room to argue FOR me. I started doing this after some slick feminist got her student pets to do the same, and focus their hatred of white mankind onto me. It didn’t offend me because I learned a very clever technique from them. Why fight, when there’s a mob that can fight for you?

Eventually, I took the writing class of aCuban post-colonialist (named 'Franny' to her friends). Having learned my lessons in the past, I decided to stay quiet, say nothing, and lay low. Unfortunately, I sat in the front of the class. She made it very clear on the first day that she didn’t want white people in her class. She couldn’t *say that, so she said things like “no bars, no guns, no dogs, no names like “Andy”- no jeans, no cigarrettes, no horror, no sci fi- just  nostuff like that. She also mention that she wanted us to write realistic material, then went on to tell us how a whale predicted the future and told her not to have children. She kicked me out of her class the next day, for no reason. I didn't speak to her. She refused to meet with me to discuss it. My adviser and the dean of student admissions took her side and helped remove me from the class.

I was so angry, that I went to 4chan, and laid the story at their feet. I gave them all her office information, including office hours and email and cell number. Then I went offline and didn’t hear back for about a year. On my 26^th birthday, a bunch of strangers came to the campus of the University on the day Franny was going to give a big talk to the feminists and the post-colonialists. They stormed in and took the mic over, asking her questions about her writing career, and her old books from the 80s, asking her why she hated white people so much. Franny almost stormed off in a tearful embarrassing mess. She couldn't articulate the words she wanted to say to her friends in the audience because she was too flustered with hatred of who was asking her these questions. When she finally blew up and told the men and women asking questions to “Go Fuck yourselves!” all of them stood up.

They then marched out in single file, having bought all her books from the school bookstore, and burned them right in front of the building. A huge waving fire rose and lit up the square as dark specters added books to the flame. Her pages curled up and turned to crisps. Whips of light spiraled from the confines of the pit as flaming pieces of papers flowered out like a shower of sparks. It was flux with golden light, a ring of guardians protecting its sacred flame, the fire lit up the night and like a beacon I found it. This happened on my 26^th birthday. It was the best present I’d ever gotten.

I relied on my blue bike to get me around town. Groceries, houses, mostly. After five years in school, I finally got hit by a Challenger or some expensive vehicle and the driver kept on moving. My bike broke days later, and I was walking to school. This took all damn day and I didn’t want to take the bus, even though it was probably free college students. My tooth just rotted out, and it exploded in my mouth one morning while eating. The pain kept me up for two solid days. I had no health insurance, no money (yes I had a job) so I just let it fester until I could take it no longer. I stole a bike from the dorms one night. Found a nice, expensive looking one that wasn’t locked up, and I still have it to this day. Returning the favor, as I saw it back then.

Years later after I dropped out and quit my job slinging shitty drinks, I moved to the west where I've always wanted to go. I immediately stole a weapon and sold it. This is the last thing I ever stole. Once it was over, strangers LIKED talking to me. They looked me in the eye, and appreciated what they saw as intensity or toughness. Really, I did something wrong and felt bad about it, and was internalizing what I had done, who I had betrayed, and how crazy I must have really been at that moment in time. I felt so grief stricken that I got into contact with my first love. Of course she moved on long ago, probably while we were still together, but I wondered about what she was doing, what brought her happiness, if she was even still alive.

There was no romantic fantasy. We got into it. Immediately began attacking each other. All of these thoughts and feelings she kept to herself and never told me. I told about how she had an unfinished tiger tattoo on her back, and how she quit school two weeks before graduation (it was a private school her mom was paying for!) And she wanted more freedom, so she joined the army. Dear girl, you do what you are told to do in the army. Stupid city girl. I got her to calm down by reciting Serbian war songs to her. If you don't know anything about the Serbians, they’ve lost every war they ever had, and during the Uprisings in the 90s, they utilized musical propaganda to smooth out the war crimes. These songs are usually racist, combative, and threatening. They worked. It got the American army girl to send me nudes with kissy captions.

We never met up because of the chaos of the Coronavirus. I spent three months isolated in the dark, a black hole opened over my head, and from it spilled forth black clouds and demon warriors descended to the earth in heavy war trucks. They showed me the truth. 

She came back to my hometown around the same time I did but she told me nothing. Word gets around, gossip gets around. There are no coincidences only omens. The love I felt for her is gone, and with it went my love for many things. Such are the principles of nature, the cycles of stars and planets and black cosmic specks. Agony breeds agony, missteps close pathways, and there’s always another bastard who needs a good punch to the throat. Like this methhead I see wandering the streets. He’s got kids, baby mammas, exchanges tattoos for drugs and sex. He’s scrawny, sickly, ugly, and dumb as sack of bricks. His crackhead girlfriends won't save his life, he cheats on them all the time. I'm no criminal, but If I had to start anyplace Id begin right there.

I saw him one winter night walking under the train bridge in the crackhood side of town. I drove a truck onto the sidewalk and stopped it right in front of him. When I got out I pinned him against a column, punched him in the ribs until he coughed up blood, and told him that for now on, if he’s buying meth, he’s going to buy it from me. For now on this is how it's going to be. I have a destiny, a bright future, and reason to live. For some reason, I never felt more alive, happier, and I kept hitting him until he fell to the ground. I dropped my heels on him over and over until he stopped moving. I bent down, and listened to the wind of his chest.

His heart still beat. He still breathed.

My first thought was to drop him off at the DRUG CONSOLING office downtown. They help people get clean. Good people doing honest good work. Yet it also occurred to me as it also began to snow, that things like this happen to addicts all the time. They get into a fight, they pass out, and the snow covers them up until springtide. I climbed into my truck and left.

Months later I get a job at the town tree nursery. I nurse saplings, and plant them in a tree farm. It’s been here since before dirt roads. It’s been owned by so many families that the name is becoming a joke. Julrick-Wuckol-Henry-Hassenroethe-Kriefels-Snyder Arbor Farm. Try saying that at a dinner party fifty times. It’s not unordinary for old women to work here or people fresh off the boat trying to make a living of things. We even host field trips full of children and teachers to come learn about the local arbor industry. On those days I stay in my office and let the others do the talking.

It was a long day, and the field trip arrived, so I sat in the dark watching the children from my window. I could hear the cacophony and the endless clamor of screaming children flood the building. I get interrupted by someone coming in the door. It's not my boss, it's not one of the ladies, it's an old fat man in a dorky sunhat. He just enters and sits in my office. I offer to tell him about what we do here, perhaps get him a job, but he says “I already know everything.” He goes on and on and on and on about bones under the earth and how difficult it is to hide them from the government. Half a million dollar fossil found in the earth, and the federal authority takes a share. Then he broke down into tears when I asked his name. “Mr. Hassenroethe” He managed to spit out, shaking my hand. “My son was getting into drugs. We kicked him out of the house because he wouldn’t get clean. He went to stay with his druggie friends, they beat him up, and left him in the snow. He froze to death 6 blocks away from our house.”

I froze in my seat, lowered my jaw, leaned forward, but inside a race horse gate lifted.

He continued “My son had such a bright future. He could've done anything. A doctor. A psychologist. A movie director… and he promised us he'd get clean so many times….”

I asked the old man to stop it, stop rambling about some dead man that had nothing to do with me. The more he talked about it, the more I saw his scratched-up face, and the more I heard the raspy breaths fainting like steam. I rose my fists and demanded that he shut the hell up, but he didn’t. He kept whining and crying like the man I beat to death. He even started scratching his face, picking at scabs, shuddering from the cold as the ancient wind of a Viking Winter blew in from the window.

No. Before my eyes, his face transformed from the old fossil baron to the droopy spacey face of the man I put down so so long ago. It couldn’t be the same person, I told him, It cant be! I felt the explosion of euphoria as the man before me looked exactly like him. Even wearing the same knitted cap and mittens shivering in the cold moonlight.

My instincts kicked in and I wasted no time beating the living shit out of the methhead again. I crashed his head into the window and beat him down with a paper weight. Not two seconds later, the methhead comes back and is standing in my doorway screaming like woman. I beat the shit out of him too. More and more crackheads start running down the halls towards the school bus. I grabbed as many as I can and beat them down with a fire extinguisher. More and more of the exact same methheads tried to run out the door but they moved too slow, like children, and so I clobbered them good. More and more swarmed the room, they packed the walls, they came in from the windows, from the doors, from the ceiling. I heard the little Viking songs my mother sung to me as a child as I wielded my weapon and ignored their cries, frozen in a moment. 

The Burning Tower

The Burning Tower

Graham Swanson

 

Severe ulcers of regret channel tragic outcomes to the fortune teller under the distant tent. Her smoke is in the

air, but no one dares cross the creeks and old roads covered in thorny branches coveted by the badgers and

nighthawks. The prince of sorrow stood petrified with his lance still in hand, the chipped blade covered in moss

and spider webs. He sent a mean text message, then another, and another, completely vindicated,  because right

before sunset over the horizon of his earliest lovedreams, the ire of poisonous rats infected the brains of the once

wise wizards in the castles of victimhood, and bred the greed of the vaultkeeper to enlist his rioters to loot the

secret catacombs for the lost master manuals. The prince offered warnings to his witches after these rioters

appeared in the night to demand ransom for the safety of the manuals, and he paid with blood, his lust, and by

taking on a curse never to sleep again. The rioters didn’t know that the naive prince knew nothing of these

manuals. 

Other elites rode stallions up mountain slopes past the peasants hauling barrows of filth, called themselves warriors because they witnessed some battle or another and knew an armbar or two, or they stayed in their estates practicing harpsichord and studying the poetry of the elder warriors who conquered the world 10000 moon cycles ago. This prince maintained an unspoken romance with the young nuns of the old convent, and the ancient witches of the blackwood coven while practicing his honor of lighting all 10000 candles of the glass cathedral.  The nuns listened to him chop wood from the other side of wooden doors, and the witches summon demons to bow before him. Orphans hidden under black hoods followed him through the trees to witness his cruel betrayal. The insane wizards rewarded them with droplets from the essence of smoking elixers.

Despite the falling leaves and brief daylight, the clouds scattered and kiddie pools evaporated. Wasps built cities within the doors of broken-down trucks. Limping garbage rodents fled the gunfire of blind old men on the higher porches of ghetto homes. Neon vested and protected in heavy boots, the oppressed peasants of the land sipped hot coffee and battled to move their dying vehicles from the bare patch on the lawn. It's all gone, the good things, the young beautiful witches masquerading with fruit in their laps, and the saintly maidens soon heard the war horn blow, and they went off to battle in the desert. Yet the prince took his impunity when the forbidden tomes fell into his lap to take the crumbling pages to the moonlight, and he stayed there until the peasant vehicle erupted in the morning sunrise and finally left. Fugitives from the alleyways reeking of crystal meth and propane peeked into windows and looked under a neighbor’s boat. 

Once he learned all that he thought he knew belonged to the minds of good lords who died back when paper money earned enough people a house to call their own, and how they created races of carnivorous monstrosities to roam the world on the book, how they rendered the civilization of the elves to smoldering ruins, and how they grew mighty speaking forests, and how the drug addict and the alcoholic created a spectrum between a depressed doomer who gets stabbed to death in an alley and dies huddled in trash, promiscuous ladies who travel all over the world but always end up either going back to their vineyards or being strangled with telephone wire in a motel, power hungry, resentful men who understand psychology and the weaknesses of power, and the hermit living in solitude on a mountain sanctuary. All those faerie tales about true love and defeating the dragon fell mute because the peasants received the benefits of association in relation to their lords, but few maintained the charms and splendors illustrated by warrior sainthoods. 

Books existed to help the peasant, but the peasants used visual language not written to communicate, so without alcohol the information interested too few, and most came away believing that any talk of helping peasants overthrow their lords came from the mouths of assholes who just wanted to strip religion from the land and let foreigners invade. They gladly worked in their lord’s field but grumbled every springtime when they had to give the lord an egg for the fertility festival. When gold rained from the sky, the smart peasants left for the college while the others birthed more children and beat each other over the heads with clubs. 

This made them fun sport for the knighthoods with no battles to claim for their ancestors. On misty mornings they hurled lances through the chests of peasants armed with wooden forks and butter knives. Those peasants were no match for the full suits of armor and storm bridled horses. The peasants wondered why the knights didn’t chase after the giants who stole their pigs, but their foolish fathers just made things worse every single time they tried to get the knights to stop attacking them and maybe do something about the monsters. Peasants really just need to work harder, because this land belongs to the honored ancestors of the conquered legions unrivaled to all the malcontents created by war and neglect. 

The prince closed the books, and called the witches to tell them what he read, but despite ancient wisdom of the zodiac, the information changed nothing to them, because they lived in the woods, and so what if they lived under the spell of relief from a turbulent home, they remained in their swamp covens. And since he read forbidden words, on the day the zodiac restarted all the knights died in the armor, and their castles crumbled. Prisoners trapped in the dungeons went free because rats carried keys to them from under the cages. The prince slowly, painfully turned to wood, then stone, and the saints still visited him to give the idol whiskey and kisses for good luck in the coming harvest.