Intimate Arson

Aaron White is a father, writer, educator, and impassioned nerd. He spends his days raising a kid, navigating academia, and wallowing in obscurity.

[amwhite90]

[friendly-lobotomy]

The goal is to attract deranged perverts and I just thought that maybe I could attract a higher class of horny weirdos, someone I could vibe

I'm so happy that Points in Case said yes to this silly Hellraiser piece that I wrote. Also, major shout out to my SO for being there to remind me that phallic has two L's when spellchecker failed me.

[amwhite90]

After an appointment

I don’t claim the other FUN DADS and weekend warriors whose parental pageantry is performed from a distance. I’m not imbued with paternal power that’s merely symbolic. I’m not scolded at the annual ex- change for being late or feeding her microwaved macaroni.

I don’t identify as FUN DAD even when clinicians call me FUN DAD to my face—me, the keeper of batteries uninvited from birthdays, the boy who barely beat being TEEN DAD with good intentions, whose brief, painful marriage left him with- out a permanent address along her bus route, who’s not consulted for the social security number or date of birth, sitting an entire hour away in yet another zoom room, clinging to the soft fabric of family life, wondering at the paradox of patriarchy—of not doing enough while encouraged to do less.

After an appointment, I just want to put out her favorite sprinkler, the same sprinkler as all other Saturdays that floods the backyard and keeps us from planting pretty tufts of grass. She loves prancing in the cold droplets iridescent with sunlight. I love how she laughs—in the face of absence, relative time—with a mouth full of adult teeth.

When it’s dark, and black-brown rivulets descend the siding, we’ll indulge in popsicles and Whitney Houston. We’ll woop loud enough for all the other FUN DADS to hear, shake up the foundation of our safe space made from paper and string, and I’ll dance as if I’m no longer defined by what I don’t have.

[amwhite90]

It's interesting to watch a cheap pleather armchair evaporate into weather, or not pleather, exactly, maybe leather or vinyl, it never mattered now--the deterioration of things that once held us comfortably, discarded next to dumpsters.

[amwhite90]

Purchase Individual Issues

Interested in a particular issue but not ready for a subscription? You can also buy individual issues and back issues. You’ll get a copy of the passworded link in your inbox. Vol. 3, No. 3: 1…

I'm happy to share the newest volume of Synkroniciti. It's a beautifully composed issue that contains bird-themed poetry, essays, and fiction. They were nice enough to include my short story "Soonest, Saturn." Harper came up with the title. She also gave me the inspiration to write it. You can purchase the issue on their website.

[amwhite90]

The dandelion spores that decorated our clothes somehow snuck into the corners of our mouths, and I swallowed mine so we could keep spinning. I held Harper’s hands as we jumped in circles, the trampoline secured beneath a giant, aged tree with a trunk cleaved by lightning, its sore sprouting a new, smaller tree from inside. Each bounce sent junk from its branches floating about our ankles—leaves, crunchy helicopter seeds. Little twigs were stuck in her hair.

Harper laughed, her eyes focused on mine before darting to the sky. But we didn’t break contact, not even as the backyard blurred in brown-green and my head began to hurt with the same sickness as being at sea. Daughter and father, we were masters of gravity, a reckoning force, a destructive, spinning top sending hundreds of helicopters up and down in time slower than our collective flailing. We focused our weight in the center of the mat. Maple seeds pinched our bare feet then plummeted to the ground below us, twirling at the last moment in lazy, swooshing circles that picked up speed. I imagined Harper calculating them, and I imagined how I might count them, too.

When we came down as one, the spinning earth flew. As the world spun, I saw things in focus. I had her to myself, if only for moments, both of us entirely here outside of therapy and school and two different homes. She wasn’t just an extension of me, but it felt like I was also part of her.

Harper pulled me in to sniff me, and I asked her what happiness smells like—strawberries, lavender, citrus, a Lush rainbow bar. Her laugh in response was recomposed Vivaldi, four seasons of sharp violin.

[amwhite90]

When my child chose to run

We wavered at the void of a baptismal river. I held on to your wing when you tried to wrest free, when you looked at me with big black eyes, and I despised my desire to push you in, to remake you like me because the hormone patches and pills couldn’t help you be human.

But you were successful in pulling away, in zig-zagging away to avoid me, in causing me to stumble trying to catch you because my deer brain was still caught up in the trappings of civilization, in performing my personhood and the truth, I now know, is I liked it.

I was nothing short of a mother warrior social media diva, no different than the villainous ringmaster who prods baby elephants to fly. My identity as your parent was better than people. Your birth was not my failure. Despite me you can’t even come to hate human beings.

I know this makes no animal sense to you, that I could want to drown you until you’re just like everyone and you’re no longer a half-human harpy singing aslant songs. I wanted only to be the sympathetic character in the collective story of your childhood.

You were smart to run. This world tastes more and more like a worm each day. You were smart to spurn this basilisk of avarice, a magpie mother hungry for obsessive shiny control. You are not the cliché I formed in my mouth. You’ve ascended and I’ll cheer for you as you reach, soonest, Saturn.

Read the full issue here: https://online.fliphtml5.com/qoqiq/ntxw/#p=1

[amwhite90]

Rochester Mayor Suspends Police Officers Who Pepper-Sprayed 9-Year-Old Girl

The incident renews scrutiny of the city and its police department following the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died of asphyxiation after an encounter with police in March.

This is weighing heavily on my mind. Harper is nine-years-old. She sometimes lashes out when she's upset. She can also be uncooperative and unresponsive to commands. Never, ever could I justify physical violence against her, no matter how much she screams or flails or resists intervention.

This kind of violence is ubiquitous in our society. Black folks suffer from it, and so do neurodivergent people like Harper. To me, telling a child that "you're acting like a child" is an analogy for how Power informs our institutions, behaviors, and ways of thinking.

Mental health and criminality are often woven together within our society's narratives, but that doesn't mean police should respond to suicidal children with violence. We need trained mental health professionals to make these kinds of house calls. We need advocates, allies, politicians, police, and the general public to support them in this work.

It wasn't that long ago that children like Harper would have spent their lives in institutions, subjected to cruelty like this for "their own good." It's abhorrent, and it still happens today.

[amwhite90]

When the rhythm of the beat is uneven

What’s left to say in isolation? After hours sheltered in place, we’re past all the pleasantries of those polite strangers we once were.

I build my body of words for you just to tear it down and begin again, pitch- fork and torch the bits of my brain I’ve pickled for another day.

I create more clever ways to say I love you, but the lines all come out as cold clichés, like how I’d swallow your COVID cooties just to keep you in me a while longer.

If just one line could be as good as the smell of your hair, or the music your mouth makes, then they’d pulse with a life of their own, and by god, I would know what it feels like to be god.

Granted, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll settle with saying I’d die and live and die again just to hear your every ooo and aaa, and to drown in your electricity.

[friendly-lobotomy]

With A Call To “Stop The Count” Donald Trump Takes A Late Stance On America’s Vampire Problem

President Trump is behind in the polls and the effect it’s having on his ego is showing. It seems that he thinks he can try and win over the American peoples favor even though all the votes have been cast in the election. 

The most glaring example of this sad display of “Please take me back, baby” energy was his call to “Stop The Count!” on Twitter, an obvious reference to Count Dracula and America’s vampire epidemic. 

For many Americans, I believe this will be too little too late.

This comes after months of questioning America’s lead vampire expert Dr. Van Helsing who, at  recent rallies, the President promised to fire if he was granted a second term. “Fire Van Helsing! Fire Van Helsing!” was a regular chant from the crowds who, it should be noted, for the most part, wore no neck coverings during the event. 

America’s vampire problem has cost the country countless lives and changed the very way we live our day-to-day lives with many business and institutions requiring mandatory neck protective coverings and sundown curfews. And, if you’re like me, you can’t help but notice that for months every store shelf seemed to be bare of any garlic. 

And yet the White House did nothing.

Blood banks are being tapped out while, all along, President Trump seemed totally indifferent, sometimes openly flaunting that while he himself had once been bitten by a vampire that it was “No big deal” and that the whole vampire pandemic was a hoax dreamt up by the Democratic Party. (It is hard to say if Trump ever actually contracted vampirism from his supposed bite since even before he claimed he’d been bitten he was already cold and blood thirsty and avoided all self reflection.)

Many pointed out Trump’s reluctance to do anything about the vampire problem while he also had many vampires in his own cabinet, notably the ghoulish Rudy Giuliani and advisor Stephen Miller. 

Note: while it has been reported that Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner is a vampire, that is false. Kushner, it should be noted, is actually the ghost of a small 18th century English boy whose soul possessed a large porcelain doll. 

Whether Trump’s late-stage band wagon jump will work, it’s hard to say. He’s spent so much time ignoring the vampire menace that it seems, via the polls, that his bats have come home to roost and he finally has understood what’s at stake.   

Image from the cover of Tomb of Dracula #13 (1972) by Gil Kane and Tom Palmer

[amwhite90]

In my best Batman voice: "Racists are a superstitious, cowardly lot.”

[amwhite90]

A poem of mine about suicide and McNuggets has been included in the newest issue of AMP. 

[amwhite90]

I first heard this poem only weeks before Harper's autism diagnosis. I never imagined that our lives would take this interesting turn. Every day, I'm grateful for, and humbled by, my daughter. She's given me perspective and helped shape the person I am.

Listening to it now sparks the same flutter in my gut that I first felt sitting in my parked car at Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital. It's wonderfully cathartic. I will always recommend Bennett's beautiful love letter to his brother. Please listen, and please continue supporting our friends on the autism spectrum. They are an amazing expression of the human medley.

[amwhite90]

COVID-19

I understand the urge to buy up things at a discount, such as cheap airline tickets, especially when you feel like you always have to go without. But please don't enable corporations to capitalize on a pandemic by risking your health or the health of others. Their CEOs are still making more money than you, probably from the comfort of their hermetically sealed bunkers with really fast wifi.

[amwhite90]

That shiny vermiculite in store-bought soil

My potted perennials

all died last summer, not last-

ing any more than a month

by my hand, but I haven’t

turned off the phone reminder

to wet them each week with blue

rock candy right at their roots.

The cheerful chime each time sings

for the life I failed to feed,

yet with full devotion watched

wither in indulgent heat.

Every bane is beautiful.

Colorful clusters of pink-

purple puckered and melted

back into the curated

dirt. I carried out the work

of Death in my false starts, and

the perennials perished

from good intentions dressed just

as me made up of meat and

bile, destined to oil

just like the dinosaurs I

cherished as a small child.

Every bane is abysmal.

Today’s perfumed face is painted up

ugly like yesterday. I heard that

Australian magpies sing siren

songs when consumed by bushfire. Their

stardust glitters in the celestial

ground that is farmed for my garden and

marked by four stakes, tethered with twine to

tame forces beyond my control. I

plow the past, performing my person-

hood, planting and reaping and eating

and shitting my civilization.

Every bane is inevitable. 

It’s tough to strike this kind

of balance between being

someone for someone and

making it look like it’s

organic. It’s tough to

catch ash on my tongue like

fat snowflakes in the storm

of all the good I tried

to do. As I wither

into thin hair and some

saggy tits, it’s all I

can do to jerk off in-

to the sink and ask my-

self if the things I think

are mine are really mine.

Every bane is benign. 

Perched on my porch above

the perennials were

bird eggs speckled blue. I

waited for the robins

to fly away before

I knocked down their nest, then

tossed it into the tall

grass grown from ground up hearts.

I’ve since learned there’s no real

difference between the

prosperous animals

and people aged to die

and live yet again as

stalks of green distilled. I’ll

put the clay pots away

until next spring, when I 

surely will not succumb

to my human habits,

bitter as wet fruit rot.

Every bane is blessing.

[amwhite90]

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My poem "At an Age of Instagram," originally printed in 2018, has found a second life in The World We Live(d) In, an anthology published by The Indiana Writers Center. I'm excited to have my work appear alongside some truly amazing and accomplished poets.

[amwhite90]

A new(ish)essay I wrote about Harper, my dad, and self-injurious behavior is now available in Capsule Stories. I also have a poem out right now in Indiana's Best Emerging Poets 2019 anthology. These magazines can be purchased at the links below.

I, of course, see very little of this money, but I can sleep well knowing a part of me is in your home for the holidays...watching...and waiting...

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/capsule-stories-carolina-vonkampen/1135171290?ean=9781734324600&fbclid=IwAR0MW1I7K813KufgEJcwwqhGA0ZxYWAxv-Z0UjJ_ByFU8EyDmgboNYzVYHs

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1734324600

https://www.zpublishinghouse.com/products/indianas-best-emerging-poets-2019-an-anthology?_pos=3&_sid=242625a6c&_ss=r&variant=29496564383859