Casts Casts by Yasha

Yasha trying to cope, telling you what I can't.

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Tongues

My story “Tongues” is on Maudlin House.

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Goin’ to the Jack-o-lantern

My story “Goin’ to the Jack-o-lantern” is on Silent Auctions Lit Mag.

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I bought the shawn penn bob honey book (not the right book) and your tumblr was listed at the end. Did you write this book and why did you call Penn a failed actor?

Sean, is that you? 

Go to bed. It’s past your bedtime.

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Musk and Honey is available now for all you space poetry zinesters out there.

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10.8.17

Sometimes things swell in the air when you leave for work. Birds look at me through the window, but they’re looking through me or to me, not just at me. Our floorboards pulse, just enough to make it hard to walk to the bed where I lay down instead of getting ready to go to my job. I drape my arm over the side of the mattress and swing it back and forth like it will rewind time, and you’ll come back and lay in bed with me again. 

Sometimes I think I’ll say I’m sick and I’ll take all of our books out of the shelves and rearrange them by feelings. I’ll put your Ferrantes around my Amelia Grays and wait for you to walk in for lunch and I’ll already have a pizza in the oven, because in the fall, you get on a pizza kick.

Sometimes I think I’l never go to my job again, because I’ll make enough money from the stocks I invested in as a kid, and I’ll buy a moderate sized 3-Flat and one floor will just be our library and we can read all day and eat pizza for every lunch. 

I think this right when you close the door to go to work.

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I just read The Paris Review’s job listings high and it was terrifying.

https://www.theparisreview.org/about/jobs

[bombuspress]

Issue Three, Portrait/[self]-Portrait, is finally here! Featuring works from a dozen creators, it is an investigation, a reflection, and a rallying call for the summer months.

Read the issue here.

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I have a few short-short stories in issue iii of Bombus Press along with a lot of beautiful works.

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6.17.17

When crossing traffic, I’m relieved I don’t have a car in the city. I know I’m bound to get hit again.

The worst thing I ever did was tell someone, “I hope you get hit by car.”

Two months later, she did and shattered her kneecap and got a hairline fracture in her scalp. 

I never saw her again. She dropped out of school and moved back with her parents.

I don’t remember the details of our fight that led to what I said. We were drunk and nineteen.

A few weeks later, I apologized and she told me I wasn’t the first person to tell her they hoped she got hit by a car.

Regardless, things I say have an impact on people, and I cringe when I imagine her doubling over the hood of a Honda. 

So now I try to look both ways and think twice.

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Usually/distortion/guy.

I don’t usually smoke, but when I do, I like for it to be at home. I like to cook something, then smoke while it’s heating up. When I come back, I eat while I watch HBO shows, since I’m still logged into my ex’s dad’s account. Then I turn this song on and wait for the distortion to kick in after his stupid speech. Then I giggle at myself. I used to listen to this song in my mom’s manual Saturn when she took me to preschool, where I cried and threw up. “Where no one notices the contrast of white on white.” Adam Duritz sings this every night to crowds who don’t give a shit. It’s like “Hey, the Counting Crows are playing with Spin Doctors, or some shit. Wanna go?” and you say, “Sure,” and Adam Duritz pouts because your friend called them “THE Counting Crows” and everyone always adds ‘the’. And I typed “counting crows guy” into Google to figure out how to spell his name. 

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I tried to lucid dream for so long, that now I’m always checking my reality. 

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2.27.17

One time my friend Kyle took acid and ate two packs of Trident gum. 

It was nice to see him so happy. 

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2.2.17

There are two pictures of us together, and both are group pictures, and both we’re grainy, and it’s usually that face I make between fake picture smiles, and you’re inching closer to the photographer, and I am still trying to lean into you, and I know you hate when people get too close, and your friends are pretty close, and I guess we’re getting to be pretty close, and maybe the sun makes me look older than I am, and that’s okay because you look great, and my little sister asked for your handles to creep on you, and I’m happy my sister is seeing us together, and I think the pictures are perfect.

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I started thinking about the deepest parts of the ocean and I got ill.

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1.8.17

I have to get gum, and picked out a pack of Trident. “What are you, a dentist?” You said, and I am not. You told me the gum industry is suffering because millennials don’t chew gum, and I said I chew gum, and you said it’s not enough, and I don’t think I’m technically a millennial. I’m borderline.

We bought a cheap bottle of merlot, because we always agree on that, and got sushi that our Asian Uber driver criticized us for. The man sitting next to me told me about the manga woodcuts on the walls while you were in the bathroom. I tried to play it cool, but I used to love manga and it’s hard to keep it cool.

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12.20.16

When I was a child, I would imagine things were reachable within the scope of my own vision, so I could grasp a grain silo three miles away and hold it in my palm.

I also had an obsession with imagining strings were attached to everything to the point where in interrupted how I thought and I couldn’t explain things well, because I was constantly trying not to think about my hand being attached to books or boxes by strings, like when Peter Parker can’t set down his tray in the lunch room, or whatever that scene was.

I don’t really remember it well enough to exemplify it.

Anyway, I wonder if I had Tourettes.

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12.16.16

I’m going to write some fiction now.

I know this girl who carries a tooth in a necklace. Apparently it’s her tooth, which had grown from the middle of the roof of her mouth. The dentist had to remove it because it was sticking into her tongue and giving her headaches. It bugs me that she has it displayed on a necklace, because she’s being creepy about it for the sake of being creepy. I also can’t stand this girl. 

I lied, because this is a true story, but who’s to say what a “fiction” is.

My friend opened a coffee shop a few years back and had this antique trunk as decoration. He said he wanted to fill it up with something cool. I suggested baby teeth. 

He said, “No, I was thinking something not weird. Like suckers. I don’t know.”

I could have said I loved the tooth-necklace girl. That might have been a “fiction,” but I don’t know, because maybe I would love her if I didn’t dislike her so much.