[alan-hanson]

[the-new-library]

lieslieslies: Hey, you should come to this.

[the-new-library]

AND EXTRA!

The New Library is extremely proud to present an exclusive video poem from the minds of John Mortara and Sebastian Lubbers: THE WILD AND SPINNING SUN. 

We very much hope you thoroughly enjoy this next-level gift. Happy Holidays. Make wise decisions.

[the-new-library]

At Night, When I Remember

by Erin Thorp

I wake to dead lights and the contents of the universe surfacing like bones from a tar pit, buried in a way that preserves them forever. The dark is a museum of things I have loved. Remember the day world: the crooked bones of winter trees, wrapped in trembling mesh ribbons of birds And in dreams, it's the curse of starfish meets guillotine. Everything that regrows gets severed again.

[the-new-library]

NOVEMBER 28, 2012

We hope your families were well and your stomachs now full. POETRY: Dirt Holes by Alessandra Hoshor FICTION: In Music by Emily Morris  Submissions still welcome.

[the-new-library]

Dirt Holes

by Alessandra Hoshor

holy hit and goosebumps unravel you so symmetry is two crossed legs beneath a table on the opposite side of the earth from where you are standing right now so mimicry is looking at the glass and wondering if you would press your lips against it and resonating through the yardstick that you drag across the wire fence (ting ting thwack ting ch ch ch) and your sleeve squeaking across your plastic coat is the brush with violence and perhaps a tile of a structure that is leaving holes in the dirt

[the-new-library]

In Music

by Emily Morris

In theory, I hated them. Just sitting up there, flirting with abandon, with the boys and the girls, even a little with our teacher, Mr. Wick, but it was okay, somehow-- they filled the air, and sweetly. They were naturals at it. Being young. 

The windows let in the last warm croaks of summer. Mr. Wick had stopped teaching five minutes early, "as a treat," perhaps tired from the sheer energy it took to deflect us, this affable, useless mass of puberty. It would be too much to bear for anyone.   

And the girls never did anything to hurt me-- Leila, and Teddie, whose real name was Theodora. They were graceful and clean. They were nice, but not too nice. They were Nice Girls: family-oriented, inoffensively religious, but still princesses, each the celebrity of her close-knit family. Like a pair of weightless pearls, they seemed to float through the classroom, settling neatly atop the music room's tinny piano. 

Andy had practically leapt to the cheap wooden bench. Brave of you, I'd thought. It was only the second week of school, and he was wasting no time, socially. He started plunking down a tune I knew well. It was his parents' first dance song. We'd spent hours in his unfinished basement, marveling-- first out of curiosity, and then sudden, rank perversity-- at home videos while our moms drank coffee in the kitchen upstairs.

“IJUSSTcalled... to say... I love youuuuuu,” Andy crooned at them. The girls giggled and kicked up their bare legs; a crown of knees alighted his head. The more they giggled, the more passionately Andy plonked the keys, though he'd still had enough sense to duck his head down to smile. 

He looked, I thought, as if he knew that A Memory was forming. I purposely tried to laugh (what I imagined was) a very knowing laugh in Andy's direction. Maybe he would look up at me and smile, maybe then I'd chuckle along with the class. He blinked toward me, but decided I was unsafe. He wanted the pearls.

Simmering quietly in my chair, my sweaty forearms stuck to the sugared desktop. Meanly, garishly, I imagined him bragging to his future buddies. Oh yeah, ha, one time, my friends Teddie and Leila and I took over my music teacher's class and played Stevie Wonder songs, ha ha. 

My head started to throb. I looked down at my red, pimply thighs and tried to remember feeling okay this morning. The vacuum of my childhood bedroom usually led me astray in this way. It let me be, when I needed to be hyper-vigilant. The only way I'd get by was to anticipate any instances of embarrassment; excise them; move on.

I dug my thumb tightly under my left brow, applying pressure to that tiny knot of cartilage that always makes headaches magically go away-- one of those mechanisms that reminds you we're just bodies, just points on a lumpy mass that sometimes refract.

I'd bought a new pair of shorts the day before, at Dress Barn. I hadn't expected to find anything— was just trying on some ugly floral jumper that had potential— when I'd seen Leila among the Ladies' section. Gently, almost as if she were scared it might hurt her, she'd held up the black garment to her mother's squat back. I'd ducked into the dressing room.  The shorts were the only thing hanging behind the door, so I tried them on. They'd fit. By default, that meant I liked them. 

Thumbs still hooked in each eye, I opened my eyelids. Only Mr. Wick was left in the classroom, trying with some effort to move the piano back to its “X”- marked spot on the linoleum floor. The migraine haloes pushed into the tops of my eyelids. He looked at me with that deflated look teachers sometimes have, like they'd been holding their breath all day.

"Still nice out, huh?"

"Yeah," I murmured, and looked down. I rushed toward the classroom door and toward the school's exit. I couldn't look at Mr. Wick today. 

Andy was outside, kicking at the curb. I watched him from the lobby for a moment, acknowledging the shape of him. 

The outer sole of his right shoe reads "ANDY <3 GREMLIN”-- an old inside joke. Don't remember the story. Teddie and Leila are long gone; probably rushed out to ice skating or gymnastics or whatever they do. I shrug my own knapsack onto one shoulder. The migraine's faded now.“Hey,” I call to him, lightening my voice considerably,“familiar song on the piano just now.”Andy looks sheepish, then turns cold. “Whatever, Anna. You act like you know everything about me.” I wince, and then compose myself.“Yeah, well, my mom said you need a ride home with us, so....” I trail off. My mother arrives soon after. 

Once at Andy's driveway, she turns over her shoulder and lifts her right hand from the steering wheel to wave back at him.“Bye, hon! Tell your mom I'll call her tomorrow!” The next time she asks me about Andy, I make something up. Then I just ignore her. She gets it eventually. 

* * * 

“To the good old days,” I imagine Teddie and Leila toasting each other now, their legs still tanned and lean, though they wouldn't think so. They would remember that day with the piano, too, as a general hallmark of others impulses. It is important to them that they remember every detail to this story---the song, the kicking, the sitting on pianos. They tell it for much longer than it's worth, try to recall every detail. Cocking their heads to the side, they search for Andy's name but come up short.

[the-new-library]

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

We've been busy but we're still reading.  POETRY: Women Who Drink by Melissa Balch ESSAY: An indefinite stay in Texas. by Laura Beckner Keep submitting. How's your fall? 

[the-new-library]

Women Who Drink

by Melissa Balch

condensation forms on the glass, and i study the outline of your hand.   some women hold pint glasses tentatively, all fingertips, no guile, timidly, tempting someone to tell them of the qualities they lack in this man’s art: a range of ovals along the shaft.    others grasp deliberately, mucking their whole hand upon the moisture as if more determined, and less tenuous.   you sip the foam, and never soften your grip.

[the-new-library]

An indefinite stay in Texas.

by Laura Beckner

My parents met in Texas.

My father had a job covering the metro beat at The Houston Chronicle and my mother was an undergrad at UT Austin.  These years are forever preserved in beautiful black and white photographs of the two of them wearing hippie shirts, sprawled under shady trees with romantic items like a lyre or a tabby cat in the background.  My mother braided strips of leather into her long hair.  There is a shot of her topless somewhere perched on the rocks with a kind of feigned serious look that only a very young woman knows how to make.

When my Dad tells stories about his days at The Chronicle they usually involve guns in paper bags and fathers accidentally shooting their daughters through doors and whatnot.  Once, at the Washington DC equivalent of high tea, he got so wrapped up in one of these grim tales he failed to notice our elderly, deaf guest trembling on the sofa; she was reading my father’s lips and processing the horror of what he was saying at a truly comedic delay.  My mother said she didn’t think it was appropriate conversation material and I haven’t heard much about the old days at the paper since.

The week I spent in Austin does not fit neatly into a medium-sized tupperware.  I pulled up to my friend’s apartment after a brief altercation at a peach stand in Fredericksburg.  Kaylie and I had been friends since 6th grade when I had a sleepover at her house.  Sleepovers are an odd social custom when you think about it.  There you are, hormonal and insecure, your freshly shaved leg hairs inches away from a girl who you barely know, while you trash talk other girls and wonder why the pillows feel different.  It’s basically just as uncomfortable as sleeping with guys in college, except there were less body parts that required immediate attention.  I didn’t sleep soundly next to another human being until my first boyfriend, when he told me he thought he loved me and gave me a 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of the Tower of Babel, not necessarily in that order.

Kaylie tackled her 20’s in her characteristically plucky and fearless way.  She worked in a lab in Mexico, studied art in Italy, dated a fancy New York furniture designer, biked across the country twice, and finally married a bearded entrepreneur who seemed to be just perfect for her.  Our visits over the years revealed that she was progressing into adulthood properly while I was still scouring her cabinets for sugar cookies and weeping about how my sister was prettier than me.  It’s a miracle that we have remained friends.

With Kaylie’s husband out of town, we passed the hot summer weekend like characters from “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” except we were younger and whiter.  We went dancing with two studly Irish military guys who had us doing endless shots of Jameson.  In between kissing, whiskey, and The Cure I saw Kaylie telling her Irishman loudly with hand motions that she was happy to dance with him, but she was married.  He nodded but grabbed her ass about five minutes later anyway.

We declined a 3AM offer to drink gin in their hotel room and wandered home laughing.  The next day was spent sunning by the pool, making popcorn, and watching a romantic comedy that stars someone I actually know.

I was hanging around Austin waiting for a job interview that never came.  Instead I bought a pair of jean cutoffs, swam in a dark cold lake, and tried on the pace and texture of Kaylie and Sam’s daily life.  I woke up every morning to high rise views of a much more modest city below and meditated next to a knife holder on the counter shaped like a Keith Haring cartoon man with utensils slotted through his plastic body.   Google search “stabbed man knife rack” and you’ll get it. My walks somehow always deposited me in front of Whole Foods or a food truck with 20 different kinds of funnel cake or something.  I would sigh and return to the perennial knifing victim back in the kitchen with a wheatberry salad or powdered sugar still on my lips.

We went to a famous old dive bar where there was country dancing and I watched my friends two-step around the floor to a live band.  I finally partnered up with a few old men, one of whom stopped and took a good hard look at me before saying, “You’re strange.”  I took it as a compliment and went back to quick, quick, slow.

Somewhere back in LA, I had thought maybe I would move to Austin.  Kaylie and Sam certainly loved it there, and they were radiant and happy.  But the beauty that spoke to me the most was hidden behind fences and crumbling walls, cellulite and wrinkles, an old power factory, an orange tinted woman with fake breasts who really knew how to twirl, a lake with weeds that rose to the surface and teenage hips with red grass marks branded next to silly scrolling tattoos.

I should have remembered that when my father proposed to my mother in those balmy young days she answered him by saying, “Yes, as long as you take me out of Texas.”

[the-new-library]

OCTOBER 17, 2012.

Selections from three of our favorite past contributors:

ESSAY: Attention/Distraction by Claire Foley POETRY:  autobiography of a weather phenomenon by Cynthia Shaffer  POETRY: Fevers by Nicholas Mills  Please continue to submit.

[the-new-library]

Attention/Distraction

by Claire Foley

I’ve lived in a new city for one month now, thirty days stacked up of sifting and unfolding and settling in.

To live somewhere new means a new mode of attentiveness, one of heads craning back and plucking wonder from each plaza, wonder then delineated postcard by postcard dropped in mailbox slots to plod home. Hectic days are underscored by a slow marveling at my alternate reality, my life here.

I have four months here to carve out my existence and then leave. I eat biscuits in my room and take notes in class. I go to markets, bridges, squares, circles, streets, unraveling maps piece by piece. I take weekend trips and don’t sleep and send letters home with fizzy lines. I wonder if this is indeed my life and how.

But disrupting my new consciousness is this: I am here but I am in love with someone who is not here. (Love, a new word, still crackles at my touch.) But I should be fully present, say the people who, I gather, orchestrate their lives to make geographical sense. Maybe he shouldn’t be coming along with me — in thoughts, in my evenings spent silly-grinning at a computer screen and imagining afternoons in our southern town, lips to skin, tangled-sheet mornings with his fan dizzy overhead.

Thus I'm cracked stupid; split in half. A war between attention and recession into thought. Minutes dissolve in class, on the train, evaporating into plumes of his name and a countdown until — real, physical — collision.

I try to wrestle myself into the present but I fight myself; I can’t fragment myself. The person I am here is a person in love and I can’t separate it. (There is a thread running through it, making the non-linear make sense, stringing the weeks apart together so I might not suffocate.) I am trying to reconcile the pieces of it.

And I’m in love with London, too. I love its sprawling heaths and brown-dusted homes, its grays and blues, its humble skyline and the sense of wildness in what is unrefined. I’m comfortable here, like all my various parts are at ease.

(But still I get restless. Still I read your letters over and over. And as the train moves forward and the hills loop up loop down outside my window, I feel your absence acutely; I roll your name around in jumbles with the word love like an incantation. We talk about ghosts and homes and time, classes and the existence of our selves without the other, and I look at the pixels of you almost sick with wanting. But still I am here, a student, a tourist, a person with a life in a place four thousand miles from you, and time is rolling and rolling onward and so it goes, but I carry you with me here.)

[the-new-library]

autobiography of a weather phenomenon

by Cynthia Shaffer you know in Topeka a tornado blew through in '52 when my father was five and he is alive, still. a supercell is a mushroom cloud of different winds conflicted in direction, and they tunnel down to funnel town, to alley-oop... I was born in '88 Topeka, too, when Kansas Jayhawks won the NCAA National Championship against Oklahoma and these two warring sport-states reign Tornado Alley a strange strip of earth where pre-heaven barrels through in tantrums mightily and in higher numbers than their neighbors. he's alive, it was not Fujita 5. it was not F6 either, Christ which exists only in theory. I gather this 'cause in his myth he clung to a porch that should have been ripped up and fed into the cyclone (a dramatic mistake, to be fair. a cyclone is bigger and must spin with the Earth. it is brooding but obedient, mostly tropical, an awful brother in his own right) and all because the dry north blows cold down to warm hot breath come up and they fuck in some atmospheric rage that boils angry cumulus draft ladders down to suck up sweet earth dust and cows and corvettes. in '98 I was ten and at a movie when the reel cut to black and we hid in the back behind the screen because a siren had politely screamed some sensitive warning, and when we left the sky was green. spectrally, sunset reds kiss stormwater blue and turn the sky to bruise. and we are here, still.

[the-new-library]

Fevers

by Nicholas Mills

Mornings when we ran into the green surf, shirts in grey piles on the sand; lying on front lawns, breaking seals on aspirin and Coke bottles. Stand, although you feel doubled over, on the kerb, arms held limply out for buses and taxis, friends’ cars that smell too clean, music too loud. Playing cards over cups of black tea - but we don’t do that any more. Girls with darkened eyes, cashmere coats, sitting on milk-crates, their throats sore; passing illegal things, and red-dirt ideas, thoughts borrowed from dog-eared pages of text-books and evening papers, and plays in which we act our ages. We forgot the fevers we outgrew, that ran blistered and wet through the couches and back-seats I ran through too, that worked in places I never showed you.

[the-new-library]

OCTOBER 3, 2012.

Tales to tell:

POETRY: your palms a hymnal by Dalton Day ESSAY: Brunch by Kelly Bergin ESSAY: Familial Request by Alan Hanson  SUBMIT!

[the-new-library]

your palms a hymnal

by Dalton Day

1.

please give me   a stack of teacups an elephant bible to bleed in a bed made from a piano tree a boat made from the same thing   I want to sail with you through the blue bowl that the ocean is   let me touch these shores these beaches   these mountains hold such magic inside   the stars have whittled me so thin and bright I only want to swallow them down   2.   my wrists are skinny when I swing the hatchet the stumps have already begun to sing

[the-new-library]

Brunch

by Kelly Bergin

A mutual friend, knocked up. We joke and then—

“You can’t have kids, right?,” they asked me. “Because of the lupus, right? Or is it because of the cancer? Or is it the medicine?”

I am twenty six and I live in Los Angeles. None of my friends are pregnant or planning to be. We shop and take the Pill and go to work hung over. Having children is the future and we live in the present. Brunch is almost over and we think we just sat down.

We joke about it and then someone asks me and maybe it’s because I never think about it that they want to know, now. Over eggs and bloody Marys.

“Can you?”

They say things that are easy to ask loudly, after a few drinks. A cigarette and a serious question.

They want to know if I can have children.

I want to shout that I have questions too. I want to know why they want to know.

But when I ask them why, I overwhelm them. I embarrass them and then it is me, me who has made this situation awkward. Me, with my badly dyed hair and stupid diseases.

So instead, I say nothing. I fumble with my napkin and order another mimosa. I finish my French toast. We take pictures, laugh at inside jokes.

Will I know? Will I be able to? Will I be married?

These questions are in my brain now and I see that it is only just beginning. For years people will watch me age and make decisions and they will wonder whether I couldn’t have kids or just didn’t want to. If it’s because I had a career, or because I never married. If I’ll adopt someday.

I console myself. I have another drink. It is late afternoon now and the sun moves across the table, tinting the glasses of water, orange and yellow. We have been here too long.

I know that they want me to be okay. They mean well. They say “I could never live how you do, you have such strength.”

I don’t tell them that living is a choice I didn’t make. It was decided and I was born and I have lived ever since.  And I feel important and special when my suffering is apparent enough that someone says, “I would not want to be you.”

I tell them it’s not that bad. I laugh. I realize I don’t want to be me either.

“Do you want to go to another bar after this?”

Yes. I do. I want brunch to last forever. Because the light is orange and we have no wrinkles, only laugh lines. Everything is warm and fine and passing.

I want people to want my life instead of admiring me for my strength. To see only what the surface says, because the surface has it all.

I want to give sympathy instead of receiving. I want to take care of someone someday and maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. Maybe I won’t.

But now—for now, I want the life that they want. That they wish for. That they already have.

I want to ask the questions and know the answers too.

[the-new-library]

Familial Request

by Alan Hanson

I have decided, Mother, to give you a gift. I have decided, Mother, Mother who now goes by Erin, to give you a version of me you can fold and carry. I have decided, Erin, whose birthday is now somewhere in a month stripped of dates, to make up for the cold, stone skin I wrapped myself in years ago when you turned ghost in Colorado. This is all I have to give.

How our recent past is seasonally punctuated: I drive miles upon miles into the hearts of a manufactured family I have cultivated in replacement of the standard structure. My nuclear loves are in my eyes like spikes and cross-continentally a system of strong vine has wrapped itself in new definitions of family. I live in a technicolor dream that screams and I am rooted in happiness. Yet three times a year you fumble a phone and delicately ask How are things and Do you miss me and Why does your sister never talk to me?

I have an arsenal of answers. For years I sharpened knives to deftly cut your core out of you. To hold it in my palm and present to you the image of your absence, of your falseness, of your fracture. But you, too, are a perfect and accidental existence. And I, healed, have no energy to war you again. I can only politic and nod. I can say Things are fine and Yes sometimes I do and I don’t know maybe you should call her. I could cut, Erin, oh Erin Lee, oh Daughter of Linda, how I could cut. But my engine has no more pistons for revenge. 

I have decided, Stranger, to give you a gift. When your ivory and hungry fingers tapped keys through blues and whites to request that we are publicly listed as family I shook. It is a request I made for the latter half of my life answered by snow drifts in phone lines and bird-bone promises. But now, with my weapons collecting dust, I accept that this is the form in which you can bond back to me. And I will gift you the confirmation of your request. And you may flip through jpegs of me and my new family, my new family who is Cuban and Mexican and Irish and Italian, and my new girlfriend who is beautiful and a lighthouse, whom you may never meet, and my home in California, which was once your home, too, and you can keep these things. You may fill in the blanks you helped stretch. Blanks the size of a life. That is what you can have of me. Images and information through your router and your glassy eyes; until you learn to build a highway back to me.