Naked Sunset

Sreemanti Sengupta

T

hat morning was different. My eyes felt locked in a cage of dreams. And the bed was floating in ill smelling semen. I tried to remember last night. In Paris, I was with San Tiago the street artist who was travelling with me from motel to motel. My life came back to me in bits and pieces of flesh that I feed the stray dogs on the beaches of Orissa. I remembered the lady who stared hard through her party mask and said how inappropriate it was for a late Hippie to turn up for a book launch. The laugh I laughed walked back to my senses, like a dancer in the Middle East, teasing me to massage her backside. Or was it the front? I cannot recall. The backs and fronts and ins and outs collide and converge and push up like a ball of vomit that’s uneasily trapped in me for centuries. Very soon a laugh escapes as the vision of a Punjabi wedding hall, the one I sneaked into one hungry night in Ludhiana. The mountains of food were hallucinogenic..and soon they were nothing more than tits and asses and buttholes that people lined up to eat.

San Tiago, like many other men looking for exotic flowers that bloom in dangerous swathes of forests, asked me for marriage. The joint almost burnt into my fingers when I told him off. I told him I was getting fat and I was squinted, I was too vain and too beautiful, too free and too much of everything. That he was a street painter, and that all his work was trampled over by cars and feet and pissed on by dogs. He told me about Beauty and Art. About the inky black roads that lead everywhere and his Madonnas emerging aka thrusting out like pelvic bones from the cosmopolitan consciousness. “It is not about how many people stop and look, it is how much they are disturbed by a nonsensical burst of colour out of the corner of their eyes. It is like the fly that you cannot kill.”

My throat was parched for the want of Darjeeling tea. I rolled over and Darjeeling appeared as I had first seen it, emerging like a comely bride from the windows of a chugging train. The explosion of green at my window had probably inebriated the little me. I could hear Ma coaxing me to eat the bread and hard boiled egg. I simply watched, a sandwich uncouthly stuffed in my mouth. Darjeeling emerged in intolerably green tea estates past my window. I even waved to some Kanchis but no one waved back. Later in Geography, I learnt they were intent on plucking two-leaves-and-a-bud.

.

As a child and often afterwards, I have been confused about vacations. I had a strong urge to jump and run in the green fields that the train was carelessly cutting through, towards the horrible definitude of a vacation. I watched the lapis lazuli sky over the fields and wondered where colours came from, I almost stretched out my hand to catch the wings of the flying stork. Soon I would be itching to take a vacation from vacations.

Teetering on the thin railings of a balcony somewhere in Mumbai, my drunk mind sang a poem to me. Rosa was clasping my hand, equally drunk. We had decided minutes back that we would commit a grand suicide, for we were pained by the terrorist bombings in Mumbai, that the little boys who were playing with red balloons on the beach, now had their brains spattered on the sands. Rosa didn’t know much, understood less. It was a blessing I told her. She had told me not to die. I took breaks from puking out stale chicken kebab and demanded an answer. “Don’t you see green fields that rush by a chugging train? Don’t you see white sea gulls floating over the blue foaming ocean? Don’t you see wild creepers shooting out of old walls like little rebellions? Don’t you see babies being born out of nowhere, growing up, marrying and producing more babies?”

I sneer when I think about Rosa. Rosa was the widow of a man twice her age whom she married when she was sixteen.

--“But why?”

--“Because he was the only one who did not demand a dowry.”

-Why did you conceive so early?

-Because people started saying I was late.

I remember people looking at me queerly when I hung around with Rosa. They thought it weird that girl from a respectable family to be spending so much time with a brown uneducated widow from a remote Maharashtrian village. I gave a damn of course and suffered secretly. I suffered when there wasn’t a single soul to pass me a glass of water when my body was burning at one hundred and four degrees.

Rosa often told me of her village.

-My husband never beat me.

-Hmm

-There are homes where the man just walks off one morning and returns with a wife. A man lives with as many as five wives in our village and beats them all.

-Uh Huh

- Our neighborhood is too noisy, with children and women squabbling. The men mostly snore after a bout of country liquor.

I adore the ocean. I can sit at its fringes and think about Rosa’s village, about how children are produced like steel billets. How women are forced to behave like conveyor belts of babies spilling over on soiled sheets in soiled hospitals. How my grandmother had dropped one of her fifteen siblings accidentally. She was little and excited when she heard the hawker calling out wares. In her rush, she had placed the new born too near the edge of the bed. It had rolled over, fallen and died after breaking a hip bone. Nobody cared, there were fourteen others, and soon the mother would bring more.

San Tiago tells me I am too vain for my ideals. I am as common as the strip dancers at the streetside dance bars and as exotic as Caribbean folk music

.

I get up naked and strut around the dingy room. It seems that for years I have been travelling from dream to dream, where one opens gates to the next. I cannot find my way back. I push my head outside the window and immediately the eve-teasers start cheering from below. I turn and look down at my cleavage and spare them a smile. Poor, Poor desires!

It is the lull before great storm. The sun is about to set on a breathless landscape. I smell the tense air, anticipating, hoping against hope. The horizon turns crimson in minutes, a beautiful calm drapes over the high-rises beyond.

In moments, the storm will arrive.

When I was in school in that village of mine, in the poverty that sucked away dreams like an octopus wrapping tentacles around his victim, I sat near the window, and suddenly the mathematical tables etched with white powdery chalk on the black slate grown old and weary with overuse, the sensation of the straw mat tickling me under the skirt Ma had patched up in several torn places, my hair, grown a straggly length just touching the shoulders, beating lightly with the wind, the heat and the salt of teenage skins all repeating after the teacher like tightly railed tracks. I sensed a remote storm building up somewhere, a storm that resembled hundred years of pent up desires of a squadron of soldiers sent to fight some war in Siberia. Back when I wasn’t sure what desire meant. Back when I didn’t know what any of this meant. This, me, here, sensing everything letting go, melting, dissolving, into a force beyond. Another time I had lost consciousness, staring into the village pond, feeding the giant fishes and watching the ripples. The village doctor pronounced that the spirits had possessed me. I was a cursed child. I felt a giggle escape me when I saw Ma crying about how am doomed to be an old unmarried maid. Who is going to take the hands of a poor dark mad girl?

San Tiago and Rosa do not believe me when I say I was born in a village. That I made my way to the world.

-Your skin is too bright. You don’t smell of the earth.

One of my early lovers complained that my body smelt of endings and death. I had smiled and pulled him close and switched off the glaring light that seemed to peel off layers of my epidermis and distribute a disturbing fragrance everywhere. I could not of course tell him the truth. I am free because I keep running away. Each escape piling up a like small death in me, like deceased embryos bursting at the pores of my skin.

When I tell San Tiago of my lovers, he merely turns his face and plays the flute. He says one day he shall make a portrait of me at Times Square and then I’ll have no way of escaping him! “The magic is in spontaneity. Streets and Traffic do not give you preparation..time is as scant as in the preparation of a Revolution. A revolution can begin with a baby’s cry in some remote, inaccessible corner of this planet..it gathers mass like a skeleton gathering flesh..it is the virility of a single voice that strings together an entire generation..”

It is one of those days when the bed is unmade and the room stinks of cheap wine. It is humid enough to trace beads of silvery sweat that balance themselves like ballerinas on my eyelashes. The sun is down and the darkness is screeching with crickets. Outside, the ice cream vendor puts me in a daze..

I screaam..I screaam....I screaam

*   *   * 

Sreemanti Sengupta enjoys a world of divided minds. She is an advertising copywriter from Kolkata, India, a poet, a struggling author, an e-mag editor, an elocutionist, previously published in various online journals such as Mad Swirl, Paragraph Planet, Certain Circuits, Bare Hands Poetry, Ppigpen and more including print anthologies in both English and her vernacular Bangla. She founded and runs The Odd Magazine celebrating alternate creativity herewww.theoddmagazine.wix.com/thisisodd and blogs atwww.weareideating.wordpress.com




*   *   *

A Paul West Excerpt

from
Red in Tooth and Claw
a novel by Paul West
published by Onager Editions, 2015

Yet what he had hoped, finally, to register with tender completeness, and then to set it up before his mind’s eye as a Polish Palladium—an improvised sacred object having the power to preserve a city or a country like the famous statue of Pallas Athene that protected Troy—was still there in his head, frozen among the engrams along with the classical learning he had brought into play at Embassy cocktail parties, with a Latin tag for this, a Greek one for that. Major Epigram, as they nicknamed him, had wished to see, and, having seen, had convinced himself that the seen was never lost. Let someone witness a thing, he’d taught himself, and it endures: there is no time, no loss, no waste. So, just the same as two weeks earlier, people still trudged from farm to farm, bartering honey for apples, balls of whitewash for birch-bark strips from which to make sandals. Stranded at the tilt like outsize palm-leaf crosses from an ancient Easter, the windmills had no motion. Sagging at their long middles, the milk wagons had nowhere to go, and they sagged from long use, from being overloaded in days gone by, not in any way from the weight of empty churns. Like propped-up coffins with little roofs, the beehives seemed to invite new tenants in. Go anywhere, get out of the way, were the messages everyone was whispering, but no one knew what to do first, and so clusters of farmers and farmhands dawdled about in the landscape, guessing and arguing, and only in Kazimierz-like places were the prudent busily pasting brown paper over their windows to save the glass from blast, the occupants from splinters. The banks and schools were closed, but the stores were open, though with little to sell: no sugar or liquor, no canned goods, just the pots, pans, files, vises, pincers, choppers, and shovels pictured outside on a placard for the benefit of the illiterate, whose visual abstractions had more flesh and blood, or at least more shovelly shovels, than the verbal ones of their betters did. WODA SODOWA read the sign on the soda water stand on the edge of the closed market, but there was none to sell. The pharmacies were out of bandages and iodine. Repaired clocks went uncollected while time dilated or shrank. And those impulsive ones who had fled, moving so as to be on the go at any rate rather than knowing exactly where to go, trundled with them barrels of salt herrings, heirloom pictures of Christ gazing blankly at some conifers (a standard icon), and chickens in improvised wire coops. The departing trains, all headed east or southeast, toward ghoulish Mother Russia, would never return, and folks who stayed behind slur-chanted the shallow hair-split last-ditch litany "With the Germans we may lose our freedom, but with the Russians we shall lose our souls." The Germans were everywhere, the rumor said, but they had not yet reached that disk of magical ocher and russet landscape, or were hovering at its perimeter, joking harshly and goose-stepping in circles, as if loath to interfere. It looked so German anyway.

        Nourished by a mind’s eye full of this drawn-out idyll, Major Czimanski, after irritably hunting through the drawers and walk-in closets of the rented town-house on Pulawy Street, hung his suits in heavy parcels, done up with cord, on the crossbar of the bicycle he had found out back, unoiled and dusty and upside-down as if ready for conversion to another purpose such as spinning or water-pumping. "Perhaps," he said, "they’re not all mine, but no one will ever come back, not for their suits. I’m sure the owners wouldn’t mind."

        "They won’t even know," his wife told him distantly, as if accomplishing hard mental arithmetic. "Ever. If it doesn’t work, bring them back. We’ll find a use. Oh for a car. Will you just look at all this stuff they left behind." She motioned at an untidy array on the couch of books, silverware, cut glass, gramophone records, trumpets and clarinets. As if a high-living musical quintet had left in a hurry. "Remember, Ludwik, he has the gold already." She twanged the bell for him as, rather like someone leaving a funeral or a hospital waiting room, he wheeled the bicycle away, a display frame with wheels, the strung-up parcels like dun-plumaged headless birds. Minus his tunic and cap, he looked to her rather ordinary, a well-groomed repairman removing his equipment from the premises after fixing the elephantine trumpeting noise the bathroom pipes made when the faucets were turned full on. "What?" he called behind him, thinking she had spoken, and almost collided at the gate with two Jews walking backward in front of a spinning wheel on a small cart and tugging hemp from their waist bags, twisting it deftly into strands and feeding it to the wheel run by a third man in a cloth cap too big for any skull. At these three he stared, amazed by the somnambulism of their toil, three of the doomed anxious to earn their keep even while backing into the inferno. Spinning the thread of destiny, he noted with a classical smile: Now which of these three Fates is the one who snips? The bicycle fell into line behind the spinning wheel on the cart as if not he but some more appropriate force were moving it along, shoddy bargain with an even shoddier destiny, and his mother’s disdainful shade hectoring him with "Is this you?" and his father’s cannonade: "Servants do our wheeling for us, and that is not an exhortation to ride the foolish thing."

        Ludwik Czimanski advanced with his mind shut off, reaching the edge of town after ten minutes, glad that the trio of hemp spinners had provided him with a rhythm to walk by, but gladder still they had gone the other way. Now he stared, pausing, at rye-thatched haystack covers, like the roofs of an African kraal. This year of years they will stay empty. Farther along, hemp was soaking in the ditch along the roadside, and bundles of it lay unattended on the bank. Overtaking him with smothered gurgles, half a dozen sprightly men in cloth caps that might have come from the same box on the same day (uniform buff twill) forged on ahead with bundles of coat hangers slung over their backs and half a dozen in each hand as if in search of an army eager to strip naked and air their battle clothes. It’s all half-dozens, he told himself sardonically, and looked at their hands, half-expecting each to have a sixth finger. Or did they take six steps and then halt, as if walking to bars in music?

         What sharpened his deep-buried, deliberately minified distress, after he turned into a lane flanked with crude houses for sale, perched on diagonal brackets built into the walls halfway between the ground and the roof. Bigger coffins, arranged on carefully folded sacking spread over pairs of trestles, he just blinked at heartlessly, but the little ones dismayed him, tugging at his mind with a pertinence too keen to bear. He no sooner passed one set of them than he saw another, planed and sanded but still the post-mortem minimum, just enough in the shade from the eaves not to reflect sunlight. Prophetic greed, his mind told the lane. They might need them for firewood before the week is out. Cold always by the end of this month.

        Fifteen minutes later, in a black sheepskin hat and a holed plaid shirt encrusted with a complete range of droppings from egg and mustard to whitewash and manure, Gnonka the pig-farmer untied the cords and began to finger the five suits, one with satin lapels, one of a tweed perfumed with Baltic heather, a third with two vests of which one was velvet with maroon pearl buttons, while the other two were ordinary and a bit worn at the cuffs and elbows: these two culled from the house, not his own at all, and certainly not his taste, which did not run to tree-bark brown.

*   *   *

PAUL WEST is the author of 50 books. He has received awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Lannan Prize for Fiction and the Halperin-Kaminsky Prize. He was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government. He has also been a runner-up for the National Book Circle Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

*   *   *

Neighborly

Sasha Thurmond

S

unday morning, my horse Tigere', and my dog Tuxedo began snorting and barking at some monster in the woods. Clad in my pajamas, I dashed outside looking like a toothless, wreck of the Hesperas.Two men were marking off boundary lines with neon pink, plastic tape that flapped ferociously in the high winds.

The befuddled men looked up quizzically when I queried "Whad up ?" Recognizing the younger one, I blurted out "I know you, you're the one who cost me $1,000 when I first moved here!"

"Oh, Yea,  you're the one who backed your truck into my SUV !"

Silently I thought to myself that this was still debatable. It transpired eleven years ago on a moonless evening at the dimly lit parking lot of our local variety store. While I was in the store, my new neighbor parked perpendicular to the rear of my battered old farm truck .As I backed up eagerly to return home, I heard the old familiar and sickening CRUNCH!! "Ugh......not THAT” ...dollar signs flashing in my stressed out head and flying out of my pockets. The thought hit me that maybe I shouldn't have moved here after all. I was determined to make it on my own, but I always got miserably lost attempting to find my way home, and my whole world was discombobulated. Enough of that thought....I should have fought it. I decided to go the whole nine yards, and barraged them with questions. 

"Are you getting ready to build? Where are you placing your house? Are you developing all ten acres? Do you have horses?"

The father suddenly began speaking in Spanish as if he didn't understand me anymore.so I say, “Cuando empieza?" or something like that.

He flailed his arms and shouted,"Pronto!"

I smiled and slowly did a pirouette, followed by a peacock strut back home to finish my Sunday morning brunch, smugly hoping that my mission was accomplished. No way in Hell would my neighbor ever want to build his house close to mine.

*   *   *

Sasha Thurmond is a graduate of the Cornell University MFA program where she majored in Printmaking. She lives on a farm in South Carolina with her horse and other animals, and sometimes finds time to make art or write stories.

*   *   *

photo by Sasha Thurmond

gorky hanged himself in calder's tree

mike foldes

bill was drunk on virgin mojitos, while the rest of us worked our way through peroni and corona. it was a chill day on the cutting edge of warm enough and too cold to sit outdoors, but that’s where we sat, at the cuban cafe talking art and history. calder’s name came up and rick said something about a russian artist hanging himself at calder’s farm and calder’s daughter finding the body, and bill said, ‘wasn’t it gorky?’ and we all agreed, “yes, well gorky did commit suicide.” or did he? in connecticut or russia? by his own hand or stalin’s? at the time it didn’t seem to matter, but not knowing and needing to know has since become a passion. besides, gorky was a writer, not an artist. not that gorky, bill said, arshile.

*   *   * 

Mike Foldes is the founder and managing editor of Ragazine, an online literary magazine.

editor@ ragazine.cc 
http://ragazine.cc
ragazinecc/Twitter
ragazineccblogging@blogspot.com
Join Mike on MySpace & Facebook
Mike is also the author of Sleeping Dogs, A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping
Download at www.Smashwords.Com and www.Amazon.Com
Purchase the paperback at www.splitoakpress.com

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A Day in the Life of Narcissus

by Sreemanti Sengupta

I

 woke up and saw that my grandfather had beaten me to the loo. I watched the painted wooden door which he had shut three minutes ago and thought about what a bummer Diabetes was. I was sure I would meet Diabetes some day, the same way I had met Migraine and Myopia and I would treat him to Pink Candy Floss. I remembered Candy, yeah that’s what they called her, but I was too young then. I loved her because she was around all the time. I had dreams of Candy and Blyton’s Five going on quests together and Candy stealing their picnic basket. I think that’s what she wanted - picnic baskets or men with big picnic baskets. I couldn’t look at Candy without getting lost in her lips. I was soulwrecked in their bloody excess. I cringed every time Candy bent down to kiss me, sighing at the hard work that awaited me, just to rub off the red riot from my cheeks. I lost Candy or she me just like we lose strains of beloved poetry to our memories. I had gone into some illicit wooden trance by the time the door opened, bringing on The Old Man and The Stink. I couldn’t hold it so I shuffled inside. I tore away the Three Black Ants that were sitting on the rim of the Poo Bin, waiting to pinch my ass. I sat and crapped serenely and couldn’t find one good reason for spoiling this with a newspaper which the Stereotype does. I am not interested in Stereotype types. I meet them everywhere, or they meet me. I think they are the real sneaky types, betraying people, choking people on their last drinks. I had a whole bundle at school and way up to college and to university. I doubt I picked up Paranoia from them. I never liked Paranoia, that insane creature. I was afraid taking her out in crowded places, like happening places with people and buzzing with activity. I felt rather irritated, nay, embarrassed when she called me closer and whispered that everybody on the street were either looking or bitching about her - her dress, her past, something or the other that was incredulous and disturbingly Unicorneish. I gave up when she demanded all the lights be switched off when we were doing it - “the chairs look queer” she said. I of course needed the lights, I needed to see them under me, feeling my enormous weight. I am done with crapping and the black poop floats inside the bin. I asked Mamma why it’s black and she said that’s because I take iron tablets. I remember when this happened, the time since I have been Black Pooping. I and Hemoglobin were great friends till such time I saw him making out with my girl on the hospital bed. It was a bloody mess. I throw up everytime I recall how he tried to explain that it was necessary for the girl to get well and have a Normal Life. I left him with my girl and he left me with Black Poop. I don’t like going out, I think that Paranoia bitch had something to do with it. I vaguely enjoy a mock solitude in my room, with an indifferent track playing in my desktop unless it croaks and stops...arrgh that bothers me. I am me in too many ways and too many of them are obsessive and protective, when the day ends it irks me because I haven’t ended. I hate this part when I have to go out and people stare at me. I have disorders in the brain which are friendly. I think Bipolar was a little disappointed when I told him about Low Confidence. I can still picture him brutally facing me and saying it within quotes that Low Confidence was a total Loser and I should concentrate on The Grand Things, such as Schizophrenia because I am destined to have exotic disturbances, not prosaic, beer bellied ones. I go to an Exotic Corporate Office to earn my bread and write Exotic Things to sell Exotic Things. I’ve travelled some places with my babes and brooms where Exotic has been warm and kind to me. I have had Exotic doing me favours and showering me with gifts. I have known Countries In a Single Leaf Of Tea and Suffering In The Rhyhm Of Dances Cut Short, just because I had Exotic around me. I have been easy on him and he on me, except his choice in women and people in general. I was Exotic’s guest once and he told me that there was no time to tour, and we needn’t. I watched as The Girl From The Tribe entered, shed her clothes and waited. I turned and saw Exotic breathing down my neck and marking the erogenous zones on the brown body. I stared and sank as he explained you couldn’t go wrong with her, she’s our pride! I anyway will now cross the street and you must know it confuses me. I can't understand roads or road signs in the same way bats do not understand the morning. I have a sense of distance because it tires me, of speed because it is the wind against my hair and acceleration, because it brings hopes and highs.  I cannot fathom why roads are not flowing and going wherever they want to and why there are destinations we must reach, why destinations are waiting so ridiculously where they have waited Yesterday and Yesterday and Yesterday.  I beg you not to believe anyone who tells you that I have gone to their door on a festival night to ask them about Peculiarity. I can vouch I haven’t done so. I can tell you of an old dying man who irritated me with a silly smile stuck on his face like a eight peg vomit to the bottle. I am sure these are Quirks and Peculiarities, and both are exotic and it suits me fine. I know that politicians will often ask you for the wheels to their wheelbarrow and you throw in some obscure Flower of The Hills, Some Rotten Old Lady Who Still Has Babies, Some Tea (ah!), A Dance Step Or Two That’s Swear To Zillionbeeps Authentic and some more. I try to convince myself that I have gotten into severer exotic things, to the soul, where politics cannot invade. I am disturbed about not being more disturbed. I think it’s mighty interesting to have a tortured soul, except that night when I had an unending dream and am not sure I’ve woken up at all. I had the the baddest day at office and I was thinking of the epiphanic words that would explain it on my Facebook wall when urgent sleep fell on me like a huge beam of burning wood on a forest sleeper. I saw a plush washroom, my shaving kit all arranged and pretty, the walls all lined with mirrors, mirrors I have always hated. I looked up and I got taken aback for a few seconds. I stood there trying to smile, as I naturally do in front of a mirror, any mirror, even those that are cracked and poisonous with scribbled abuses. I watched as nothing happened, nothing. I couldn’t see crease lines or the pupils lighting up and then I realised it was a mask. I immediately ventured to tear it down and did - tried to smile - didn’t happen - tore it down again - tried to cry - nothing - and again and again. I have developed a thing for the opaque and the simple after that, almost zen like. I am not necessarily the in-betweener, but habitually so, and damn it’s painful. I can tell you what it is like if you can tell me how it is to be blessed with immortality, that too on the condition that ‘thou shalt have a fish bone stuck in your throat forever.’ I am walking to office now and everything attacks me - the drizzle has torn up everything in shreds - the faces and the cars - the zip zap by and give me queer looks. I curse Paranoia under my breath and the rain falls harder. I open the Giant Black Umbrella, that titanic shield against everything, and I walk, I murmur a pagan prayer ...take me to the Corporate Office, will ya?. I think I think..that it’s always me and my and so much so…...SPLASH!...sonouva..the guilty car passes by and there is a little pothole filled with sparkling rainwater.

Epilogue

black umbrella

some blooms fine

I, me mine

I, me, mine

*  *  *

Sreemanti Sengupta enjoys a world of divided minds. She is an advertising copywriter from Kolkata, India, a poet, a struggling author, an e-mag editor, an elocutionist, previously published in various online journals such as Mad Swirl, Paragraph Planet, Certain Circuits, Bare Hands Poetry, Ppigpen and more including print anthologies in both English and her vernacular Bangla. She founded and runs The Odd Magazine celebrating alternate creativity here www.theoddmagazine.wix.com/thisisodd and blogs at www.weareideating.wordpress.com

*   *   *

The painting is by Zoe Nikitaki,  a visual artist - illustrator and a storyteller, who lives and creates in Greece. She also writes and illustrates books for children and for adults who keep on dreaming and want to reconnect with the inner child. Connect with her on www.zoenikitaki.com (under construction) 

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Why? a book review

by Pearson Oldmitz

Why? The Question that Could Save Your Life

Robert Brown, DDS

TriMark Press, 2014, 159pp

SO MANY THINGS come to mind. Why is what passes for television news so frustratingly awful? Why is winter so long?  That’s not the kind of reflection Robert Brown has in mind in this slender, read-in-one sitting book. Instead, he writes as a man who has had his own problems with the U.S. medical industry, and now encourages others to follow his lead and ask: why?  Why that medicine? Why that treatment?

Mostly, Brown’s thesis revolves around the very old, yet new again argument that we should eat more wisely and ask more questions of our medical caregivers.  His formula is simple to describe:  some foods cause inflammation, and inflammation causes disease. Eliminate the food and inflammation and you control and perhaps even cure the disease. He lists wheat, gluten, diary and other possible allergens, and includes an easy, no equipment needed, self-administered test for food allergies that I’ve never found in any other nutrition book.

What is interesting about this book,  in a market crammed with nutrition advice books, is what Brown’s book doesn’t do:  there isn’t a single recipe, no ten day or four week plan, no busy work and list keeping to distract the reader. What he does include are a few frightening examples of how medicine-as-big-and-profitable-business may be working against us, not for us.

If you buy Brown’s argument (and this reader does), the book gives enough information for you to begin to work on your own health plan. In that, this book is not really a self-help book, but more of a convincing essay that we need to be more active in our own health care and take responsibility for what goes down our own gullets…and to ask more questions. Always a good thing.

*   *   *  

Pearson Oldmitz is a short story writer and blogger. Friend him on FaceBook  https://www.facebook.com/pearson.oldmitz

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Carceral Circus

by Keri Blakinger

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN a 300-pound lady naked and covered in Vaseline? No? Me either; when I met Betty she was fully clothed, but her naked Vaseline escapade was legendary. In the real world, there aren’t many opportunities to see people walking around naked coated in Vaseline – but I didn’t meet Betty in the real world. I met Betty in prison.

Prisoners are often compared to animals in the zoo, which is a somewhat obvious comparison when one of them is running around naked, shrieking like a wild (and naked) banshee. In truth, though, prison is far more like a circus than a zoo. Many of the circus personalities are present: you have your fat lady, your bearded ladies, your acrobats, and even sword swallowers. Well, not sword swallowers. But there are many individuals who are very talented at “swallowing” a surprising amount of contraband with their vaginas. Prison is not your average circus experience – and a felony conviction is the price of admission – but, in the right light, it is a circus nonetheless. Here are the featured performers:

The Fat Lady: It is perhaps doing Betty a disservice to call her the Fat Lady; she was far more entertaining than your typical circus Fat Lady. She was, however, over 300 pounds. A dedicated alcoholic, Betty went to jail more frequently than some people do their laundry. She had a penchant for getting arrested either naked or half-naked and sometimes dropping her drawers – while handcuffed – to moon whichever unfortunate judge happened to be remanding her that particular day. Although Betty was fat in a literal sense, the key thing about the Fat Lady is that everyone wants to stare. Whether or not they are actually overweight, the Fat Ladies of prison fascinate and often horrify onlookers by doing unexpected and shocking things, things no one can help but watch. Maybe they decide to take a crap on the floor, maybe they have a screaming match with an imaginary person, maybe they decide to take a swing at someone for invading their dreams. Sometimes, this type of Fat Lady has mental health issues -- but sometimes it’s just an act. Usually the onlookers know, but not always. In either case, it is difficult not to watch.

Lion Tamer: The lion tamer has a difficult task, and one that could go horribly, horribly wrong -- just like those inmates who have sex with corrections officers during their prison stays. In some cases, it’s clearly against the inmate’s will; in others, the inmate is a willing party. In all cases, the inmate is in grave danger. If it’s voluntary, the inmate is in danger of being placed in solitary confinement. If it’s involuntary … the inmate is still in danger of being placed in solitary confinement. In fact, in the latter case, they are both in danger of being placed in solitary confinement for telling and of being placed in solitary confinement for being found out. In theory, reporting a sexual assault should not result in retribution. Perhaps predictably, in reality it does. Essentially, no matter what, the lion eats you.

The Bearded Lady: There is a whole coterie of bearded ladies in prison. See, on the outside, women with facial hair generally shave it, tweeze, or do anything in their power to get rid of it.  On the inside, though, some don’t bother. Why? Because they’re “gay for the stay.” So many women find prison girlfriends that it’s generated a phrase, an axiom of prison existence: “Gay for the stay, straight at the gate.” Of those who go gay for the stay, there are two basic types -- femmes and AGs, or aggressors. Femmes are, as the moniker implies, the girly types. AGs are the more butch lesbians. Although the majority were not transgender on the outside and do not identify as transgender on the inside, many insist on masculine pronouns during their prison stay and are generally referred to as boys. Because I had short hair during my circus tour, even C.O.s would refer to me as “he.”  I didn’t seem very masculine, though, so the short hair confused people and they would often asked, “Are you a boy or not?”

Human Cannonball: A man being shot out of a cannon clearly has little regard for personal safety. Essentially, the human cannonball just doesn’t give a shit. Just like the jailhouse lawyer. It may perhaps surprise those unfamiliar with the carceral circus to learn that jailhouse lawyering is such a dangerous job, but it certainly is. The exact repercussions can vary greatly from one facility to the next. In some facilities, the biggest risk is a little extra hatred from the guards. In other facilities, helping one’s fellow inmates with legal paperwork is a major rules violation and will result in solitary confinement if discovered. Despite this risk, there are generous souls who do it anyway.

My friend, Henrietta, did months in solitary for helping other inmates with legal paperwork. Repeatedly. She knew that she was breaking the rules. She’d been punished before. She didn’t care. Unlike a human cannonball, she didn’t engage in dangerous activities for the sake of entertainment. She did it because it was the right thing to do. People needed help and she had the skills. So she helped.

Acrobats: In the real circus, acrobats seem to defy the rules of gravity; in the carceral circus, they just defy the rules. It should come as no surprise that there are some inmates who refuse to follow the rules. They get high, they make out in the bathroom, they get in fights, they steal. They get away with it an awful lot of the time, but when they don’t, they turn into a contortionist.

Contortionists: Contortionism involves tying oneself in knots, sometimes while confined in a tiny box -- not unlike those inmates who land in solitary confinement. With traditional contortionists, crowds watch as the performer twists body in painful knots. With solitary confinement, the inmate watches as his or her own mind twists into painful knots as the days drone on and the contortionist loses touch with reality in a nightless, always-lit cell with no human contact.  

Tight-Rope Walkers: That’s everyone. Everyone in prison is doing a tightrope walk, every single day trying to maintain some shred of dignity or sense of self when you have regular strip searches and are identified only by a number. You teeter between a person and a piece of property; between choosing to stay sober and returning to drugs; between finding redemption and becoming a statistic.

Spectators: No show is complete without an audience. And who is the audience in this case? Why, the guards, of course. Ultimately any show is answerable to the spectators, and ultimately every inmate is answerable to the guards. Granted, in this case, the spectators have the ability to send the performers to solitary confinement, which is something they do with great regularity and for the most absurd of reasons.

Guessing the reason for someone being placed in solitary is as ridiculous as any carnival game. Except that carnival games may be a little fairer. In the carceral carnival, you can go to solitary for major things, like having a weapon or smuggling drugs, but you can also go to solitary for minor things, like having too many postage stamps or talking back or missing an appointment. Most solitary stays aren’t particularly short, either -- in state prisons, it’s usually a few months, but some people spend years or even decades in solitary confinement.

World’s Tallest Man: The World’s Tallest Man is above it all. This is what every inmate wants. Well, perhaps not -- some like the drama of being more directly involved in the show. With a little luck and a lot of resolve, any inmate can stay above it all. Stay in your bunk and read. Keep to yourself. Don’t give the guards any reason to remember your name. Stay out of trouble. Be anonymous. Almost no one does it perfectly -- you probably won’t be the World’s Tallest Man. But if you do your time the right way, you can at least be tall enough to stay out of the fray.

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Of course, the circus is not the real world. The circus is where people go to escape, whether it’s for a night or more permanently, such as if they’ve run off to join the circus. Prison is a circus that no one chooses to run off to – but it’s just as, or more, removed from the real world than any Barnum and Bailey affair.

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 KERI BLAKINGER is an ex-convict and a journalist living in upstate New York. She is a reporter for The Ithaca Times and has had bylines in The Washington Post, Business Insider, Salon, Alternet, and more. She is also an ardent prison reform activist, indiscriminate dog lover, and aspiring book hoarder. 





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