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PaperfingerMarch 2014 The Lost Issue

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PaperfingerMarch 2014 The Lost Issue

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Get Featured!

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Get Featured!

@paper�ngermagfacebook.com/paper�ngermagazine

paper�ngermag.tumblr.com/

Think you’ve got what it takes?We’re always looking for more artists to feature and more writers. Email us at jessicafrickdesigns@gmail.com to submit your poem, short story or to tell us about an artist you think deserves to be featured.

Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter for updates and to be alerted the �rst friday of every month so you don’t miss an issue!

Looking for advertising space?Email us at jessicafrickdesigns@gmail.com for pricing information.

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Kristiane WeeksAutobiographiaLiteraria

Poetry

28 Saragossa

Marcia Vojcsik30Michelle Clark34Ashley Peterson

Pauline Thier

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Meet Marcia Vojcsik

Shortstories

Kristiane Weeks

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FEATURE

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I am a little bit of everythingCarl Sagan calls it starstuffI call it fingered impressions into skin-

not just my father, dark marble unbreakableunbreakable meor my motherwe have the samePolish nose, lips, laughSorry mom, but I am the bayat the bottom of yourmagmatic steep (you’re a little toovolcanic for me)

I crave blueberry doughnuts,pools in thunderstormsWho gave me these?Was it you who made mehorrific, “desensitized” for thirty-years-past,mostly Italian, blood (Oh, Argento!)

the stars still keepme sweet, keep a smileyou can pour over pancakesjust give it a trytry to imagine youwithout your surroundingswithout your setting:St. Augustineyou’ve made me laxI moveI thinklike your lapping baylike your heavy summer air

Setting: IndianaI can take the girlout of the cornfieldI can try,rip cornstalks out of the girl,unearthroots from ribcagesyou can replant them anywhere

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but there’s nothing to be doneagainst Midwestern charm

Don’t thank me,thank Lake Effect snowgifted from Lake Michiganitself, thank the flatland consuming milesthat brown mass paired tastefully with months of gray skiesthere’s hundreds of farmers killing themselves over these colors every yearthese colors are all mine

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I am not a farmerbut some days I wonderif this loam isn’t meant for morethan seeds and scraping hands

plant my feet, my scarred ankle and armsevery ribboned curl on my headtake my darkest tears

I push them into soil, deeprefuse to nourish themhow are they still sproutingWhat fuels themand what fuels mewhat is my profession?I am not an academicI am more than a shaper of sentencesI am a preserver give me your wordsI can jar them, boil them, seal tightI am a magician, watchas I turn mere letters into Earth

and you are my gypsy manjuggling and predicting shades of the graying sky

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and you’re saying this is just the way it isand you’re sayingI can’t tell youyou won’t understand

but you can tell mebecause who really knowsanythingabout anythinganyways?

You can tell me starsare marshmallow fluffaliens built today’s technologyand I will not laughI’m not an encyclopediaand maybe an encyclopediaisn’t even an encyclopediabut maybe youare

why I keep coming backto youfor answers,coming back to soak upevery yellow and red particleemitting from you.

I want to explorepages inside your handsand read knowledge formedfrom the golden forest in your eyes.

You can tell me seagulls are bagelsI will listen, honestly,because your guess is as goodor betterthan mine and right nowI’m guessingyou and I are going to be comfortablesitting under blankets togetheruntil we figure out just what

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all this is all aboutAnd even when we don’t exactlyfigure it outat least I know youwill move the orange juiceto the front of the fridgeafter you drink from the cartonand I know thisbecause there’s never a glassin the sink and the dishwasheris full (or clean)

and at least you will know this doesn’t bother me,observing your remnantsshuffle around me whenyou’re away,the channel turned to HLN,the shower curtain left open,I need to feel these movementsundisturbed.

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Kristiane Weeks

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Is it Ponce De Leon’s birthday again? All I want is a cup of coffee from one of the dozens of cafes in the downtown square. But any of these choices are wrong on this day, another day in St. Augustine where most of the older residents were dressed up as Spanish conquistadors, another day where all of America was somehow on vacation and confusedly wandering the Colonial Spanish quarters of town, where the best coffee is. Ponce de Leon himself is admired next to the softened stone City Gate, waving as hordes of strollers and people asking each other which way the fort is squeeze by. A couple looking at a map of attractions bumped into the founder of St. Augustine and knocks his saber to the ground. Everyone takes pictures, including my coffee date, Holly. We decide coffee at home is probably safest option and turn back.

On the way back we pass coquina buildings and I remember the flyer on one of the wooden columns in the foyer of Ponce Hotel, better known as Flagler College; Celebrate the anniversary of

the first European expedition to Florida! I remember I’m supposed to avoid downtown at all costs on these days. This city is too compact for biweekly costume-laden celebrations. We pass Bed and Breakfasts and little vacation homes with cats hanging all over the low palms, and then I stop walking without realizing I’ve stopped because I’m enchanted by the only establishment in St. Augustine flaunting kaleidoscopically colorful stained-glass on the second and third floor windows and rich yellow siding that makes the house stand out like the sun emerging from cool clouds

It doesn’t take long before I need to take a moment, discover something new every time I pass. Luckily the house I rent for my four-year stay in St. Augustine is also on Saragossa Street, a charming Southern neighborhood two blocks away from Flagler College. My house is a sad chipping pastel green ranch-style with ants climbing up kitchen cupboards, performing daily rituals around the bag of sugar. Every day I trip over the Rhapis palm clusters stretching

across the front steps, and head down Saragossa with sweet scents of loquat and magnolia trees lining the road. Three minutes later I’m gazing beyond a thin iron fence at a display of potted ferns and short palms covering a front yard of white concrete. Sprinkled in every space that doesn’t hold a plant is some sort of glass bauble or statue (mostly of cats). There’s too many things to admire; glass sailboats in a window just below the highest peak of the house, a ceramic rabbit’s head by the front door.

On another coffee date with Holly, I ask if she remembers when I stopped in front of the yellow house a while back. She does, so I proceed to explain why this happened, telling her how vast the whimsy details of this house expand. I discover over thirty purple or blue glass bulbs sticking out of plant-pots filled with sand, on pedestals. There are wine and coke bottles displayed on prongs of rusted iron sculptures. Shiny vases I could hide in. There’s a ceramic sun smiling over the front door, tall stone cat statues accompanied with one of the many lounging cats of

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St. Augustine taking a break from sun-bathing in the shadow of the figures.

She responds, “This whole city is like that.”

“The whole city is not like that. The whole city is…” what is the word to describe St. Augustine? “Gimmicky.”

“Gimmicky?”

“I mean, we just watched a magician cut a twenty-dollar bill out of a tangerine on the side of the road.” My boyfriend volunteered for the act and wrote his name on a twenty, gave the twenty to the magician, the magician put it under his shoe and pulled a tangerine out of his pocket. He cut the tangerine open and there was the twenty with Charlie scribbled on it. He used the twenty to get these coffees.

I understand she’s talking about “Historical St. Augustine,” how most of this town is hanging on from the 1700s or earlier, hiding “fun facts” and “did-you-know’s” around every colonial corner. The rest of the city feels inauthentic. It’s full of attractions like the Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse that rang fake bells every thirty seconds

harmonizing with screeching recorded laughter of children.

We walk through Old Town Square to the cafe on a day that’s surprisingly not some holiday people are walking around costumed in colonial garb, women in bonnets and long dresses—in Florida!—carrying needlework, talking about the ghosts wandering the top floor of Harry’s Restaurant. We listen as she eyes her stitching, casually noting how the restaurant used to be a residence, built in the late 1700s, owned by a rich woman, Catalina. When she died, none of her nine children managed to inherit the estate and the Catalina Ghost has been terrorizing the third floor and the women’s restroom ever since to get her property back. The view of the Old Castillo Fort overlooking the Matanzas Bay inlet might be worth fighting for, even in death. One day while examining the house, I notice a plaque on a pocked clump of stone hiding under long fronds in pots. The house at 28 Saragossa Street was built in 1891, with fifty windows, twenty five rooms, and no ghosts, it reads. I discover the three-story canary-colored, white-trimmed Queen Anne style house was built for Henry Ritchie, who was “responsible for the Bird’s

Eye View sketch of St. Augustine.” 28 Saragossa used to be a house where a man could look through the Ponce De Leon Hotel, the Lightner Museum, the Old Drug Store, look through binoculars, examine life, and sketch all the elegant cobblestone roads, Spanish-style buildings, the exact way all the fingers of the Matanzas pushes its way over land. Every perfectly-angled road. But that didn’t matter now. Now, the porches and balcony porches are covered in dangling tinkling wind-chimes of all shapes and colors. There is a mosaic square next to the door, white and blue sea glass surrounded blue ceramic squares shaping a 28. Now, 28 Saragossa contains a vibrancy the city avoids through obsessing over the way St. Augustine used to be.

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It is appropriate to be featured in The Lost Issue of Paperfinger since I have been lost for the last year of my life. Poetry has been both my reliable roadmap to who I am, and a caricature of a roadmap which is not a roadmap at all, but the words “GIVE UP NOW” scribbled in crayon. What I’m saying is, being a poet is easy, but writing is hard. Hemingway said it best, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed.” Most people do not enjoy spending an afternoon bleeding, let alone bleeding enough to fill up pages and pages of paper, but a writer must. For a while, I stopped bleeding. I splashed Kool-Aid on a page and pretended. This only depressed me and left stains I’m still scrubbing out. The emotional release I felt from writing was gone with this new heartless work, the words no longer danced off the page, they sat and pouted. I realized I can’t escape the truth about writing: I need to bleed. Writing is not powerful unless powerful emotions are expressed, and it was only once I acknowledged my struggles that I was able to write through them.

-Marcia Vojcsik

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Aubade for the Lover I Never Touched

Your skin would be soft. I know this. You would fitaround all the right contours, folded neatlyover me like an envelope, nestled head over heartlistening to the frantic tumbling of my nerves. Know this,I would be nervous. I would trace the outline of your formwith shaky hands – an outline I have traced and retracedin my mind since the day we met. I would giggle at allthe wrong times and interrupt your small talk with moans.I know this: you would like it. You would gasp in surprise,synchronize with my rhythm – a tandem synapse explosion.We would collapse with absolute clarity, you would wonderwhy you didn’t see it sooner, wonder: what on Earth took us so long?

Ah, but you must know this by now:you will never know this.

Acrostic for Ganest II (Om Ganesaya Namah)

Once upon a time I believed in a god, maker of the Christian heavens and secular earth butgone are those loitering days in the garden of souls and sweet tempting fruit.

Now, a decision I must make: enter permanently orstay forever outside confused about my taste buds.You see, the fruit in that garden only taste as good as its advertisements and all the lord’s servants and all the clergymen couldnot convince this little Christian liar.

After wondering through four years of wasteland I begin maintaining my garden within,accepting the love of the universe, Om Namah Shivaya, honoring the divinity residing inside all along.

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[i want to be your dirty hippie bride]

i want to be your dirty hippie brideliving in our dirty hippie trailergrowing our own food eating it crunchyraw caveman style under the starsplaying music for tips reading palms ofnaïve tourists oh i see you have trouble inyour life we squander time onlyresource we care about is whatkeeps us alive we don’t own clocksor worry about waking up for thatoffice job you hate pretending tocare about the economy toastwith unfiltered water to being freeto being in love to being alive

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A late night rescue, sorry I missed your birthday party, sorryhe ruined my birthday, awkward new ex-boyfriend, awkward newex-roommate, Irish car bombs, hookah, battling the bard, poetic ambition,lose weight by replacing meals with coffee, a new frontier, a new haircut,a familiar enemy, ukulele at the dead end pub, the slutty phase, the fish,welcome back, you can show yourself out, oh hello, friends with benefits,hard drive dive, hookah often, the big fight, I’m sorry, Khalessi, tres leche,Stockholm syndrome, tourism, why can’t money actually grow on trees?unrequited, requited but briefly, lack of showers, peppermint bubble baths,jealousy, admiration, anger, goodbye, retail, cigars, wine, fist fights, fireworks,I miss being happy, Oh, Canada, last minute perfection, Christopher Walken,the Incredible Hulk, un-fuckable, sea gulls, kitten, oh, hello, friends withbenefits take two, delinquent hot tubbing, never satisfied, short but stillsweet, goodbye, together again, goodbye for good, 2 am texts, grease stainsand greasy smells, Queen Elizabeth, Professor V, yoga, coffee, beer,insomnia, hookah, Magic the Gathering, Natura Café, the Jilly bean,hospital confessions, the final break, Princess Bubblegum, Buggy,questionable work etiquette, Lord Ouroboros arrives, No Cheat November,the slutty phase take two, the stray cat, hello, trouble, Facebook love confessions,Mellow Mushroom, Thor, beer, the dry spell, Yellow Jacket Press, the party,snakes make the best wingmen, new roommate, seventh commandment violation,the wake-up call, black smithing, cheap champagne, Ruby, oh, to be a kid again.

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Vessel Haikus

One might be a cupOpen to the world’s fillingBut I’ve been long sealed

Skin like porcelainHard with a catacomb heartBoth bright and dark

When I have been brokeLet me spill but hide yourselfIt will not smell sweet

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What To Expect When There Are No More Expectations

There is a mental moment, a move into new territory, that toto we’re not in Kansas anymore realization, leaning up against the soda shelf at the jiffy, starring at the tomato basil lays, you will acknowledge an easy acceptance of death, a moment known mostly to self-aware 90-year-old’s as the bed they lay upon begins to chill, If Micheal reached out his hand, If the clouds began a celestial turn down service preparing you for heavenly rest, if you bit the bullet while kicking the gravedigger’s bucket of dust, you would be okay with it, sore jaw, jammed toed and all, and you’ll leave the chips for the promise of a chacotaco, bite into it in the parking lot cursing with cubby bunny cheeks, it’s odd soggy staleness for deception and disappointment, you eat half of it.

Hack Writers

They’re a few million like me, in painfully small towns, high priced private schools, pews and local bars the whole world round. Uninspired scribblers, chicken scratching at significance. Second rate scholars, spending too much time licking their wounds and not enough of it exploiting them. Victims of the doubtful years, we write only when it kills us that we’re wasting time. Dreamers who lack the drive. Motivation and deterrent, Fear, is the name of the double edge sword we use to conduct our self mutilation. Penance for being undiscovered. Tending toward the grossly sentimental. We’ve won no awards, or hearts. We think we ought to pursue other things, but we can only continue to self deprecate.

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A.

In Texas there’s a city called Abernathy.1882 brought them a streak of lightfollowing what might have been a marble rolling across the atmosphereas if it were on a glass table.

Somewhere along the way it found a holeand shot out with such force and brightnessthat the state of Texas thought nighthad become day.

It shook the entire state when itbounced off the earth, broke in two, and finallycooled in the dirt.

The marble was lost in the desert, only five miles from Abernathy.

B.

…and I flipped past the thick yellowcover, yellow pages, business pages,until I hit white searching for A…B…E…R…but the only Abernathys were Abernathy, Kimberly L andAbernathy, Brian D

My hands, too small to hold a grapefruit without gripping each side tightly didn’t realize that phone books only covered certain districts, and not the entire world. So they kept flipping. Flipping and hoping to run across Abernathy in maybe the business pages, or even the blue hued dentist section,but Abernathy, Devin, my father, did not live in South Bend’s phone book pages.

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E.

By 21 I had hoped to be over Abernathy, Devin, but no matter how fara meteor travels, even if it hits the earth,a part of it still belongs to space.

R.

…and after searching with my small handsfor years,…and after hoping that Abernathy, Devinhad his reasons for letting me go,…I find that the Texan Meteorite was not the only starto fall on this planet. Lost. Forgotten.

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Twenty-Three hours

A hot, sweaty summer evening.My sister and I are takingdown the laundry, folding it.The phone rings. Her face freezes.We’re joking around—just watchit being about mom.

As if we already knew.We have to come over.

There’s mom.Laying on her bed, only wearingpanties. It is too hotfor anything else.The bed is stainedyellow, like her.

Her eyes are gazingsteadily, but into nothingness.She tells the doctor the painis minimal. That’s so her.All I wonder is if the doctorcould prescribe an A/C.

I miss the doctor’s verdict, but momgives me hers.She is done.She is dying.

I enter survivor mode.

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I barely slept last night but I am getting up early to take my nine year old brother to school because his dad has to wait for the nurse and someone has to tell his teacher his mom is dying on the first day of school and I have to make sure he understands too.

He says he does.

When I come back my grandmother and aunt are at my mom’s house and we all want to do something to make ourselves useful so we move all the clothes from their cut-short vacation of the way to make sure the hospital bed, her death bed, will fit in her room because she wants to stay home, but when that’s done there’s nothing else we can do, but wait, standing around and not really talking or looking at each other. We just wait for something else to do,

or death.

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And then there you areat the pharmacy. Buying liquidmorphine for your mother‘cause she’s too stubbornto take her pills.She’s giving up

When you get backto the house, there’s nothingto do. So you go home and wait.Secretly hoping she’s goingto be better.You’re in denial.

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I’m having dinner withdad. Decided on greasy,comforting take-out.The smell of the bag of patatis heavenly, but abruptlydisrupted—my sister’s calling.

I’m ordered to come to mom’sright now. It’s not good.I let my tears run. Salting the patatin my hands. I don’t careabout my audience. My motheris dying.

Dad hugs me and tells meto take the patat with me. Someonemight be hungry.When I finally get there, the foodstill warm. I’m told I amtoo late.

She just gave inten minutes ago.The patat still warmin the bag.

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Lullaby

The moon ispeering,the moon ispeeking.

It is quietoh soquietin the room.

Coincidence does notexist.Not now, notin silence.

You would haveliked to staywith us longer,in the room.But it’s quietoh so quietin the room.

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Some kind of peace

my mother died yesterdayyet I feel so calm.upset, heartbroken,but at peace.the screaming has passed.tears quietly come and go.blood flows smoothlythrough my body,no rush. no heart racing. I thinkI am fine.there is comfort in my heartsoothing meit’s ok

wait—

is this cloud nine in hell?

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Thank you to all my incredible writers!Think you’ve got what it takes to write something for us?Submit your stories and poems to jessicafrickdesigns@gmail