("Deliberation" by Mario Sanchez Nevado)
While these are only two tiny fragments from an overall piece, I've included the link below for anyone interested in reading the full story. The full piece is also available in my debut collection called "Scaring the Stars into Submission," which you can find here: http://amzn.to/2j5053B
I am the rock face, the culmination of the world's age, the sediment of eons pressed together by time, movement, and gravity. I am that which breaks the skin and scrapes the bones. I have tasted generations of blood, kept the remnants in pockets of amber and solitude. I have seen the sweeping away of civilizations, the propagation of new ones, themselves swept away and replaced a hundred times over. The lessons never change; the people never learn.
I am the erosion, the unseen forces of wind and water nibbling away at the edges. I am the drown and the suffocation, the choke and the asphyxiation. I am the weightlessness of tides; I am the unstoppable force of displacement. I am the pebble moved from great heights, I am the divot carved in earthstone. I am the scree and detritus blown across hardpan, I am the whisper you never truly see, never truly hear.
I am the song, the spirit, and the silence. I am that which moves between worlds effortlessly – the first breath of life and the final exhalation in death. I am the music of the newly birthed child’s scream, the proclamation of life’s arrival. I am the notion, the idea, the halo and the horns. I am the sound of leaves on limbs in the wind. I am the sound of clouds passing overhead. I am the tune the sun hums as it sinks below the horizon. I am the cacophony of starlight, the chaos of a silent winter day. I am the wisp of snowflake falling onto tongue, I am the discordant tune of thaw in the spring; I am melt.
The grandmother lit candles in the windows to keep the memories at bay. She kept the fire stoked in the hearth to keep the ghosts from leaving. She set the kitchen sink on fire, kept it roaring while she slept, for fear the nightmares would creep up from the darkness through the pipes and finally steal her away. She soaked the door jambs and hinges with gasoline, lighter fluid, grain alcohol, gun powder. She singed the hems of all her dresses as they hung in the closet, hoped the char and ash would make her a protection charm against the things she could not see, but hovered around her every hour of the day.
The electric blankets were turned up high, mottled and blistered her skin as she slept, but she would wake in the morning and that was proof that it was right. She would sleep in fire, she would dream of fire, she would walk, awake, with thoughts of fire and smoke and feel her lungs close up in fear of the things the fire kept away.
She made necklaces of matches, earrings from the flammable tips. She hung wind-chimes made of old grenade pins and hung them around the porch to ward off the beasts she saw in dreams. She made lamps of propane tanks and welding equipment, took baths in paint thinner and sulfur.
Some notes from the editor in the introduction:
"The apocalyptic landscape of Adam “Bucho” Rodenberger’s “Trauerspielen (Mourning Plays)” is more reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia than of Robert Browning’s or T.S. Eliot’s waste lands. All is not leached of color. All is not puckered with blight even if bird squawks fall preternaturally silent, even if fish have mysteriously abandoned water as if raptured without human notice.
Even when annihilation is not believed to be imminent, when planets are not in the process of colliding as they do in von Trier’s film, we (human thinkers and tinkerers) tend to preoccupy ourselves with the ephemeral nature of our own and our environment’s existence. As Joan Colby observes in the title to her contribution to issue 4 of Glint Literary Journal, “Everything Is Tenuous.”
But I begin this introduction with Rodenberger’s “plays” since his text exemplifies a certain concern with interstitiality that runs throughout our issue’s contents. What do I mean by this word, which spell check insists on underlining red, as if to rebuke me for indulging a lexicon of indeterminacy?
Interstitial means “in between.” It is also synonymous with liminal, a word that is often employed to describe threshold moments, twilight states of mind. At this point, I would like to direct my reader’s attention to the website for the Interstitial Arts Foundation where s/he may find a virtual compendium of defining essays on this subject. Here, multimodal artists may find theoretical support and/or inspiration for that creative, transgressive desire to defy convention, regardless of medium.
In one contribution to the IAF website, Barth Anderson explains the nature of interstitiality in a way that may prove helpful to Glint readers who encounter subjects and strategies that don’t abide by expectations. (This background may prove useful, for example, to orthodox Christians confronted with Frederick Pollack’s “Late Find at Nag Hammadi,” in which the Second Coming manages to upset even the devil’s preconceived notions.) According to Anderson’s IAF essay,
Interstitial art should be prickly, tricky, ornery. It should defy expectations, work against them, and in so doing, maintain a relationship to one or more genres, albeit contentiously. There’s a sense of playful disregard on the interstitial artist’s part, seeking not merely to create something new, but something that jars. The interstitial artist converses with that viewer who recognizes what genres are being addressed but who is seeking a different experience from the one they might have been anticipating.
Although I am comfortable placing Rodenberger’s “Trauerspielen” among the fiction links in our contents list, I’m less comfortable calling it a short story. Perhaps, I should call it a longer-than-usual prose poem that alternates between paragraph and stanza. We do have a number of relatively short prose poems (identified as such by their creator) in issue four. These selections (Kim Peter Kovac’s “Radium Girls,” “Gazelle Music,” and two of his “Three Poems from ‘Out of Robben Island’”) would not be out of place in well-known anthologies like David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present.
Other contributions may appear more conventional. Andrew Genskow’s “Gravediggers,” for example, seems to fall rather neatly into the genre of the Southern Gothic only I kept sensing traces of the western dime novel as I read—despite the absence of horses and Stetsons. Surely, HBO’s Deadwood and Stephen King’s The Gunslinger are skulking beneath the surface of Genskow’s gator country.
Although interstitiality encompasses many vagaries of genre and form, I consider it a predominant theme of this issue’s artistic endeavor. In the philosophical language play of Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé’s poems, organism is composed with such “a multiplicity,” with “organs so diffuse / it seems lost in its miasma,” becoming “an animal soup,” where “cells like plankton” contain so much potential they could become “a punctured lung / or a cut ear or a lock of hair for a wig / or that wattlebird tail feather.” It is not surprising that bodies should become sites of instability.
And, thus, we come back to Rodenberger’s apocalyptic text where mysterious graffiti on a concrete wall informs: “This is where you became something else,” and, then, “This is where we tried to stop you.” The reader does not know who the “we” might be, but she notices the implied failure. Metamorphosis is not impeded, not defeated.