Month: August 2014
Ménage
by Kevin McLellan
M. finally procured one that fateful day of compliments and smiles. Was it charm? They were all dressed the same, but it was the one in front of the fire station filling the community dog bowl with water that caught M’s eye. Yes, M. acquired a fireperson which M. named F. Soon after F. moved into M.’s sizeable ranch the ceiling started to sag.
M. was relieved to have someone take care of the cleaning and especially after dinner, You look strapping! F. ignores the comment and turns away from the kitchen sink, You need to return me to the station where I belong. M. responds, If one works more so with things, rather than with people, then one is also a thing. You are a thing, and you belong to me. F. blankly looks at M., returns to the neutral dishes in the sink.
M. watches F. brush and floss in the medicine cabinet mirror, You look so fine and delicate. F. turns off the tap, I belong to the fire station. M. follows F. into the bedroom and then watches the staring in the full-length mirror while turning down the waterbed covers. The waterbed makes an undulating sound. Why won’t you look at me like the way you look at yourself? F. doesn’t respond as M. sets the alarm clock for 7:00 a.m. and extinguishes the handsome lamp.
F. wears turnout gear to bed, sleeps on top of the bed, sleeps facing the wall. The wallpaper repeats the same pink flower. They are equally spaced apart. It is as if these same flowers are floating, but they will never touch.
Kevin McLellan is the author of the chapbooks Shoes on a wire (Split Oak, forthcoming) runner-up for the 2012 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent or forthcoming poems in journals including: American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review Online, Puerto del Sol, Sixth Finch, Western Humanities Review, Witness and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge MA, and sometimes teaches poetry workshops at URI.
In your cover letter, you referred to “Ménage” as “a tiny piece of prose that attempts to explore gender-neutrality and objectification.” Would you please elaborate? The lamp is handsome. The flowered wallpaper is (considered) feminine. This tiny piece of prose attempts to break down sex and gender stereotyping — by not appropriating a sex to each of the characters and by assigning gender labels to objects while also incorporating things that have certain associations or allegiances to a particular gender — and explore objectification, not unlike the process of building a fire to put out a fire. The dishes are neutral. Amy Ash has an MFA from New Mexico State University and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Kansas. A Pushcart nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize, her work has been published widely in journals and anthologies, including Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Harpur Palate, Salamander, Prick of the Spindle, and The Best of Kore Press 2012. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Acme Book of Love. Her full-length collection, The Open Mouth of the Vase (winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Book Award), will be released in January. How does Amy Ash end up writing a triptych about fire? Every spring in the Flint Hills region of Kansas, not far from where I live, controlled burns light the landscape, promoting regrowth of native plants and warding off invasive species. As someone who grew up in southern Ohio, I find these proscribed burns fascinating, haunting, and beautiful. My father was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer around the same time of year, and I sped back to Ohio for his surgery. These events became conflated in my mind—the images swirling and overlapping, always at the forefront of my thoughts. Recasting these images, this story, in triptych form is an attempt to make sense of things, to impose order on that what seems so uncontrollable. Like cancer. Like fire. by Maureen AlsopNot Flower but Fire
by Amy Ash
Love, Transcription (4 of 5)
Looney #1
by Benjamin Cartwright
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD