Kristi Conley-Brockie

Response

Olivia Olivia

Inspiration piece

Don’t Be Sad In Lisbon

Don’t be sad in Lisbon. Don’t be sad you might be forgotten. Don’t be sad no one you know is here. Don’t be sad no one you love lives in Portland anymore either. Don’t be sad the streets are narrow and you are always willing to let someone else use the sidewalk but no one offers you the same courtesy. Don’t be sad you live alone, it’s good – you have your own fridge and your own shower. Look at the view. Look at the ocean, or the river. Look at the river. They said it was the Tejo. They said this is where all the ships left to conquer the world. Imagine all the lobsters they must have eaten on their way. Imagine the king killing the prince’s girlfriend, Ines. I don’t remember the king’s name. I remember how he made me feel, I thought man no one would ever do that for me. No one would ever make the whole village kiss my corpse’s hand. But don’t be sad, don’t be sad in Lisbon. You paid entirely too much money to be here. You have to learn things, you have to remember things.

Remember the austerity measures. Remember how the public pisinas were all shuttered, and according to locals their drained cement bowls stand alone in the heat, graffitied then forgotten. Remember the friendly look on the dog’s faces, the way they look like they also probably don’t speak English, but it is possible they speak Portuguese.

Don’t get lost walking the narrow streets of Alfama, don’t get lost looking for the beach. Forget your sorrows, the sun will be up soon. Tell plenty of jokes. Laugh like an American. Think of Mister Pessoa. Think of Ofelia, what is was like to love a man who thought he was 80 different people. Was it a joke then, to love a poet? Did people laugh? Did her parents think this was a great idea? When he broke her heart, did everyone say “we told you so”? Was she happy to throw his shit out, or did she keep some of it until she died? What did they eat together, I wonder. I wonder what she thought of the tile, what she thought of the thin streets, I wonder if people made place for her when she walked along next to them. I wonder if she too had to force a place for herself in the world, push aside others and say hey look here I’m walking. I wonder if she swam, if she ate shrimp, if it was ever hot like this. I wonder if her mother had to warn her about Mister Pessoa. “Beware black magic, beware flattery, beware a man who has to be 80 different people when you just need one man. Next thing you know you’re only dating one of them, and the others wander the streets at all hours. You say, don’t you love me? And he says, certainly I do, but my heteronym wanted to touch the neighbor’s thighs.” How could she have helped, looking at the water and thinking, I’mma leave this man, all 80 of him.

Don’t think about Ofelia, think about Pessoa. Think about his statue on the way home. Think about his leftover coffee cup that’s still on the table from a century ago.

Don’t worry yourself by looking at the sea. Sleep well.

Don’t be sad in the middle of the night, when you’re hungry and you want to pet your cat. Don’t let anyone know that sadness is a featureless state, it doesn’t matter where you are. Be careful in the ocean. They say the rip tides here are strong. They can tear you right off the shore, and you might never come back.

Kristi Conley-Brockie
Feather and Whorl
Pen pencil on paper
Response

DONDUKOV BOULEVARD
By Gabriel Shanks
Inspiration piece

No more hiding. We can fall away, slip from sight,
even in the middle of the city,
and if you ask me what my fondest memory is,
I will tell you of leaves and bricks in a road halfway round the world,
where the wind tastes of long-dead empires,
and even if our arms are broken at the ends,
I will step onto its bricks and call for you,
in music you have never heard before,
and you will be yourself as you have never known,
watching the stars slide into place,
and nothing will ever be wasted again,
not even the breath you exhale,
and we will not care if we are followed,
because we will run down these roads,
and history will coat us in fur and feathers,
living in pauses and stutters of speech,
until the pavement takes pity and teaches us words,
and the sunlight will show us the next corner,
and we will need only tomorrow.

Kristine Conley-Brockie

Response

Nick Lotze

Inspiration piece

Antiseptic Sunshine

November 22, 2010

December 1983 saw a terrible crash, a ten car accident caught on tape by passerby’s turning disaster into a finely shot craft and the cynics couldn’t help but laugh, though some left aghast; shining lights into night searching for life like the homeless in the dumpsters for treasure in between the trash.

Eyes straining on a past like an ear pressed with a glass against the wall of a house made of photographs and with that a child born into this world with a harvest that yields less wheat than chaff.

Days gone by living a life not blessed but instead mired in distress, buried by regrets already before his first breath, the light in a child’s eyes extinguished like moth’s drawn to cover the flames of a candle burning at each end but still blinded by the antiseptic shine of the lights hanging high as his first artificial sunrise.

His thoughts, embers that glimmer, self reflecting on a remiss future as it gets dimmer, nothing in life sacred, judgment before those who’d cast the first stones, feeling cold almost naked, trying to use written words as a blanket whilst measuring the level of decayment of all his relationships, searching for reason why reason did fail as each day turns into night before slipping through a child’s fingertips so frail.

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Kristi Conley-Brockie

The Pie That Went to my Thigh

Pencil and PhotoShop

Response

Why Did I Eat That Pie?
by Lisa Eldridge
Inspiration piece

Why did I eat that pie?
It went directly to my thigh.
Not the left one, but the right.
I wish I had stopped at one bite.

Why did I drink that gin?
Did I think it would help me stay thin?
Why did I snort that coke?
To be friends with the glamorous folk?

Why did I smoke that joint?
Because…maybe…uh, what was my point?
Why did I date that guy?
He dumped me and that made me cry.

So why did I date that guy?
And why did I eat that pie?

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying
or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or
artist is strictly prohibited.

Light at the End of the Tunnel
Kristi Conley
Response

The Perils of Optimism
by Lisa Eldridge
Inspiration

Bitsy Schmendelsohn floored the stiff gas pedal on her 1994 Dodge Bladder. She was careful to rest her left foot against the peeling vinyl of the driver-side door so as not to lose her lavender satin slingback shoe out of the large hole in the rotten footplate. Bitsy and Sweetie, her ancient, incontinent grandmother, were speeding east on the highway, in what was beginning to seem like a pointless effort. Bitsy was trying to reach the small city of Dogtown in time for the religious conversion ceremony of Chet, her second ex-husband. Bitsy had promised Chet she and Sweetie would both be there to support him as he finally achieved his months-long dream of becoming a Futilist.

Things were about to get a little hinky.

(The previous day, following the pre-ceremonial brunch and group circumcision, Bitsy had set out in her rattletrap, oil-spewing Bladder to drive the 87 miles to pick Sweetie up from The Home. Sweetie had always had a soft spot in her heart for her grandson-in-law, now her ex-grandson-in-law. Sweetie liked to say, “If that good-for-nothing Chet ever actually finishes one thing he’s ever started, I’ll have seen everything and be ready to die happy.” Because Bitsy had run into a bit of bad financial luck in the last few months, she was hoping to make a few bucks by pawning the jewelry Sweetie had promised her in the will. Anything she could do to hasten Sweetie’s demise seemed like a good bet, so she had gassed up the Bladder with some anticipation.)

Now, Bitsy steered the car down the road with her knees while she held a cigarette in one hand and applied her false eyelashes with the other. She cursed loudly when a hot ash settled on her rouged cheek. Bitsy had to get to Chet before anything went wrong! Without Bitsy beside him for moral support, Chet would be beside himself, which was not a place Bitsy ever wanted Chet to be if he were going to go through with the ceremony so Sweetie could witness it and be satisfied enough to finally kick the bucket and leave her meager nest egg to her beloved and insolvent granddaughter. Grimly, Bitsy hunched over the wheel and pressed her foot down as hard as it could go. The Bladder coughed, weakly, and sped up slightly.

All of a sudden, something felt…wrong. Bitsy blinked at the light filtering through the dirty windshield. The light turned peach, then gold, and then settled on a diaphanous non-color. The radio blatted discordant noise, whether music or words she could not have said. Bitsy glanced at the ancient, snoring woman in the seat next to her, and panic overwhelmed her as she realized she was sitting next to a stranger. She pulled the car to the shoulder and stopped it with a screech of brakes. She threw open the door and staggered away from the car, falling to her knees a few feet behind the vehicle.

(Sweetie could probably have warned Bitsy that something like this was bound to happen. The women in Sweetie’s family did not cope well with special occasions. Sweetie had herself been late to her own wedding because she’d suddenly been overcome with the vapors and had to be placated with several shots of Old Thunder Spleen before she finally agreed to stumble, mincingly, down the aisle to almost 3 years of wedded bliss (followed by 20 years of divorced bliss). At the funeral for Sal, Sweetie’s ex-husband and Bitsy’s grandfather, Bitsy’s own mother had been caught in the coat closet with her dead father’s business partner before, as Sweetie liked to remind her, the body was even cold. This was literally true, as Bitsy’s grandfather had died in a suspicious fire that had burned, mysteriously, for over a week.)

Sweetie had always suspected that Bitsy’s real father had not been Mervin Schmendelsohn at all but rather her late husband’s business partner, Dr. Jasper Terwilliger, DDS. Sweetie was sure she saw the resemblance between the dentist and her granddaughter: it was something about her teeth when Bitsy neglected to cover her mouth while eating saltwater taffy.

So, here it was, less than an hour until Chet’s rebirth as a Futilist, and Bitsy was crouched in the dirt, staring in consternation at the cars whizzing by her. The spontaneous amnesia had returned.

(This always happened when she let herself get too optimistic.)

Kristi Conley
Response

Hard Numbers
by Lisa Eldridge
Inspiration piece

I was waiting in the express line at Hot Nuts and Elegant Foodstuffs. The store still has that name, even though I believe it has not sold hot nuts since the 1950s, at least. Truth be told, it is no longer much of an elegant establishment, if it ever truly was, but they have a good liquor selection and some nice tongue cutlets come the Autumnal Equinox.

I was nervously counting my items. There were either seven items or eleven, depending on whether I counted the apples individually or as one unit. If the apples had been in a bag, naturally I would not have worried, but they were not in a bag and so I could not stop staring down at them, five large American Dipshits, unbagged and unfettered and rolling around on the conveyor belt. I knew I should have put them in a bag. In the Express Line, There Are Rules. Ten items or less (fewer)! Ten items or less (fewer)! Even a child knows the Express Line Rule is sacrosanct. Yet, there sat my apples, in amongst the other sundries and geegaws I had need of, mocking propriety and adding up my total grocery order to more, not less (fewer) than ten items. I had to admit it to myself: five apples, loose, equal five apples; five apples in a bag equal one bag of apples. I believed then, as I still believe, this fact to be incontrovertible.

Why then, you ask, if you (I) were (was) so determined (as a right-thinking American) to follow the edicts of the high-end supermarket lines, had you (I) not placed your (my) five apples into one plastic bag and ended your (my) conundrum? Ah, ha! You might well ask. Oh, you are asking? Well, I will tell you.

There had been plenty of plastic bags, a plethora of plastic bags, available in the produce department. But procuring one would have meant risking an interaction with the produce department manager, Price Preston, who for reasons known only to himself always stood directly in front of the plastic-bag dispenser while surveying his domain.

Thus my dilemma. In order to procure a produce bag for my five apples, I would have had to approach said produce manager, Price Preston, to obtain the item. Price Preston, my former lover. My past paramour, Price Preston. My princely past paramour, Price Preston. Well, you get the picture. We have a history.

Of course I was over Price Preston! Our whole thing, our old fling, was water under the bridge, onions over the oubliette. Our wife-carrying trophy was draped in spiderwebs in the falling-over shed, and if I had remembered to put it out at the curb on household waste day, I would almost definitely have done so already. But it was still awkward when we ran into each other. If forced to speak, we always greeted each other with fauxthusiasm, but the tension was palpable. Preston Price always captured and held my gaze a little too long, and this is a small town and I did not need people gossiping about me more than they already did, Lord knows.

So I had my five apples, smoked oysters in a can, three bottles of drain opener, dried tarragon, and a fifth of Lipschitz Pirate-Spiced Rum. A total of eleven items, I was forced to admit. I brooded and fumed. Damn that Price Preston, I fumed furiously. Still causing me grief almost 20 years after the embers of our blazing Summer Fling had abruptly cooled. How dared he!

If I had had the foresight to bring my own plastic bag, my life might have taken a very different turn that day. But I was standing in the ten items or less (fewer!) line with eleven items, and the clerk was that strange dog-woman who always gave me the stink eye whether or not she had a reason. Her stink eye was on me now.

I am not, by nature, a shrinking violet. All the checkout lines were long that day, and I had places to be and little time to waste. But flouting the ten items or less (fewer!) law might have proved the tip top of a slippery slope to loss of couth. I would not stand accused of undermining the “elegant” in Elegant Foodstuffs.

So, with great ruefulness and care, I repacked my basket and moved two lanes over to a regular line, behind a short, stocky man with a heaping cart, which he was slowly unloading. As his hotdogs and canned tuna and pimentos moved smoothly down the belt, I unpacked my basket. Sighing softly, and settling in for a long wait, I picked up an issue of Celebrity Death Watch Weekly to peruse while I waited.

Do you know the feeling that sometimes comes over you when the world holds its breath? The tingling in the air, the sudden rush of energy through your solar plexus? It can signal danger, or it can signal something wonderful. As I placed the last apple on the belt, the man in front of me turned around; saying nothing at first, he placed his hand over mine, over the apple, over the conveyor belt. It was he. It was Price Preston.

“Still buying the American Dipshits, Delphinia?” When he spoke, it was in the soft yet deep throaty tones that I still heard in my dreams.

I tried to speak, but my throat was suddenly dry. I coughed, discreetly, and thought about removing my hand from underneath his. “Hello, Price Preston. Yes, I do enjoy a daily American Dipshit. I always have and probably always will.”

“You know,” he murmured, leaning toward me and staring into my eyes, “we don’t get much call for that variety anymore. But I have a standing order for a dozen, so we’ll always have them in stock for you.”

I must have blushed a deeper red than the apples themselves, because then he smiled, showing his white, unusually small teeth. With a grand gesture, he removed the rubber rod that separated our orders, and handed the clerk his credit card. Before I could protest, my items were bagged and paid for and in his cart, and Price Preston was leading me out of Hot Nuts and Elegant Foodstuffs, into the future and the bright light of day.

Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.