Poetry: Caitlin Bailey

Repatriated

Shaky hands, costal bang. Blood poured from
a hole, repatriated to heart. Compensation is
an ugly word, creased skin pulled from an orange.
I gather small fish in a cup, my finger lightning
rod, little wobble. The room begins to smell
like juniper, dull coins. Stillness comes
in a thing like you, curled at my waist.
What I’ll do to protect this splendor.
I open like a lock, love the sturdiest verb.

Blood Garden

You are five and wicked with need. A dandelion
seed blown through the house. The grandmother
closet, change deep in the belly, the dress.
You colonize the too-big shoes, easy ingénue.
Thirsty at the top of the stairs, lapping
sugar water, silky tongued and brave until

one shoe catches the other, the smell of olives,
the way down. And so tumble two stairs, crush
glass beneath your body to slice the soft meat
of your fist open, a hush unraveled in red
across the carpet. Your skin a white flap,
a red plane. To you blood is a garden
where your future is sown, the red arc
a bright harbinger of so many wounds.

All rights reserved to Caitlin Bailey. 

Poetry: Gregory Lawless

Getting Lost on the Back Roads of Pennsylvania, While Trying to Find His Parents’ New House, the Author & His Now-Ex-girlfriend Stop by the Side of the Road & Consider What to Do Next

It is night. I shut my eyes

& they open again.

They are lost
the way a bead

of water gets lost
on a hot mirror.

They itch from the faint
needle fall of stars.

I aim the flashlight
at the map, & giant moths
crash into highways

& lakes, like monsters
in Japanese
horror flicks.

My little circle
of light looks

to the tiny
unseen inhabitants

of this paper Pennsylvania

like a tornado
of sun: they burn apart

& tell me to go
home. I am

home, I tell them,
which is why I am lost. I need their help

getting down
from this ladder
of night, & they won’t. I need to drive

through the hurt

forest & wind up
at a 24-hour donut shop

where I can sugar myself
and coffee myself

& pretend this country
is not the enemy
of the dawn. Men

live here & ride their snowmobiles
through the soft bodies

of deer. They sharpen their boots
in the mud. They blacken
each other’s eyes

with fistfuls of mid-
night. Someone
or something throws a snowball

of midnight at the back
of my head
& the word ‘fuck’
rolls out the front

which means the map
is broken

& the flashlight

has run out
of ideas. You

are no help. I ask you
to hold the map

& your hands backpedal
into pockets. I ask you
to pour what’s left
of the flashlight

into my cupped hands
& the door
sulks suddenly shut.

Inside, we pass the silence
back & forth

like a joint
& take big
selfish breaths

as the headlights flash
into a field,

spotting the flying saucers
of deer eyes
in the grasses.

They are green & lovely
& they mean us no harm.

But when I turn
the ignition, the deer run off
like a gang of hurdlers,
leaving me alone

with you & my fear. Together

we drive past beasts
& night birds
& crackling barns,

seeking the blind
moon. All the small houses

are on strike. The porch lights
haunted with gnats.

& When I roll my window

down to suck in
the dark air, you roll
your window up, as though
there’s only so much world

you can take.

All rights reserved to Gregory Lawless.

Fiction: Phyllis Green

“Hummingbird Study” (first draft)

 By Meredith Taylor

I rode my bike from my Isle Vista apartment to Butterfly Ridge in Montecito. I named the area Butterfly Ridge because it’s directly over Butterfly Beach. It was formerly Channel Drive but the Beanie Baby guy (Note: Google his name) has taken away the Drive and made a pedestrian/biker pathway bordered by a colossus of flowers of all colors, and then the flowers simply meld with the stunning view beyond (of the Channel Islands and the blue Pacific Ocean). There is no more beautiful place on earth. It’s a haven for butterflies and hummingbirds and I, Meredith, a grad student at UC Santa Barbara, am studying hummingbirds and planning a scientific life. My back was turned to the Beanie Baby guy’s Moorish mansion (still not completed after years of construction) (Note: Google to see if it is actually Moorish architecture). I was watching two hummingbirds in some sort of game or dance. I wondered if anyone had ever seen it before, like maybe the DuPont guy who did those photographs (Google that guy).

I almost reached for my backpack but I didn’t want to take my eyes away from whatever was going on, maybe a fight. No time for the digital camera. I would have to just watch and not look away then record it all in my journal when I got home.

They looked like they were trying to kill each other.

I saw two hummingbirds. Colors that I recall were navy blue, possibly dark gray or black, red, purple, green, shimmering feathers like new car colors ever changing with the light, long beaks, tiny birds, beady eyes. They hovered about two feet apart, five feet from the tops of the flowers. Then they flew toward each other aggressively and bumped each other with great force. I could hear the collision. I was standing only six feet from them. Then they went back to the original hovering positions and twice more repeated their fierce flying into each other and the same loudness at contact. After this they were about two feet from each other and they flew in unison, parallel to the other, high into the sky, maybe twenty to twenty-five feet high and when they reached that height, they circled and swooped down and landed among the flowers.

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Poetry: Warp Drive, or the Cabin Boy of Starfleet

If you’ve never traveled faster
than light, count yourself
lucky. It does mean things
to the body. Your bones

get soupy, you can’t stand up
straight, and you totter
like a baby gazelle, wobbly,
full of fright. But the Captain

with his bald, Shakespearian
grace makes it all look
so easy. The way his big hands
splash across his chest

when he smoothes his uniform
or slaps his combadge
with dictatorial haste. He even
pulls off being pissed

with panache. I, on the other hand,
am only hailed when there’s a spill
on the bridge or an accident
on the holodeck. Too bad,

at this point in history, nobody’s
improved on a bucket
and a mop. Swab the deck,
ye dog, he says to me

with a wink, quoting Stevenson,
I think. At night he watches old
Merchant & Ivory flicks
or BBC tapes, practicing

his delivery. Make it so, he says,
bare-chested, while I disinfect
his sink. He brushes his fingers
against my cheek and booms,

Don’t make me pull rank.
When I slap his hand away,
he laughs. Then he reads a little Pliny
before he falls asleep while I massage

his feet. The second I stop,
of course, he wakes up
coated in sweat. Nightmares
of Romulan attacks or perhaps

it’s something deeper
than that, something he can’t
remember, or won’t. Don’t stop,
he tells me, and I don’t.

All rights reserved to Gregory Lawless.

Featured Artist: Pat Perry

Based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Pat Perry’s work reflects a Midwest mentality we recognize and love. The detailed work is as rugged and dark as it is unabashedly beautiful. Perry is one of the Paper Darts Volume 4 heroes, but we just couldn’t wait to share his work with our online readers. Below we treat you to an eyeful and an excerpt from our upcoming interview with Perry, where he discusses his sketching process.

From the Outlived Series:

Paper Darts: Your sketchbooks are pretty phenomenal. Can you describe your relationship with them?

Pat Perry: When you decide to pursue art as a living, projects, personal or commercial, get drawn out and complicated. If those bigger works are the movies I make, my sketchbook is filled with YouTube videos. Ed Templeton nailed it when he explained how everyone likes to pick up a pencil and draw as a kid, but most people lose that and stop making art for fun. My sketchbook is the way I feel is best to keep that raw, unfiltered practice alive. That book is for me and I can draw whatever I feel like drawing without worrying whether its right or wrong—what freedom! The observational drawings keep me on my game while also keeping a document of the days that go by. The drawings from my head stir the pot and are an escape from the monotony and stress of the real world.

PD: How do your sketchbooks translate into finished, fully illustrated pieces? Do you prefer sketching to the process of finalizing a detailed, finished work?

PP: The sketchbooks aren’t where you’ll find the initial, exact study for a finished piece. Only fragments that spark me down a path and on a tangent that eventually ends with a finished drawing or painting. The sketchbooks are great because I don’t have to execute the pages in a room by myself away from the life I’m desperately trying to translate and interpret. I can be right there under that overpass, next to that lake, in that hospital room, drawing. The fully finished pieces are just as necessary though, and I like forcing myself to work on something for a long time and seeing it to its end. I think an audience can be moved by a piece that took a long time, because that only reinforces how important the idea was.

From The sketchbook:

All Rights Reserved to Pat Perry.