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FICTIONWhite Horse, Dark Rider Clothespins Junk Surveil A Reading From The Book of Ash Ashton |
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POETRYBottoming And Now For An Important Announcement Hermaphroditic Deer With Seven Legs “Tasty” Why Do You Write These Poems The Mayfair |
Reviewed by Nathan Huffstutter
2011, Two Dollar Radio
146 pages, advance review copy
In addition to holding a third-degree black belt, Francis Levy knows a thing or two about raising hell. Still, after glutting his first two novels with a blitz of psychosexual disorders and more bare-assed buggery than a stroke mag, should a stranger stop Levy on the subway and gush about being a huge, HUGE fan, the author’s first instinct would have to be an uh-oh backward step.
Installations sure to provoke as many walkouts as donors, Erotomania: A Romance and Seven Days in Rio offer opposite sides of the same satyric coin, with the former presenting by far the stickier flip. Despite its heady conceptual foundation, exploring animal instinct, recapitulation theory, and the dawning of human consciousness amid an evolving relationship, at the page-level, Erotomania’s boy-meets-nympho love story mostly just cums in your face. Liberated from his debut’s tedium of assplay and fluid discharge, Levy unleashes Seven Days in Rio as a no less frisky but much freer beast: where Erotomania propped the pounding over and over and over of compulsive sex atop an illusive psychoanalytic foundation, Rio props psychoanalysis atop an illusion, or delusion, of breezy tropical sex.
“I’m Kenny,” I said. “Do you understand anglais? I am new to your country and I wanted to introduce myself while also initiating myself into your highly permissive sexual culture. I will put my cards on the table: I’d be glad to engage you to perform sexual acts on me for a fee.”
And there you have it. Speaking these first words to the first woman he sees, Manhattan CPA/seasoned sex tourist Kenny Cantor lays out his raison d’etre: he’s vacationing in Brazil exclusively to pay for sex, with the term pay being of much greater importance than any specific copulative act. Equal parts George Will and Lloyd Christmas, Cantor strolls Rio in a bowtie and seersucker suit, imagining every female passerby to be either a current or former prostitute. For Cantor, the entire opposite sex is reduced to the pet-name “Tiffany” (an Anna Freud reference?), and a parade of exotic Tiffanys proposition him by freely hiking up their skirts or being fully nude from the outset. Despite these apparent vaginal gimmes, Cantor blunders from one unfulfilling encounter to another, from the call girl who turns his hotel room into her own wireless office to the educated beauty who hails from a dynasty of wealthy whores to the lusty, busty hotel clerk whose only flaw is her refusal to charge. Continue reading
Start
It doesn’t sound like you might think. Angie closes her eyes tight, pulls in different directions on her long brown ponytail, presses the flashing green start button, and listens to the buzz of the machine before her. One might imagine that a device such as this one may sound like a vacuum, a whirling sucking noise escaping from a series of complex knobs and tubes. Angie, herself, once imagined it as simple as the summer afternoon hum of her mother’s avocado green Hoover, with a dull-white hose and a shiny silver nozzle. But the truth is somewhere in between.
Somewhere in Between
The early abortion machine vacuum aspiration procedure is one of three available options to end an early pregnancy. This early abortion method can be used 5 to 12 weeks after your last menstrual period. This procedure is quick (5 to 15 minutes) and can be safely completed in a regular medical office or clinic. This procedure is also sometimes referred to as early aborton, apiration abortion, machine vacuum aspiration or vacuum aspiration. Before the Procedure, an osmotic (cervical) dilator may be inserted into the cervix to slowly dilate its opening either a day before or hours before a machine vacuum aspiration abortion. Also, pain or sedation medication might be provided orally or intravenously. Vasopressin (or a comparable medication) could also be mixed with the local anesthetic to lessen or slow bleeding at the injection site on the cervix.
Angie closes her eyes for this part.
This Part
Today’s girls all look the same. They march in, one right after another, hopping up on the white crinkling tissue paper, and are eaten by the sounds. Angie isn’t even sure if one leaves and a new one enters. They blend together like paper-dolls, clinging to one another, connected, braided. This morning, while one of them lies with her legs in a V, the alarm goes off. Bells ring, phones jump alive, lights flash. The young woman slips her white hand into Angie’s hot palm. Every hour Angie and her co-worker, Dr. Joe, must reset the broken security system. But now, Angie is handcuffed to the patient by fear. Dr. Joe curses under his thick Jersey accent and resets the alarm himself. Now he must scrub back in. Angie waits, her stony resolve is the young girl’s only tether to reality. How did I get here, Angie whispers out loud.
How She Got Here
She was drowned in her bathtub, Angie remembers, but never tells anyone. She imagines the memory a cloud, vaporizing into the thin air around her. It’s in the darkest of nights, the deepest of depressions, that it comes back, like a flashlight swooning over a dead body. Her mother’s long, slippery fingers. Her three-year-old neck, smooth and smelling of Ivory soap. Mr. Bubble nearby, staring at her with caution. Angie’s brown ringlets dipped forward like a crane over and over, until they pool around her like blood. The water is warm, like sweat, like urine, like anything from inside the body. Her mother is crying. Her father is screaming, their voices collide in the air and break into a million pieces.
A Million Pieces
Angie lives in a broken life.
–
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Amye Barrese Archer has an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. She has written poetry, short stories, and many truths on bathroom walls. Her work has appeared in PANK, Twins Magazine, Provincetown Arts Magazine, The Ampersand Review, and Boston Literary Magazine. She has also been part of PANK Magazine’s This Modern Writer Series. Her first chapbook, No One Ever Looks Up, was published by Pudding House Press in 2007. Her second chapbook, A Shotgun Life, is forthcoming from Big Table Publishing. She currently teaches creative writing at Keystone College, and is the Reviews Editor for PANK. You can read her blog, The Fat Girl Skinny.
Heard love’s through
with my esophagus,
gulp. My mind shakes
around, I don’t know.
An itch is hiding up
a sleeve: maybe mine,
maybe hers, or maybe
Houdini was onto
something. I couldn’t
fake fun again, after
you. I’m about to turn
into a maze. You’re
back where anything
could have happened.
–
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Marit Ericson is a graduate student at Rutgers University. She likes sad movies and clever comedians, as well as clever movies and sad comedians, and music. If you see a strand of oaks in a yard and said oaks make you happy once in a while, you are probably okay in her book. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Quarterlife Quarterly and other venues.
…..He recognized her now. The Iron Curtain chick–immigrant from the tortured lands. Skinny, devoutly New Tribe–ethereal, yes. She had a beautiful face. She wore a white turban on her head.
…..Once or twice, but not lately, he’d dealt with her. The van she’d driven up in would be the Sheep Queen’s.
…..She looked a little wrecked, her mascara descending in streaks. Maybe she’d come from a party, left suddenly after a disastrous scene. Mussed and tearful. She was appealing like that. He wanted to participate in her fugitive chemistry.
–From Already Dead
by Denis Johnson
