Once,
as I left the can, you wrapped yourself around me and laughed into my hair, like I was four and I’d just told a knock-knock joke at a company picnic. “Adorable!”, you’d exclaimed, saying you’d never heard anyone sing while they pissed. A girl feels special in those moments,
novelty dolly,
this is why he loves me,
this is why they’d all love me,
this is what I have to offer that only he can see. And you’re sure you’re full of all that sorts of stuffing that’ll make the man tick.
If you’re impressed about me singing on the toilet,
wait til you get a load of me murmuring about all you can eat pasta in my
sleep. Sometimes I walk around with only one
sock. I can’t properly pronounce marsupial. I tap my finger when I’m angry.
This morning I hummed while I arm wrestled the wind out the passenger seat of your car window. You rolled your fist into itself and made crescent moons of purple on your palm, angry Elvis-lipped and full of detest. You rolled the window up at the stop
light and turned on the radio. News. No way to sing along.
I am reminded, crustily,
that this happens to adolescents as well. One day the world is ruffling your moptop, in love with every silly notion that slips out your baby-toothed head,
and then you hit the awkward, ugly years.
Difference is, with this-
with you-
with us, I will not come out the other side full-grown and learn-ed. The only thing that’ll change is I won’t have the heart to sing in the bathroom anymore.
Which is too bad, because I really enjoyed it
once.

Abject. Hangdog.
Got your heart stuck in some lucky chump’s molar,
-now it’s rotting in there.
Everyone can smell it when he opens his maw,
except
He can’t
He’s too used to the stench.
You do clinical trials
You have to. You need
the money.
A hundred to talk to a research scientist about your
constipation.
Hundred fifty and drugs
possibly placebos
for your participation in a sleep study.
Focus groups on anxiety. They’re filming you. This makes you anxious. How can you focus?
“Do you suffer from…”
That’s how the headlines always read.
Yes. You suffer. You suffer from all of it.
In fact, everything
makes you suffer. It’s the suffering
that chews at you the most.
But you’ll never read the headline
“Do you suffer from having a cunt and a heart that both need too much? Participate in our study. We can help you.”
It’s far too easy
for you
to list all the things you suffer from,
and far too hard
for you
to say what you suffer for.

My top three favorite holidays, in order, are:

1.) Thanksgiving, because I get to feed people and we all talk about how thankful we are.

2.) Your birthday, because I get to celebrate you having been born.

3.) Valentine’s Day!!!!, because we get to celebrate one of my favorite things: LOVE. Love, love, Hooray for Love!

I’m a sappy romantic. Movies, music, weddings, new love, old love. I love love. Even if I am single on Valentine’s Day- oh. Wait. That’s… never happened. Huh. Anyway, even if I were single, I think seeing other people in love is pretty darn wonderful. I even love the people who are grumpy about Valentine’s Day.

So, starting next week I’ll be posting product reviews, stories, recipes, and hopefully, if you’re so kind as to send me anything, your own Valentine’s Day related writing. Send me poems, artwork, stories, songs! Whatever you want to send to me, send it. I would love to share it here.

You can submit by emailing me! NikolHasler at Gmail
Email a by-line, any photos you want associated with your submission, and links to any of your work.

Love to all of you!

The bus smells like old milk today. Every day. I hate sitting in the middle of the long busses, right in the weird, hinged part that rocks back and forth as the bus makes a turn. It’s the part with accordion walls, and I’ve got no choice, because it’s the only seat free. This isn’t a carnival ride. I’d prefer the only moving parts of my motor vehicle be the wheels.

I’m headed to Brentwood School. My son hears that they don’t even really have to study there. My son hears they just sit around in circles like a bunch of hippies, and that the students sometimes just leave and go to the beach. I wonder where my son hears things like this, and I remember that these legends of other schools are as old as the day the second one-room schoolhouse opened up in one area. I roll my eyes when he starts in on subjects like cafeteria food, the things other parents let their kids do, the way things were so awful in this school or that town. He’s 14. Let him have it. In a few years he’ll be in college talking about how good his high school choir was. Then after that it’ll be job stuff, small town stuff. There will always be stories to tell about these things.

Brentwood School is beautiful. These kids are all sitting outside, eating fancy chicken kabobs and fire roasted vegetables. They’re dressed like the magazines. They look like the movies. Their voices are like the radio. The campus looks like a resort. A bell rings and they don’t move quickly at all. The teachers are dressed casually, expensively. The butterflies even act like they might not know there’s a harsher version of life out there with windshields to hit like a hobo hitting rock bottom. It’s an innocent place, and there’s not a lot of pressure to do well.

On the bus, sitting across from me, this old man has a face with lines so deep they could have been written by Steinbeck. He has white whiskers, sores on his arms, and his trucker hat is falling apart like it’s been listening to overwrought country songs. He’s holding onto an envelope that looks as worn down as his skin, but the envelope appears to be empty.

Doors of classrooms close, and a group of students stand outside of the art room, spray painting skateboards. They aren’t laboring over the work. They’re just spraying. A group of kids pass me and they’re talking about how they really wish some girl’s self esteem was better. They say that she’s really pretty, but she’s so down on herself that it makes it hard to spend time with her. This is what these kids talk about, I guess. I think I was talking about smoking weed or some guy I liked who didn’t like me back, or how much of a bitch my parent/guardian/best friend was being.

Brentwood School

The old man lifts the envelope to his cheek, dabs his face with it, returns it to his lap, reads it. He does this again and again. The envelope has a name on it- Suzanne. Her name is written in purple, cursive like the kind your mom used when she was writing notes to the school office excusing your absence.

I sit for a minute in the courtyard of the school. I’m early. When I take the bus I give myself extra time. I am nervous. I don’t know that I relate to these kids at all. I am about to talk to them about sex. I imagine their dating lives. I imagine their homes, their parents. A boy comes running up a hill, and he’s pushing a girl in a blue mop bucket. Her legs are sticking straight up out of the bucket like carrot sticks. I see his RUNDMC shirt and I think an old person’s thought. “I wonder if he even knows who RUNDMC is.” So be it, I’m old.

Suzanne. Who is she? What was originally in this envelope? It’s possible this is just an envelope he found in the trash. Each morning there are people who come by my house with their shopping carts and dig through my trash, right outside my window. They take more than the recycling. I’ve shuddered many times at the thoughts of the junk their hands have touched. I have taken to double bagging my bathroom trash. Maybe he just needed a soft thing to rub against his face. But then he puts the envelope back in his lap, reads the name, touches it with a hard, yellow finger.

In the classroom, everything is going well. These teenagers, at the meat of it, they’re just like any others. One boy asks if I could be his mother. I tell him I’m no fun at all as a mom. I’m not just saying that. Later that night I tell my son. We talk about the kind of grandmother I’d be. He says I’d be a bad influence. I was never a bad influence on him. He just does the opposite of what I do, and it all works out well.

I’m openly staring at the man, but he’s gracious or removed enough that he doesn’t look back at me, challenge me to stop. It’s impolite, but there’s nothing else to look at. I suppose I could stare at my phone, or count BMWs out the window. He lifts the envelope to his face again. Dabs his cheek. He’s crying. The envelope returns to his lap, and he’s staring at her name as if it’s one of those optical illusion puzzles that were so popular in the 90s. What’s he going to see in that name if he relaxes his eyes just right?

The kids ask me questions. They ask me about orgasms, nipples, why some men get man-boobs. They ask me what my life was like. One girl asks if I was ever raped. They ask me why people like the things they do. They ask me about love. They ask me about love. Again, and again, they ask me about love.

I can answer anything at all about sex, the body, the way it all works, the psychology of the fetish, the medical explanation for the process of getting a boner. But I don’t know fuckall about love. What I know best is the absence of love, because the absence is around us more often than love proper. I don’t know anything about love that you don’t, kids. I want to find Suzanne. I want to find the old man. I want to fill up the envelope with whatever was needed to keep her around. Maybe it’s money. Maybe it’s an apology. Maybe it’s less time spent at the dog track, pissing away the rent. Maybe it’s a few more years of life, or better access to health care. I want to know what to say when a young girl with a ponytail and a striped shirt asks me “How do you know for sure that you’re in love?” I want the answer to be better than “Sometimes you don’t know until it’s too late.”

I miss talking to you. You’re kind of the best to talk to, you know? I’m sure you do. So, I’ll just ramble at you. How’s that?

I bet you’re happy about the chill in the air these days. Sweater weather, and girls in boots. The air is like crisp apples. You grew up here, and it’s so strange to think that you never went through the same sort of season changes that I did. I thought once about people in Alaska, how they see the rest of the world. I thought about people who have never seen the ocean, much as I hadn’t for 27 years, and how there are some people who grew up seeing the ocean, and how such very simple differences are a huge part of who we are.

In the midwest, the fall can start as early as August. The leaves change and everyone talks about how beautiful it is, and the smell of the air is darker and heavier, like dirt settling on dirt settling on dirt that never had a chance to get tilled. Everything feels like it was meant to be tended to at the thaw, but the summer came on too sudden and hot to get around to it. Giant, hand spray-painted signs advertise pumpkins, firewood, hayrides. You can buy local made apple pies at gas stations. There’s one place, an orchard I’ve long forgotten the name of, where you can buy pie that baked in a bag. The bag is made of some kind of wax paper, and baking it in the bag keeps the fruit moist; keeps the fruit’s flavor from flying out into the oven walls; keeps the crust crisp. Once, during a nervous breakdown, I’d driven to this orchard unintentionally. I’d napped in the parking lot while watching families haul pumpkins to their Subarus. When I woke up, I went into their store and bought a pie in a bag, which they then put in a brown paper bag. I couldn’t stop laughing and saying “It’s a pie in a bag in a bag.” I paid for the pie with a check that I knew would bounce. I threw the pie in a ditch on the drive home. Shortly after that I was hospitalized because I’d been found sitting in the dark, using pumpkin carving tools to dig deep into my upper thigh.

I think global warming has maybe changed things, but when I was living there, it was just a matter of a few short months before the autumn in the Midwest turned to winter. This happens in mid to late October. The sky is black by 5:30 pm, the ground is frozen, the windows get covered in plastic or your house will never stay warm. Once it got so cold that a window in our 100 year old apartment shattered. Our landlord didn’t fix the window for a week. And personally, in all that time that leads up to winter, my dread of cold hands and isolation increases to a point that I feel like I might shatter.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I think I expected autumn would never bother me again. The effect isn’t as profound. The dark isn’t as immediate. Things still grow. There is still light. And I have blankets warm enough, and people warm enough. But, it still steps on my heart a little bit. I feel like everything gets further away. I feel like I am distant, and not myself. I feel like I am not anyone at all, and sometimes I can’t get up. And I wait for Spring.

Some Buddhist at some point said that depression is dwelling on the past, anxiety is worrying about the future, and we’re supposed to be living in the present. I’m sure he was right. Buddhists aren’t usually wrong. Or maybe they are. Maybe we only hear about the right stuff they say, kind of like how we only see flattering photos of people and think they’re so photogenic. Maybe there’s a bunch of stuff these Buddhist gurus say that’s absolute horseshit. “If you take a man a bucket of water, you must leave with a bucket of fire.” “That doesn’t make any fucking sense.” “It’s a work in progress.” “No, it’s just stupid. You’re just making up things because they sound cool.”

Anyway, Ted, I miss talking to you. And I hope you’re out there loving all this cold.

It’s hanging in my closet, blue and rigid, one sloppy sleeve not quite on the hanger as it should be. I’m lousy for keeping things neat, and I don’t take much time hanging things. When I apologize for the mess, I really mean it, but there are things I’m sorry for that I won’t change. There are ways I’m always going to be.

One guy, he said he wanted to get rich so he could buy me a housekeeper. He’s one of the funnier guys I’m dating, and he’s really bugged out over germs and dirt. He won’t take a shower at my house because my tub is so gross. I’m sorry about the mess, but it’s not going to change. He comes over anyway. What does it matter to me that he won’t take a shower?

When I lay down, all the dirt from the floor that got all over my feet gets all over my sheets and then my bed is a mess of little sandy bits. You can do what you’d like to try to fix that- shake the sheets, run your hands across the fabric quickly like you’re brushing a horse. Nothing you can do ever fixes that. I change the sheets once a week, so if a guy is smart he’ll chose Wednesday night to stay with me.

Your shirt is in my closet, and I have no idea how to give it back to you, because I don’t know who you are. I can’t rightly go asking every guy I’m dating if that’s his shirt. Much as we all know the score here, it’s impolite to hit a person in the face with a thing like “There’s a shirt in her closet and it’s not mine.” For a while I was dating this guy, Johnny, and he left a toothbrush in the medicine cabinet. I made some joke once about how I’d been letting all the other guys use it. I apologized for that joke immediately. Again, I was sorry as hell to say a thing like that, but it doesn’t mean that’s going to change.

So, next time you’re over, please take your shirt. Unless you’re leaving it here because you think that occupying some space in my closet makes you and me more legit. That’s sweet if that’s your thinking. Or maybe you’re someone who’s already left, in which case, I am destined to keep that shirt forever. I’ve still got shirts left over from the guy who left three years ago. I’m not even sentimental, I just feel like it’d be rude to just chuck out his shirt. Whoever you are and whatever happens with it, I just needed you to know. I have your shirt. I’m sorry I can’t tell you about it directly because there are so many shirt-wearing other men in my life. That does’t mean it’s going to change, but I’m sorry.

So, check this out.

And guess who’s going to be their sex columnist? Teens, send me your questions at nikol@otherzine.com.

Going through radiation means I’m spending a lot of time in bed right now. Steven Prince shares his Stuck In Bed story submission below:

So I’m stuck in bed at the moment. Well, willingly. I have this new adjustable bed, and it’s just too comfy to leave – I call it the “Uppie downie”, because it goes up and down.

I’m standing up on the plane in the half stance one does as they wait for the aisles to clear. I have to stand like this, instead of sitting and waiting for my turn to depart my aisle, because I have to let the people behind me know that there’s a goddam order to things and they are not allowed to step ahead of me in that order. A few aisles ahead of me is the tight-faced humorless broad, on the flight with two kids and a frowning middle aged sap. She keeps readjusting her hair on top of her head in the sloppy fashion women go for. When done well, it sits up there, balanced and always threatening to fall down, some magic trick of beauty, the equivalent of girls with legs that look good no matter what they’ve got on their feet.

This broad, though, she’s not doing any magic. She’s squinting all around, and in between gripping her child’s shoulder meat, she turns her claws to her hair to pile it, let it down, and pile it again.

“I swear to gawd, Steven,” her voice is like a lawn-mower that wakes you up at 6 a.m., “if you don’t get this brat away from me, I swear, I am going to kill myself.”

I wonder if she means it. I wonder if she’s the suicidal type. It’s more likely, if she’s announcing in front of a planeful of people that nearly being in the presence of her child will lead her to a premature end, that she’s not going to kill herself. She’s more the sort that kills the spirit. Then again, I’ve been on this plane for 6 hours and I am not exactly feeling very fond of her child, either. So, maybe she’s right. Maybe I should put in a word on behalf of the rest of us so that kid understands that if you’re going to run the aisles of an airplane, hitting people in the knees and arms with your stupid toy airplane, you might then have to live with knowing that everyone on that flight went home and ate a bullet.

Off of the plane, as we wait for the bags, I watch this woman and her child and her husband. I’m thinking about you. I’ve been thinking about you all week, since I got a text message telling me that you’d overdosed on pills. I found out later that you did it on purpose. The rent was due, you had no way to pay it, and you loved people who didn’t love you enough. I went out that night, saw our friends, listened to some people tell jokes, cried my head off and felt rotten because, much as I understood how sad it was that you’re dead, I also felt like you escaped.

The woman’s husband is standing with the luggage cart, and the kids are darting around the cart like kids will do. Husband’s face is the sort you could never describe. He could get away with any crime, because his face is too boring to remember. Even as I am looking at him, I am forgetting him. One of the kids finally falls down, and I see a few smiles on the faces of people who had aisle seats. Even as the kid bawls out, the husband leans on the luggage cart, staring at the baggage claim, willing it to begin spitting out our molested belongings.

Nobody helps this kid. The mother adjusts her hair, glares down at him, says something shrewd about telling him he’d fall. The other kid is busy staring at an iPad, poking her finger at whatever Dora the Explorer type game keeps a child occupied at 1 a.m. in an airport.

Whenever I show people your photo, they say “What a loss.” I can tell they don’t just mean it in the way that you tell someone you’re sorry for the loss of their 98 year old great aunt. You were a beautiful girl, and I know that’s what they’re talking about. And I think it’s probably clear in all of our minds that you weren’t a dick. People who kill themselves aren’t usually assholes, for some reason.

And the thing about that kid, and the thing about all of us, is that we know if we run around, we’re probably going to fall. If we smoke a bunch of meth, screw a bunch of people, waste days hidden away, our lives will fall apart. People have told us all about it since our ears started to work. So, I guess you weren’t surprised when you were sitting in your apartment, making the decision to throw a bunch of pills in your stomach. Shit went the wrong way for you, and you were either bored or exhausted or both.

When I was crying at that party, everyone thought I was crying because I thought I should have saved you. They all said they wish they knew you felt that way. C even said that you’d told him you felt that way, and he got sick of hearing it. I never guessed. The last time I saw you you’d stayed the night in my bed. You gave me a massage, you watched videos all night, and in the morning you drew me a picture, then I gave you some sunglasses and you hit the road. You wouldn’t have made it very high on my list of possible friends to be dead in a matter of months. I was crying at that party because when I heard you were dead I felt relieved for your sake. I was crying at that party because what did it mean about how I feel about life that I was relieved for your sake?

The tight faced woman with the not-magic hair pile and her two kids and her not-memorable husband pile were the first to get their luggage. They ambled out, pushing past the car service vultures and into air that felt like the inside of a sickly lung. The little girl broke into a run, nearly getting herself smashed by a taxi, and, as a result, nearly having her arm pulled off by her mother. I wonder, if she died just then, if I would feel relieved for her as well. And then I hoped that I could get back to not thinking about this stuff sometime soon.

Rose Hart-Landsberg is a writer living in Los Angeles. She hopes to have a sentence or two to add to her bio in the near future.

I always put my pajamas on the second I get home. I wasn’t always like that, it sort of happened gradually. I realized one clothing item at a time that there was always a higher level of comfort to achieve. The end of the progression from fully dressed to full comfort is actually getting into bed. It’s like my body can only hold on for so long and as dynamic as I feel out in the world, the second I can, I must recharge my comfort. I don’t think that other people do this. I think they know how to sustain their levels in productive society but for some reason I need a soft nest, an empty head.

When I was in college I could barely detach myself from my bed. I was suffering, like in other eras of my life, from horrible anxiety. Every class I had, every meeting I made, I would skip, lying in bed watching the clock; watching the minutes tick away until it would be too late for me to go. During these times, I don’t think I enjoyed the comfort of my mattress, squeaky and cheap –the one the college provided. I was too busy avoiding my life.

Recently, fed up with my anxiety, fed up with doctors and parents helping me “manage” it instead of getting it the fuck out of my brain, I went to a hypnotherapist. It was as stupid as I thought it would be. I cried the whole time though my annoyance at the process muted some of my upset. The conclusion the therapist came to by the end was that my mother’s intense worry over a birth defect and surgery I had as a toddler was transferred to me, an impressionable baby, and to that day, was still shaping my emotions. I decided not to go back for the second session even though she assured me my anxiety would return after only one and two would be plenty for an extended if not permanent cure. I think my bed helps more. (more…)