by Samantha Backlund-Clapp
Someday I will go to california for real, drown in the chopped lines and party particulars, observe blankly how the rough mountains dance in the ripples of heat, and cook myself dead on the miles of unending american asphalt. I will make my way to the golden state, and I will write a love letter about her, and you won’t be in it.
Someday I’ll be attached to a marvelous beeping machine and my mind will be mostly television static and I won’t remember any of this.
When I publish my first collection of works, I will dedicate it to the women who have loved me the most, and in the acknowledgements I will regurgitate a hazy memory of my choir teacher, but I will title it the butcher, because, well, you know,
The analogy is perfect. And someday I will forget your name, the whole thing and the way it fit in my mouth with all of its ill placed consonants, but I will always remember the butcher,
Nothing about it is sad, and unfortunately no one knows how to talk about things that aren’t sad, even when things aren’t sad they are made to be sad, there are certain gleams in eyes and off of silverware and leading questions made to elicit certain responses, I don’t want anyone to ask me how I feel about anything, because isn’t the only thing any of us have learned is that you cannot trust anything least of all your own mind,
How I feel is not how it is. I don’t know how to say any of the words without them seeming sad. I’ve got to learn how to puff up my chest more.
I will eventually go back into my debut novel, har dee har, and rip out certain sections, although it will be more of a metaphorical, unsatisfactory rip, as it lays in tartarus as a google doc, but I digress—I may perhaps leave the lengthy descriptions of my trudge through the valley of death, the rolling hills of iowa dotted with the steaming rot of William Burroughs read aloud to me, bad idea, I will leave the parts about my parents, about my toothache-y job, and my sweaty fitted sheet from the night I heard a bad story and gasped all the air out of the room, and even now it makes me a bit ill to think about the brazen, longing threads of prose that went on for hours, the gloomy and somehow stark white bathtub I painted myself in, covered in blood that wasn’t. . . exactly mine, and it’s so bizarre how even in the freedom of my own page, when I could have made you out to be however I wanted, I still made you awful to me.
I wrote myself bleeding out, and I fed you dialogue to make me feel worse.
I must have been feeling the whole thing quite viscerally. I read it now with a snort.
I do have to reckon with the reality that, literally every aching facet of my current life accounted for, I dreamt it all up myself. This is not good or bad. It’s just the fact that most of the time, you don’t really know what you want—there are flimsy, Platonic symbols for what you really want but they often don’t ever get their correct names—and then when you get what you thought you wanted, it hurts. It hurts and you complain, but how do you have the gall to complain about it?
We get quiet and mistake the tender questions asked from the glittery drains of our own minds for concrete instructions from god. We spend too much time saying stupid things like ‘invest’ and ‘corporate ladder’ and ‘I forgive my parents,’ when we should be saying stupid things like ‘I love you even though I have only known you for one day,’ or ‘I will come to Xxxxxxxxxx for you,’ or ‘cosmically, we should have had a baby together, and it should have had your eyes.’
I am half in love but I realized it too late. I’m wrongfully hung up on others to the point where I am in the roots and rewiring my dopamine reward centers, perpetual rat in a cage. I want to have a disastrous affair with one of my academic superiors. Who cares what any of it means.
I will call someone I haven’t spoken to in six months. I will drink ginger ale on the couch under a huge blanket and pretend to be a baby. I’ll get patted down in security, and they’ll ask if I’m old enough to be flying by myself.
The sun will never rise again and I’ll be in Manchester by morning.
Bacon and Butterflies Float
by Mike Callaghan
Samantha Backlund-Clapp is a student at the University of Amsterdam, writing on napkin scraps in her spare time. The lead on her chain is planted in rural middle America, where she learned the love language of desolate wastelands and dried corn husks. She has been printed in pinky magazine, Pacific Review, and Dakota Warren’s Nowhere Girl, among others. She is presently, and always, in search of Las Vegas and precocious realism.
Mike Callaghan focuses on fragmentation/rearrangement/reinterpretation. His work was exhibited at Griffin Museum of Photography, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and Soho Photo Gallery. His photographs were published in ZYZZYVA, Barzakh, Rhino Poetry, Streetcake magazine and Shanghai Literary Review. Mike earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 