Young couple playing records spread out on living room floor.
Ohio, 1955.
More you might like
Alanis warns of Mr. Play-it-safe
whose first flight ends in demise,
and I think my nephew Jacob, fifteen, autistic,
might grow up to be like that guy,
though his first flight was this fall
to my brother’s wedding in Ohio.
Jacob wet himself rather than
risk getting up to use the bathroom
with its toilet seat that could suck
him out into the clouded air, into
the space he can’t grab on to.
His mother didn’t hold his hand
because Jacob doesn’t like that
and it’s good, too, because Jacob says
it reminds him of Jack on LOST
when he comforts Rose while
her husband, of course, is in the bathroom.
The plane still crashes, Jacob tells me now,
and Rose and her husband are separated
for a long time, so where’s the use
in that? Her husband said that planes
WANT to stay in the air, but he
was wrong. And there was that plane
in Russia with the hole in the engine.
Jacob, I say, that plane flew, it was fine,
most planes are. New strategy: I try
to explain Say Anything, figure he hasn’t seen it,
but after I describe the boombox talisman,
two lovers boxing out the offense, how at the end
of the movie, it’s sweet that the boy holds
the girl’s hand waiting for the seatbelt light
to pulse, to gently announce that they’ll make it,
Jacob interrupts me, says, No
that’s crap, the screen goes black then,
we don’t even see what happens. Most
people die during takeoff or landing
anyway, the in between is just biding time.
PANK Magazine Lives.
My article, THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE OF A GREAT AMERICAN LITERARY JOURNAL is up at LitHub. As one of the new editors with Chris Campanioni and Ashley M. Jones I wanted to share the non-lit Lit Hub fun version, which Lit Hub felt was a little less scrubbed than what they wanted to run. Oh, bureaucracy, but I play nice and accepted the edit. Here’s the original and all of us look forward to dedicating ourselves to the PANK we all know and love.
PANK Magazine Lives
We’re very pleased to announced that PANK Magazine has been purchased & will live on under new & capable management. Stay tuned for details!
Last call for submissions
Last call. We are temporarily re-opened to PANK Magazine submissions until November 15. As ever, we do not have formal submission guidelines, though we prefer to be thrilled by your work, so send us your most thrilling work.
So long
Dear friends and family,
Please accept this brief note as PANK’s formal notification of resignation, effective as of the end of this calendar year, 2015. We’ll publish one last print issue and two final online issues of PANK Magazine; look for those in the months ahead. We are immeasurably proud of our publications and have boundless gratitude for all the staff, contributors, and each and every reader who has labored alongside us over the last decade. It’s been an immensely gratifying ride. PANK loves you.
Yours sincerely
M. Bartley Seigel, Roxane Gay, & Co.
[PANK] blog :: Books We Can’t Quit :: What begins with bird, by Noy Holland
Noy Holland’s 2005 story collection What begins with bird is a catalogue of conception. The female characters are a host of surrogates charged with the rearing of their own wombs, babies both imaginary and not, and the men are damaged bruisers, temperamental, mentally unstable fathers unaware of their growing broods, lumberjack drop-outs, quick to lose control. Tinged with love and the catatonia and soreness of afterbirth, Holland’s prose forms an ode to the lilt, bulge, hobble, and gilded calamity that is pregnancy, the fallopian galaxy of it, and to the burlesque that is parenthood. [MORE…]
fembroad