"I Sip the Black Milk of Ambition"
featuring tenuous bridges, gold-plated pistols, potato-y mush, tender hooves, ditched pantyhose, convenient houseplants, and Klaus Nomi
/ Now at AC: “Jakob at Mass MoCA” by David Leo Rice
Beyond the bazaar there is a further territory, one I know I’ve been to before but can never arrive at again. After the last market stalls, where the streets slope up to the left and level out along the cliffs overlooking the river, stands a bridge used by very few people, stretching a long way to a far side that is even less visited, as if most of those few who do step onto that bridge turn back partway. I too will turn back soon enough. I pass the restaurants nestled behind glass in rock enclosures behind the back of the bazaar, all shuttered in the mid-afternoon heat, and I press on, making for the bridge, which I know I have to hit with some speed in order to not turn back right away.
The bridge opens over a rocky, fast-moving, shallow river dividing one continent from another. It’s a matter of common knowledge that I’m walking through Istanbul, but the continents aren’t quite Europe and Asia. That border is behind me, in the known part of the city. This is the backside, facing another border, a more illicit one, little discussed. I hurry along despite my guilt over never arriving at the restaurants, where I sense some appointment has been waiting to occur.
Extending well beyond the river, the bridge stretches straight and flat into the distance. It’s made of concrete and metal, but something about it feels tenuous, like a rope bridge over a narrow in the Amazon. I set out onto it, away from the last known district of Istanbul and toward my destination. I cross it easily, anticlimactically, no longer certain if it’s true that few have come this way before. Perhaps this is no more than my daily constitutional. Perhaps I even live on the far side.
Still, on the far side, I feel beyond the reach of where I’ve been before, in a district immediately notable for its lack of detail.
Is it possible this story appealed to us because the great great uncle of one of our editors once carried daily a gold pistol as the sheriff of North Adams, home of Mass MoCA; a gold pistol which was later gifted to said editor’s father, who slept with that pistol nestled amidst the piles of comics beneath his bed each night? Yes, I suppose that’s possible. Also, however, this story is an incredible, looping journey which we would have been thrilled to publish, gold pistol or no. Read “Jakob at Mass MoCA” here.
/ From the Archive: Chelsea Harris, “I’ve Always Been Here You Know”
Millie brings me to the kitchen table and tells me to sit while she phones her sister. Her sister is my old therapist and she likes poppies and lemon bread and also has a subscription to US Weekly that she never reads. Millie says She did it again, Yeah, Well she’s at the table now and seems calm, Can you come here? I know but I need you, I can’t keep doing this it’s not good for my health, Okay, Yeah whatever, Thanks for nothing. I start twiddling my thumbs because I think it makes me look innocent and no one comes down as hard on innocent people. Millie looks at me and says You need some serious help, kid, and I think it must have worked because she called me kid and that’s a good sign, and then she says, You’re fucking annoying as hell. Everyone on this street hates you. You pester us everyday. We don’t want to be your friend! And then Millie spits right there on the kitchen floor, a big ol’ wad of phlegmy potato mush, and then she says, Sorry but I had to.
On Twitter (yes, we’re still calling it Twitter) our friend Luz posted today that this was their favorite story: “gets sadder each time i read it,” they say. Hell yes! Always Crashing: We would like to be your favorite, and to make you sad.
Read “I’ve Always Been Here You Know” at Always Crashing.
/ Elsewhere
If you’re in Pittsburgh this Friday—and why wouldn’t you be?—AC ed James Tadd Adcox will be reading with AC contribs Catherine Gammon and Tyler Crumrine, and non-AC contrib but great poet and all-around cool person H. Thao Nguyen, to celebrate the release of Adcox’s Denmark: Variations. 7pm, Friday, Cozy Corner Bookstore, 5879 Ellsworth. See you there?
“He was there, and then he was not. His body was an island he hovered above”: Three new poems by AC contrib Nicchio Teixeira appear at Impossible Task.
AC contrib Nicole Rivas’s Tender Hoof is a Book of the Month at Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
“The new year loomed like a pair of torn pantyhose in a ditch. Neither of us wanted to touch it”: New work by AC contrib Mary Biddinger at Does It Have Pockets.
New Avee Chaudhuri! Please do not click through if you would prefer not to encounter the term “ejaculate” (n.), or houseplants.
New Propagule! There aren’t any AC contributors in this one, we just really like Propagule. Check out, in particular, Jennifer A. Howard’s “The Octogon House,” a story about nowhere spaces and amnesia and a free-floating loss of identity.
/ Today’s Soundtrack
Happy birthday / RIP, see y’all next time