han’s solo – mark blickley and keith goldstein

November 15, 2018November 15, 2018 ~ South Broadway Press ~ 1 Comment

Keith Goldstein - Acadia NP.jpg

Editor’s note: the following piece is an ekphrasis, a rhetorical exercise where usually an artist bases a piece of writing off of an image. In this case, Mark Blickley based the following story off of Keith Goldstein’s image above, a picture of his son at Acadia National Park.

I’ve had this recurring Bridge Dream for nearly fifteen years. It first appeared one night after being exhausted by cram studying for my Bar Mitzvah. In this initial fantasy I was a swaddled infant left on the very beginning of a long and twisting walkway through a vibrant yet desolate forest. I was crying and there was blood from my bris seeping through the fabric covering my groin. We don’t need to dig Freud up from his grave to figure out I was about to undergo a ritual of manhood, so I must’ve been thinking about the genital mutilation that first signaled my acceptance into the tribe. What’s quite disturbing about this recurring dream as it appears today is that after fourteen years of experiencing it, I’ve only move forward incrementally from the bloody infant that was first placed on this forest path, into a six year old boy that balks at moving forward. In the real world I’m about to turned twenty-eight.

My name’s Han because my parents are both Star Wars freaks and the worship of this film series is the only real religion practiced in my household. They obviously were not the only disciples. When I was in Pre-K, there was another boy named Han as well as a girl named Leia.

What’s strange about my abandoned boy at the bridge recurring dream is that it’s always just a prologue to whatever else I’ll be dreaming that night. This winding walkway always introduces whatever anxious or peaceful visions my brain has decided to focus on that night—nightmare, erotic ecstasy, exciting adventures, idyllic beauty.

These days in my dream I am a first-grader who is really hesitant about moving forward, but I also see it as my feet turning into the classic ballet 4th position. My mother taught ballet for years so perhaps my foot position on the bridge is a nod to her. Once again I don’t need to disinter Freud to figure out this bridge snakes into a representation of my life’s journey. By the way, did you know that babies double their birth size by age five months? Yet in my recurring dream I remained a crying, bleeding infant for years —no physical growth, no emotional growth.

I’m a bit confused about relationships with women. My testosterone tells me to be more aggressive and not to feel so shy and unworthy. I’m always terrified of saying the wrong thing. In High School I didn’t really have a girlfriend because I always hung out within this circle of friends that were both males and females. Most activities were communal, not individual dates. Recently I joined a dating app called Bumble. On Bumble only women can initiate first contact which I like because it reduces the stress of rejection, yet I’ve been registered on this app for five months and have yet to receive a single hit.

I’m presently undergoing E.M.D.R. (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy, which also includes hand tapping and listening to ambient sounds, like ocean waves, via headphones that seesaw these sounds from ear to ear to promote a kind of aural hypnosis. One of the side effects of this treatment is that it can cause vivid, realistic dreams, but my recurring dream happened years before I entered therapy. My therapist insists I keep a journal between sessions in order to maintain the session’s progress she insists is occurring.

My shrink Martha works for the V.A. but please don’t think I’m some sort of Veteran war hero suffering from PTSD. I never even enlisted in the War Against Christmas, yet I’ve never known a world without suicide bombings, school shootings and acts of terrorism that take place in my backyard, not in some distant land. Martha is also an ordained Lutheran pastor but she never mentions God in any of our sessions.

I tell Martha I’m so sick of reading/hearing reasons why Millennials can’t grow up. My shrink calls it a “First World” problem not unique to young men my age. I am depressed and anxious all the time but don’t know why. I am always smiling and laughing at jokes I don’t think are funny so people won’t discover how unhappy I am. I feel like I’m faking everything. Being an adult to me means not doing things you enjoy doing, yet that’s nuts because my parents still act like kids at Star Wars Conventions.

Why am I so miserable? I had everything I was supposed to need while growing up— emotional and financial security, a good education and now I have a more than decent paying job. I do feel guilty that they are so many less fortunate than me and know it is unmanly to be so constantly sad. Every day there’s somebody crying out what privileged assholes we Millennials are, so I always feel pressured to pretend I’m happy.

My shrink says I should spend less time always surrounding myself with people and more time being alone, even if it means being bored at first. But I can’t relax by myself. I tried all different kinds of things, but I can’t slow down my goddamn anxious thoughts. I’ve tried drugs, porn, video games and even different kinds of meditation—Zen Meditation with mindfulness on breathing and intentionally focusing on the moment. Then I did Metta meditation to focus on a loving kindness towards myself as well as empathy for other people. In my final workshop I studied Sufi mediation to try to achieve mystical union with a Supreme Being.

In every class and workshop I’ve taken, I seem to be the only one who can’t obtain this metaphysical knowledge and peace. I would often comfort myself in class by thinking my fellow students are just bullshitting their enlightenment to try to make me feel like shit—but thoughts like that defeat the entire purpose of meditation, which is to get to know myself and pull away from the outside world to focus on my inner world, instead of blaming everyone else for my failure. Do you understand how fucked up a person I am? Hell, I even get sad deleting old tweets because it feels like I’m flushing away a big part of who I was and who I am.

Last month Martha suggested I try using a weighted blanket that applies deep pressure touch. She says it simulates the feeling of being comforted, like a swaddled baby, and is supposed to help my insomnia and anxiety. So instead of fighting my anxieties like a real man, I retreat into acting like a fucking baby again, all tucked inside my crib beneath a blanket with 30 pounds of pellets sewn into it. So far it hasn’t worked.

When I ask Martha how she arrives at the concept of what exactly my emotional age is, she turns the question back on me and asks what do I believe is my emotional age? I tell her I don’t know anything except first my dick is snipped at birth and then as I advance in life I have my balls constantly broken by social proclamations that I MUST BE SUCCESSFUL!

I worry I’ll never live up to my own expectations. I grew up being told I could be anything I wanted to be, but I’m coming to the realization that I’m not as smart, talented or special as I thought I was and that fuels an obsession with having to succeed. My friends and I seem to be growing up poorer than our parents. My Mom and Dad can afford to go to Star Wars conventions all over the world but my important travel plans are still handcuffed by student loans.

I get incredibly stressed over not being able to find a WiFi spot, forgetting passwords to online accounts, the buffering sign when I’m streaming online—it’s like taunting me that my life is going in circles, like the areola of a maternal tit. I stress when unable to find my T.V. remote just as my favorite Netflix show is starting.

Why am I unable to advance past the age of six in my recurring dream? Is it because I’m a victim of helicopter parenting? During my childhood my Mom and Dad hovered over every experience and problem I had growing up. Cell phones are the longest umbilical cords in the world. I was taught to be afraid of strangers, playing sports, sexual contact. Is that why they claim we Millennials act more like children than adults?

This outburst of self-pity is very tiring, so I’m going to disappear under my state of the art weighted blanket and hope tonight is the night it crushes my recurring dream of being a child stranded on a spooky bridge inside a dying, primeval forest. And if my heavy blankie is unable to extinguish the dream, perhaps when I wake up I will have at least gained a year of emotional age so I will be a seven year old boy on that walkway, just three quarters away from achieving my true age of twenty-eight.

sbgs cowskull

Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center as well as the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Scholarship Award for Drama. He is the author of Sacred Misfits (Red Hen Press), Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes from the Underground (Moira Books) and the forthcoming text based art book, Dream Streams (Clare Songbirds Publishing). His video, Widow’s Peek: The Kiss of Death, was selected to the 2018 International Experimental Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain. He is a 2018 Audie Award Finalist for his contribution to the original audio book, Nevertheless We Persisted.

Keith Goldstein is a freelance photographer and photo editor in New York City. Keith began exhibiting his photography since the1980’s. His work has appeared in many publications including ABC News Australia, Now Public, Flak Magazine, JPEG Magazine, Time. His work is included various private collections and in the Erie Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and the S.K. Neuman Culture Center, Brno, Czechoslovakia. Website

bag of eyes – david rawson

October 31, 2018November 7, 2018 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

When I took Holly to the waterfront, she told me I was destined to be a father.

“You’re going to have a girl,” she said. “And you’re going to raise her alone.”

Holly and I had been hanging out a lot the last few weeks, staying up til 4am walking around her neighborhood. One night we laid down in the middle of the street at the end of the cul de sac. No cars came. And if they had, we would have seen them coming. As I curled up in one of the blankets we had brought with us, Holly climbed up a tree that the cul de sac had been built around. It stood surrounded by pavement on all sides. I had to look down as she climbed because small leaves, twigs, and dust fell from where she rustled. I protected my eyes, and even though nothing had gotten in them, I felt them swell and water.

This trip to the waterfront was my attempt to expand our relationship, to begin to define it. I was nineteen and barely knew myself, let alone how to date this beautiful independent woman who, although she was my age, had secrets in her eyes I could not begin to uncover. She was a lion. She had an unruly mane of hair that she was always trying to move out of her eyes. She was looking out at the water. We barely spoke. I did not know how to respond. I knew I did not want kids, but I never told people I dated what I really wanted. I didn’t want to scare anyone off.

“Yeah, I haven’t given it a lot of thought, to be honest,” I said. “It all depends on the person, you know?”

But she had already decided I would be alone. Whoever the mother would be was already gone, unreachable. Although Holly was a few feet away from me, she could have been a sea away.

We sat on the rock by the waterfront on the same blankets we had used in the cul de sac. She was telling me she hated her nose. She said she thinks it is too big. She didn’t look at me. She looked at the water. I didn’t know what to say. It was a big nose if you isolated it, if you took it out of context and held it in your palm. I imagined holding her nose in my hand. She looked down at her stomach.

“I’m going to get a nose job my last year of college. And I’ll probably have my stomach done.”

She did not mention her eyes. She loved her glasses. The way she stroked the frames gently with her index fingers. The glasses framed her eyes perfectly, and she knew it. The nerdy infatuation I felt for her intensified every time she tilted her head down and looked up at me, when my world became those eyes perfectly framed.

The whole time we were talking, I had been watching two brothers, no older than twelve. Their father was nearby sitting down in a chair he had brought with him, a retractable one he had brought in a bag slung over his shoulder. He had a simple fishing rod that he held loosely in his hand. Every once in a while, he brought up a fish. His two boys were doing something on a bit of pavement down from us, near the cooler the father was placing the fish in. They were quiet, looking down at the pavement, doing something with their hands, like tracing something out deliberately.

After the boys left with their father, Holly and I stood up to leave. And we could see down the way to the pavemented area, and we could see what the boys had been doing so meticulously. Twenty-three stiff fish bodies laid rotting in the sun. The father had not taken any of the fish to eat later. It struck me in the gut as a waste of life, to catch and discard on hot pavement. It was death without a function. And then I saw what the brothers had been doing so meticulously. They had taken out the eyes. Forty-six eyes altogether that they had cut out together, as a team. The eyes were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they kept them. Somewhere there was a bag full of fish eyes.

I attempted to move the dead fish off the pavement into the water. I picked up two big sticks and attempted to move one, like I was using enormous chopsticks. Holly halfheartedly followed my lead. She said nothing. I could not measure her discomfort or shock. She would not look at me.

I got one fish into the water, but it floated vertically, its mouth open, holes for eyes.

When I dropped her off at her car after a silent drive back, she hugged me and looked up at my eyes for the first time that day. It became clear. We were not going to talk about the fish.

“You’ll probably name her something like Penelope. She’ll draw on your walls with crayon, but you won’t care. You’ll pick up a crayon and draw right along with her.”

I laughed a hollow laugh and nodded. “You can always wash a wall,” I said.

In the reflection of her car, I saw Penelope, but just for a brief moment. She was wearing a summer dress and ballet slippers, and the Robin’s Egg Blue crayon was tight in her hand as she drew a vertical line from as far as her arm would reach above her head to the moment she can feel the touch of her hand against her toes.

But then just as quickly as I had seen her, she was gone. And without consciously trying, another image flooded my brain: a small Ziploc bag full of fish eyes, in an underwear drawer somewhere, covered in t-shirts and boxers, a testament to a productive day.

David Rawson is the author of A Jellyfish for Every Name and Proximity (ELJ Editions).

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all things resound – jordan a. rothacker

October 30, 2018October 30, 2018 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

Actions have resonance. Actions are things. All things resound. They continue to resound in the place they happened.

Driving back home one night from visiting her mother in Atlanta, last Tuesday actually, Lara sung along with the stereo, the low highway rolling by with yellow ticks of paint and reflectors in the dark. The song was melancholy with a refrain to belt out legato and intense, allowing Lara to emote while belting, tears forced from her eyes. The last time she heard this song was through headphones in the much more public location of the treadmill at the gym. She couldn’t do her listen then the justice that she could now. As it ended, she stopped at one of the annoying stoplights on this highway.
She started back off from the light into the darkness, building up speed again, and she saw a flicker of light ahead on the right shoulder. She wondered what it was. It was a quick intense wonder and she released the gas gradually to look. When she saw it was a candle flickering at a flower-decked cross, she braked and pulled over.

The night was chilly, but she left the car without getting her jacket from the back seat. She hit the hazards and shut the door, scanning the night. Whoever lit the candle was gone, for how long she didn’t know, but it was still lit against the windy whizz of the cars on the highway. Lara knew what the cross meant, and she always thought the concept was strange. Why come here when the person is most likely buried somewhere else? Do the loved ones, family members, always go to both, here and the grave? She thought they probably went to the latter on the birthdays and here on the other day.

Today must be that day, she thought, and this must be the spot. Lara stood in front of the cross. Three cars passed behind her, all big sport utility vehicles, all fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit and the wind they brought cut through the knit tights she wore under her skirt. The flame flickered, flickered, flickered, cutting hard back against the wind each time in its partial glass enclosure, finally standing hard again.
This was the spot.

Lara turned around and looked at the highway. It didn’t look so violent now. There were cars with their lights far back to the left, behind the red light, and far taillights to the right horizon, but right here, right now, it was a dark peaceful place. She lowered at the knees and sat down her dark skirt into the cool damp earth.

Her ass cooled and a chill went up her back. She lay her legs out flat and slowly down her back went to the earth; just a t-shirt marring little of its chill. The flickers of the candle were just above her head. Every few flicks brought the shape of the cross or the flowers, or both, a terrifying shadow. Lara held her breath with such force she choked. She coughed and jerked against the earth, loosening it and generating more chills. It was hard to breathe, hard to catch her breath again. The white lights on the horizon to the left closed in on her. She held tight to her breath, pressed her back to the slight hill of the ground, and the candle went out as the torrent of traffic overtook where she was.

In that one moment, in that place, there was so much noise from the cars, released from the traffic light, Lara could hear nothing; from the bright of their lights she could see nothing; from the intense pain of the place she could feel nothing, and through the thudding off-time beat of death her heart could not complete. When the traffic abated and she could see again and hear again her breath released and her heartbeat resumed.

Lara knew everything and felt it all, all the pain. She rolled to her side to retch, and retching and rolling slushed in the wide puddle she had released and in which she now lay. It was awful, all awful. She stood and whipped her face with her hand and against her short sleeve. She was achy and cold, wet from the waist most of the way down. Without turning to look back at the cross, flowers, or candle—the cross made and laid by Jose’s mother Marisol, and the flowers from both his Tia Julieta and Tio Juan, and the candle placed and lit tonight by his sister Miryam—she slowly staggered down the hill to her car.

Pushing her legs through the ache she got to the car swiftly. On the hillside of the car she leaned on the back passenger for a moment to catch herself. She needed to get out of here fast. She got in the car and gunned it, just drove, off from the shoulder and out down the highway, as a panic overtook her and her nerve endings. She cried and wanted to scream and punch the wheel, but held it, she had to focus and get away. Twenty miles and fifteen minutes down the road she pulled over on the shoulder and got out to run around to the side and retched again. Ducking down into the back seat she took off her t-shirt and wiped her face with it, cleaning her mouth and dabbing at her eyes. Luckily the jacket she had with her was a raincoat-style and came down to her mid-thigh. She removed her skirt, tights, and panties all in one motion, stepping out of her boots to get it all down. With a clean corner of the t-shirt she wiped at herself where she was still wet and then balled all her clothes up into a wet gross mess and shoved it into a plastic grocery bag littering the floor of her car. Lara then stood with the jacket on and put her back to the road to button it. With a newspaper from the backseat she padded the driver’s seat so she wouldn’t get filthy again and got in to leave.

Why me, was all Lara thought the rest of the way back to Athens. It had all already happened to Jose, why did she need to feel it all too. It lingered in her memory, her whole body, her muscle memory, in a way that it couldn’t for Jose, for he was dead. She kept wanting to scream but instead just ached and drove. Other than “why me,” she did think “poor Jose,” but what he felt only lasted a moment whereas for her it continued to linger; she could even see the car that hit him, hear the crunch of plastic bumpers and metal frames, and feel again and again the metal into skin and into bone. Her seatbelt felt so tight as she drove, Lara felt the way it choked the breath out of Jose, but she was scared to take it off.

She needed to go straight to the library. Lara had been cutting close the drive all night.

She left Atlanta with just enough time. The stop at the flickering candle slowed her down and now she had no time to remedy the situation that she was naked under her coat except for a bra. She could call in, but what would she say, “I see dead people, or really just one dead guy, but mostly I just feel him, the pain of his death;” and the absurd humor in this potential interchange gave some levity to her state. But Lara still couldn’t think straight and come with any good excuse, passively with no better option to cross her mind she headed to the library for her late evening shift.

When she pulled into the parking deck a clear thought cut through the residual ache and lit upon her consciousness, Rose. Rose would be working the front desk. Rose is always either to or from the gym on one end of her shift or the other. Rose would have a change of clothes, gym clothes at least.

Lara grabbed her purse and phone and ran from the deck into the library. Rose greeted her with a smile at the front desk.

“Hey girl, why you rushing, you are just in time, and just in time to do a lot of nothing.”

“Hi Rose,” she gasped out of breath, “do you have your gym bag with you, or is it in your car? Please say you have it.”

“I have it, Jeez, I was gonna go late after work. Why?”

“Excellent,” Lara leaned on the desk and then paced in a circle catching more breath.

“Can I borrow your gym clothes right now? Maybe you will have time to go by the dorm before the gym after work for more. Please, its important.”

“You need my gym clothes? Why? What are you wearing under that coat? Girl, what have you been up to? Seriously?”

“Please, I can’t really explain. Will you just help me out?”

“Sure, relax, it’s fine, here you go,” and Rose reached down beneath the high desk and drew up a red and black gym bag. “But you owe me a story at least and an explanation of why I wasn’t invited to whatever craziness you have been up to.”

Lara took the bag and agreed, laughing off her friend. She clocked in and then changed in the bathroom glad that she and Rose were roughly the same size, except for in the chest, but luckily her bra had survived the filth and soiling. She quickly cleaned her face and crotch the best she could with hand soap and set to work. There was a full cart of books needing to be reshelved and she hoped the methodical mindless repetition of her slow uneventful job would cool and calm her down.

What was on the cart brought her first to the third floor and then up to the sixth. Up and down the stacks she breathed slowly, focusing on each breath, like she learned in yoga. She paid close attention to call numbers and her work and her mind wandered about the books, up and down each aisle, film theory, biographies of directors, then African oral literature and folk traditions. It seemed funny to her that all of this should be on the same floor, but there were only seven floors so it had to all mix together in some way. At the end of an aisle Lara noticed a wooden chair off in the corner, a chair that should be at one of the study tables in the floor’s common area near the elevators. This section of the sixth floor was the most private part of the library, and Lara knew, though not first hand, of its reputation as a popular make-out spot. Most likely explains the chair, either way, it was her job to straighten up behind the library visitors so she went to get it.
The chair faced the plain off-white corner, cold and isolated and for the second time tonight Lara felt a compulsion, she needed to sit in the chair. The second she sat down she shut her eyes and felt the tongue. She opened her eyes and there was no one around but her eyes slammed shut again and she felt the tongue again. It was right against her, it was right against her and it was right. A boy’s face flashed before her shut eyes, a boy she had never seen before, his eyes shut too, just going to town and humming and she could feel the humming burn-cooly out from the spot into her thighs; and then a different boy’s face, and then a girl’s. Lara pulled her eyes, open no one around. There was a girl’s face she didn’t know, a second ago before her shut eyes, between her legs, but they weren’t her legs, and the girl was more than just tongue, she was lips and mouth and sucking, so warm. And then Lara felt the waves, three hard-breaking waves over her, stiffening everything, boiling her blood. The first two were familiar, similar to long orgasmic waves she had felt before but the last broke shorter, cresting earlier, in three stalls and jerks and then nothing, no resolution. Her hair follicles on her head and down her arms, toes, and fingertips tingled as she drooped out of the chair and crawled into the stacks towards her cart.

All the pain from earlier was gone, and the aches had transformed; Lara was spent. Slowly she pulled herself up to sort of slump against the cart. She hadn’t bothered to borrow panties from Rose’s bag, but now the gray sweatpants she did borrow were a wet shade darker in the worst, most obvious location. Lara was done. She was done with this night. She was spent, wet, and freaked out. She was so done with other people’s feelings, other people’s experiences. She didn’t feel like herself and she didn’t feel real.
Lara rolled the cart as cover in front of her to the elevator and down to her coat for better cover. She clocked out and on her way past the front desk she told Rose to tell their supervisor she was sick, it was food poisoning, she had to go. Lara was very done with this night.

Over the next few years these moments of heightened sensitivity continued to occur, but never as bad as this first night, never two in one day. The world became a minefield for Lara, and as she slowly understood what was happening, she became increasingly careful of where she sat or lay down, where she let herself relax with her guard down. She could never really know though, hence the minefield feeling. She never told anyone about these experiences and could think of no practical use for this ability of hers. Her “sensitivity to locations” was more a curse than a power. Mostly it was just disruptive and embarrassing, but she did learn to control her reactions to some degree. Sadly, all her practice and preparation couldn’t prepare her for that one fateful night where and when she learned how her father really died and what kind of person her mother really was.

A curious amalgam of the corporeal and phantasmagoric, Jordan A. Rothacker will birth forth his fourth-birthed book in February, 2019 under the title, Gristle: weird tales (Stalking Horse Press). As every story is a ghost, “All Things Resound” will haunt that book as it does this site. Close your eyes… can you see her… what dark truth does Lara know about her family…