ISSUE 30 | JUL 2013
THE DADDY ISSUE
Illustration by Wesley Ryan Clapp
Olivia Durif
Erotics of Narcissism: How to Be a Daddy and a Woman
why we had sacrilegiously put some canonical text in « Trash » - Gertrude Stein would have definitely been an « Other Daddy » - the kind of genius that a Daddy is - it isn’t his sons he teaches to swim, but his lovers - narcissistic, even masturbatory, pleasure - Whitman’s translating tongue - the famous « be him or fuck him » problem
Justin Raden
Patricide, etc.
Oedipal and otherwise - one of those highly scripted Paris Review interviews - his most sustained paternal text - pastiche begetting pastiche - a giant dead (but not dead) father with a mechanical leg - dinner party disaster metaphors - if this essay were made out of bricks, you would not peer at the bricks wondering - no author is named
Ray Osborn
To the Girl in Black
do I drain the room - chickadee - I have nothing to ode - until salt spindles are soft - she, satisfied, supine - curls, sunder, time - minor chords are not as cosmic as they seem - Teal, Turquoise, and Quinacridone don’t show up in this elegy because those are where I stash my private moments - avarice doesn’t remind me of wrath - what I don’t want you to know is this
Galen Beebe
Where Do Dream Babies Come From?
the brink of labor - it will be okay once I’m in the next warm place - the alcohol in my breast milk - what secrets was my body harboring - the self whose ears are still unpierced - the child between us, a pretense for holding each other - I rarely find the root - I try to logic the baby into being - he slid out of our hands like a spoonful of Jello
Élan Reisner
R/exlex
first task of philosophy - « the Newton of the moral world » - it was the king’s very inviolability - « it is as though the state itself commits suicide. » - blasphemy against the Holy Ghost - every human being necessarily possesses the possibility of doing evil - our motivations are always mixed - calls up the shadow of its ideal
Odelia Kaly
I Am Not Interested
his lungs were filled with tar - taking me home and not leading me astray - I dedicated a whole candle to you in my candle-lighting ceremony - you crashed my sister’s bat mitzvah and forced her into another bout of anorexia - our shared blood - your goddamn CDs - you do nothing but smoke and smolder - halfway home now - I AM NOT INTERESTED
Michael Kinnucan
The Political Theology of Sigmund Freud
rub them raw one thousand times, rub and rub and rub - the revolting details of the homosexual lifestyle - this isn't merely a scandal for the law - maybe a welfare queen in a Cadillac - it's a Kafka machine - he makes law out of his pleasure - the fruit of the tree is the father's flesh - to confess one's guilt as the guilt of parricide
Michelle Bentsman
Father Revision
quarter the beast, insert your entire face into it, and suction loudly - other people’s fucked up fathers - he pick-axed ice and shoveled shit all day every day - that’s how I did it with your husband - a rumor going round in Minsk - you’ve been eating too much meat - then I read about autism - told me it was a daddy longlegs, that they are totally harmless
Wendy Lotterman
small remainders
I know it felt parched inside your tiny ablutions - the reward also scratched by my unsleightofhand - we all sleep with the white noise now, too, dad - allergies sit beyond on the lawns I am taught not to touch - when a snack (cold pasta) slowly (regrettably) gains the stature of a meal - this whole time I have been trying you on