The Sound of Crickets Chirping

"Handed Down", an ambient piece of short fiction, has been published at Dew on the Kudzu.

2 Poems Published

A couple of pieces published over at Poem2Day.

http://poem2day.blogspot.com/2010/05/2-poems-by-michael-k-gause.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Poem2day+%28Poem2day%29

Reading Carson McCullers and realizing what I don't like about her writing is what I don't like about my own.

Submitting more work lately. Prose.

If you are on Facebook, feel free to Friend me. I update my status with any new publication more often than I do here.

Cheers,
Michael

Two-Thirds

The woman at the table was about two-thirds.

With that I mean to indicate her place in the social order of table #8 in the restaurant. Directly before her sat all that stood in her way between her and prime matriarch status. One could easily discern her place through the hairstyles which were clear descendants of one another, as well as the very specific look she used against her elder when she spoke.
We're no stranger to it.
A mix of pained devotion and weedlike envy. It speaks of many things the tree of life lets you grow untended without question. Two-Thirds, in reply, idles at her awkward pole position. First attendant at the suspended casket not yet upon them. She rations respect and rebellion in measures dictated by convention. Mouth full, she offers value-added statements to meant complement the mother tongue. She is afforded a number of practiced motions that imply her place in line.

The cut-off:

by reason of youthful insanity in the presence of the crone

The addition:

empirical proof that education is not always laid to waste against the rigors of real life.

The dismissal:

risking disrespect, this tactic leverages familial closeness and the playful dynamic that speaks to the former this late in the game

Seated some feet away behind the elder, I have a clear view of Two-Thirds. Her face reveals everything by necessity. It smiles and winces with grey adjectives rooted deep in the lines that make her face 'complex' in the light of my simplistic Gestalt understanding. Some forms are blessed with large eyes and a supporting cast of minimal features. Together they offer the viewer an easily digestible set of shapes to engender closeness. Think babies. Think Bugs Bunny. Think any one of a million Anime hotties. Eyes, lips, nose. These intentially basic features are often used in film to depict beauty and, thereby, goodness. There is nothing complext about the visage of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, Bambi for that matter. Complexity, on the other hand, is the domain of darkness, as if only the simple shall win or be saved. However, Two-Thirds is beset with a number of unfortunate equations. The distance between eyes and nose, divided by the circumfrance of the cheek, multiplied by a lip-chin metric that makes me uneasy about life. Her head metronomes at even left and right angles of 45 degrees of understanding, with all horizontals of her face seemingly elongated. Think artificial horizon. Think overcompensation. Think early figure sketches to illustrate perspective. They are all here fully manifest and sharp enough to slice through the years left before she takes her place on the other side of the table, watching her own daughter's face lose its virginity to the passage of the torch.

Hard Pressed Colors

He slumped into the water a couple of inches and let his lids fall shut. He felt the heat of the water suffuse his legs and the water itself cool in response. He drew his hands up and onto his closed eyes and enjoyed the sensation of wet heat on his cheeks and checked vision. He pressed, and the day began to lose credibility. He pressed, and blues, reds, and yellows exploded like Dr. Seuss dandelions before a dark tan backdrop. It was small, but it was his. He pressed so the heat would crawl from the legs up to his head and into his brain, warming all thoughts moving forward. He pressed until he was sure he controlled the the sound of colors all over the world, save for the shade of sorrow he knew to be but one room over.

A Tale of Twin Cities and More

Local poet Alex Stolis and I are finishing up a chapbook of poems on Minneapolis and St. Paul

A Tale of Twin Cities, Vol. I

Here's a sneak peak:

Walker Art Center

all that matters is that you’re okay baby

The gallery will close soon; its cold and our coats need to be rescued
from the coat check. Her hand slides into my back pocket, as our hips
sway together, she turns her head to kiss me. She’s a wanna be lover,
nobody’s child, an artist who don’t look back. Her smile reminds me
of the time we spent at Aqua City. I was out of cigarettes, flat broke
and blinded by a charred sun. We were hypnotized by the slow ballet
of our bodies. Left the room before shadows could lengthen and stretch
the story into third person versions of bleeding. The sculptured garden
offers a view of the downtown skyline. We are bound and determined
but too far apart to be together.





Working on putting together a release event, finding a publisher, and ways to make it value added. Check back here for more information. We expect it to be available...somewhere...by May.



Other News:


"Song of the Alley", a short nonfiction piece of mine will be featured in the April issue of Eclectic Flash (http://www.eclecticflash.com/).


A chapter of my work-in-progress, Still Life, will be submitted to a Barry Hannah short story competition ending March 31.


I leave you with a line from Robert Green Ingersoll, Civil War Veteran and noted orator in the Golden Age of Freethought.



“Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day… It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress…Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.”

—Robert Green Ingersoll

On Fiction and Reality

The reason I have trouble crafting stories is simple. I have little concept of how people react in a given situation. This is key in creating meaningful stories with believable characters. To do this one needs to do what seems almost impossible: fully live in the world while having the cognitive distance to observe and retain the nature and form of its machinations. My attempts have manifested as false reality or, at best, experimental.

I want to whisper this to strangers on a train. I want them to understand without pity. I want to feel something other than egoism for worrying about it so much. I've always thought treated field recordings possess a certain breath that overly produced songs do not. White noise that improves. It should be a balance. I've no desire to sit and warble in the kudzu. Nature does that well enough already.

I want to see a light somewhere up the far end of the street, a light that shows me exactly the new form this work should take. It has to be a new form that fits, not a consolation for inability. I want this form to be so perfectly timed that the whole of me can gush forth in fearless orgasm that wants to beget, validate all hidden explorations, actively seek out hand-crafted effigies and take them to town as proof that the hills are good for more than just retiring.

Score

http://www.paperdarts.org/flashes/