Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of four novellas and six chapbooks, most recently “None of This is an Invitation” (with Jessica Alexander, Astrophil Press, forthcoming) and “Will You Kiss Me Goodnight?” (The Offending Adam, 2021). Recent work has been featured in Fugue, Sou'wester, Always Crashing, NELLE, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a 2021 Lambda poetry fellow, co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing program at Sam Houston State University.
To wrap our arms around love
October & bones
The first time we saw you we knew of divinity
we call
your fan hotline busy tonight
we’re sorry, this number
disconnected
no longer in service
please try your call
again
One week ago, the River Phoenix Fan Club met for the first time in the city.
Our friend, who loves Madonna more, but attended anyway, never made it back.
Street lamp fritz. Above the car, a mourning Autumn sky where we will joyride for infinity. A moment we must remember when we are older, of slightly larger width: The wind, part gritty, part cornfield, edges of air populating encroachment. The fluorescent buzz fades. Moths slam glass, as if to get under skin. Here we are in the search party.
We are calling his name. The swift beat in the pit of our legs, glutes want for a stop sign. Rows of stalks, half-green, half-wilt, enough ears to hear. I bite a cob, yellow-white kernels dribble down my chin. Voices scramble, rise, disappear. Car running. Someone walking so slowly, we think they are dead. Where are you? we say. Where are you! we say, no longer interrogative, but a declarative. Voice as map: X for here, O for there.
Walking hours in the same direction. “Didn’t we see that house before?” Elijah says. On the ridge a house in the holler, plumes of smoke chimney black and confusing. The parking lot near, but our vicinity to it expands. A lost shoe, a sprained knee, a lack of oxygen. The trees lean closely, listen. Circle one way, circle the opposite. The whiskey is gone, and everyone slurs. Eventually, the bridge reappears. Eventually, the holler is far away. Eventually, the house no longer exists, a woodstove in the back of our tongues. No one admits we were lost. No one admits there is no way we could have been lost at all.
Morning sunlight opening in the small window daffodils, outside seems warmer than it actually is. Elijah’s parents are leaving for New Mexico to see a Virgin Mary statue crying blood, to pray for our missing friend. “Catholics love that shit,” says Elijah. Elijah’s mother yells to the basement “Who did this?!” and we clamor into the living room to see the life-size nativity scene smashed to pieces, the baby Jesus decapitated, half of Mary’s face missing, the wise man holding frankincense with a hole where his genitals once were.
We leave Elijah’s mother on the floor of the kitchen cradling the headless baby Jesus. We leave as if nothing ever happened. We flinch at the skid of leaves across the yard. All of our mothers try their best to teach us to be respectable, repent our sins. To not get into trucks with strange men. To not leave our necklaces on their bedroom floors. We try to make our mothers proud, even when we are high, even when we are speaking to the dead.
In the basement, the lights off, we roll formaldehyde joints, the room expands, an ember burns from one mouth to the next, inhale, choke, exhale, cough. We sit in a circle in silence. We can, after all, communicate with the dead this way, pinpoint to pinpoint, a map.
“Let’s hold hands, ask for a sign,” Crystal says. So, we do.
A sound tinkles, one note at a time, off-key, as if outside, easy to ignore. We laugh. Elijah shushes us quiet. The notes are sharper, deeper. A hard, rapid knock, at the front door, then through the walls, traveling faster. Before anyone can get up, the banging reverberates through the walls, across the ceiling. The house is opening. Something is running, skidding, across the floor above, turning the corner as if coming down the stairs. Misty is crying. The lights turn on. Everyone’s eyes are closed. Crystal is praying. The banging stops on the last step of the staircase. Everyone is holding their breath. Into the middle of the room, something falls. Misty has smeared blood on her face.
Dina & Darlene are taught from a very young age about silence. Since they are hard to look at, their father says, its best they stay quiet. This advice never works. Instead of talking to the outside world, they speak to only each other for years.
When they are infants, Dina opens her mouth, and out floats hearts, and they land on Darlene and kiss her big baby belly. In her throat a heart gets trapped and gets married, starts a family, grows old but never dies, keeps multiplying in this intergenerational way. The twinkle of the heart echoes through their shared esophagus.
As they age, the hearts leak from Darlene’s mouth, spilling from a golden tongue what it means to love, to crush. Even when there are no words between them, there are always words. Who do they love the most but each other?
In both Running on Empty
and My Own Private Idaho
the opening scene
is a side profile
of River’s face.
There is a vacancy
in both. Running on Empty
playing baseball
in round, wire-frame
glasses covering
half of his
symmetry.
Smooth ivory skin,
concentrated brow,
a desire for innocence,
normalcy. In My Own Private Idaho
his face bears the weight
of a patchy, scraggly beard
and ratty moustache,
we wonder
before he tells Keanu Reeves
he loves him
and wants to fuck him
can he even grow one
a full moustache and beard
we mean
or is the absence
his poor attempt
at manhood
no longer
the silk of a Florida
childhood
or the insecurity of
adolescence, but what
it finally means
to grow up.
The forest behind the house in the holler has a bridge over the rivulet of water we call a stream. Over the rivulet and through the woods. Strange symbols await us in piles of garbage nailed to the trees. Elijah makes an alcohol concoction called Wet Fart and it smells like oil and burns like tattoos. We sit in a circle in silence. The circle gets larger and larger. We are so far away from each other. “We can contact the dead this way,” Misty says. “Let’s hold hands, ask for a sign.” So we do. Into the middle falls a thud. Someone screams. What happens next.
