Author: Katie Jean Shinkle

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.

KMGN 28

Our Friend

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.

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KMGN 30

Dina & Darlene

The trailer next door catches fire but doesn’t leap to Dina & Darlene’s. They heard their neighbor threatening his wife if she took his kids away, he’d burn the place down. He kept his word, which seems to be the only thing he’s good at. Everything they owned melted and dripping, smelling of burnt childhood. The pictures! His wife kept wailing. The pictures!

Later, Dina & Darlene rummage through stored boxes of photographs of themselves which are kept under the couch in pink plastic bins. Photographs from their birth, thick scars magenta and dank purple in some places, spider-vein but much larger, resonances of conjoining. Announcements predicting the future. Everyone is preoccupied with their survival. Their first birthday with two small cakes so they each could blow out candles. Their father in the background drinking PBR, their mother smiling with her glitter gold cross necklace.

Later, still, another photograph from a few weeks ago with all of their friends in a line each with a rainbow WWJD bracelet on, bracelets they forced onto their wrists. They all started going to church and now no one wants to kiss their boyfriends. “You have to save it for marriage,” they tell Dina & Darlene.

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KMGN 31

River Phoenix

To chew on his moles
is our greatest fantasy,

to the right on his chin
where we could sink our teeth

and suckle
and bite
and lift

right off of his face

and lightly mash
and roll around on our tongues,
and spit out

save for later

and put in a locket
and take turns wearing
and superglue them to our own faces

Dina could wear it one day
& Darlene the next

his moles our moles our collective DNA

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KMGN 32

Dina & Darlene Tunnel Have an Intuition, See an Apparition

Dina & Darlene are tweaking out, grinding their teeth, heart tribbling in their collective sternum, hot and oozing syrup.

A flash across the bedroom posters, every River Phoenix mouth open to receive their heart, to suck it out, to roll around their tongues.

They get out of bed, lie on the floor which feels like the street.

They are in the forest.

What happens next:

Darlene says, “He’s gone.”

“Happy Halloween,” Dina says.

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KMGN 6

Dina & Darlene Tunnel Have an Intuition, See an Apparition

Dina & Darlene are dozing on and off.

Dina says, “I was writing the eulogy for River Phoenix’s funeral in my head.”

“Weird,” Darlene says. “Go back to sleep.”

And then, River Phoenix appears.

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