Kevin told me I couldn’t fit a playground inside the back of my 1991 Ford Ranger. Doubt charms the dormant pettiness out of me. I had no choice but to kidnap him.

I did not use any rope or tape or ski masks or VHS tapes in the stealing of Kevin. I did not even employ my kiln chest or my oak thighs. I’m in a losing war against clichés. I have to avoid them at every straightaway. They use gorilla tactics, attacking me from hidden traps and often in disguise. But I still show up to fight, dammit, or else I’d be letting all previous efforts die in Maine (Maine is basically useless, right?).

Plus, comedy lasts.

This is how I kidnapped Kevin: I pickpocketed him and took his phone and locked myself into the bathroom. And in an extra loud voice, loud enough to drown out his droning protests, I called his work and told them that he had been hit by a car, by a car driven by me. And that he needed to be taken to a hospital. In a car. Driven by me.

Giggles endure.

We missed every green light on our way toward Bonsall. My words, just a pal’s knot, bound Kevin loosely. He took the sluggish drive as an opportunity to try to attack my claims.

It all started last week when we were trying to describe the playground at our Elementary school. We hadn’t seen it since we were ten, so our conviction was our only proof. We drew up the mulch and the exposed bald spot of granite dirt below the slide. We agreed on the placement of the perforated platform that led to the monkey bars and on the placement of the swaying bridge and c-shaped ladder. What we couldn’t agree on, though, was the location of our Excalibur, where Manny heroically drew out the lips, and eventually the tongue, from the regal and much older face of Heidi Stadelli.

I remember it happening underneath the platform that held up the slide. Kevin claims it was under the bridge and said he could remember Heidi having to duck underneath it.

I said to Kevin that seeing the playground in flesh could jog his memory. I told him that we could swing by Bonsall Elementary together to pick it up. If doubt is my petty charmer, zaniness is Kevin’s. It comes in the form of much blabbering. It was the same last week as it was in the truck. He gave me irrelevant accounts about the school’s massive reconstruction, describing blueprints and all, and kept hammering on about how our disputed playground no longer existed.

In my war against cliches, I have become a bit cryptic. But Kevin—even a spoon turns heavy after a hundred scoops.

Just as another yellow light almost intercepted us, I pulled out a puffy jacket from behind the seat and handed it to Kevin. It was 70 degrees out and sunny just like it always was. He rolled his eyes as he obligingly pulled the jacket over his shoulders while I rolled up my window. The hole in the muffler always seems to fix itself when the truck does its little magic thing. It gets quieter. Kevin grabs onto the handle. And, just as his buggy eyes had expected, the 1991 Ford Ranger lifted into the air. Above the sun-crusted North County hills, the truck flew, sputtering slowly and distantly into the clouds.

Kevin took the trip on the chin as we quietly let the magic of the 1991 Ford Ranger take us away. After an unimportant amount of time, we descended through a grey, enduring fog. We found ourselves landing somewhere in England, probably, where everything seemed made up, where every street sign, alley, and moss-covered roof acted as a caricature of a gnome-y fairytale.

Not long after landing, we drove into the driveway of a cottage. The smell of beans emanated out and we could hear a faint fluttering of lame R’s

I told Kevin to wait in the truck. I walked over to the side of the cottage. There was a single light on. I saw a hand drift and slide off of a desk. I continued making my way over to a narrow stoop, where on the top step a small publication called Writing for Joy sat in a basket. I took it, placed it under my arm and slowly walked back towards the truck.

As we sat in the driveway, I let Kevin read through two stories, “Defending the Arts” and “Sleepover.”

After Kevin finished reading them, he placed the publication on the bench seat and stared at the cottage for a substantial amount of time.

Without warning, he started telling me about a memory. He brought up how we all used to wait by the slide and form a human chain with arms and hands interlocked. Because we knew, if we touched somebody just as they exited the slide, we’d receive a strong shock. And, if we were interlocked, a shock would travel through our bodies and reach, depending on the length of our chain and the length of our friendships, an innocent playground goer, or if we were really lucky, Miss Turley, the noon duty teacher.

I asked him if he thought testosterone did us well, or if he found it corrosive to our wit (I thought to myself clichés probably deployed it as chemical warfare).

He ducked that question and instead, after a pause, said he thought Wright for Joy might do well displayed right next to the book nook in my booth.

I agreed. I told him how, when I read the stories, it reached into our coarse playground sand and poured it down my shirt. And the moss on the cottage roof grew. The hand lifted itself back onto the desk.

As I pressed in the clutch, I reached and opened the back-split window, and tossed the publication into the back of the 1991 Ford Ranger.

A man I am not allowed to like walked into my booth. He had the top half of an intake manifold in his hand. He doesn’t know who I am or why I am not allowed to like him. I forget what he sells in his booth, but what’s important is that it doesn’t operate here at our Sunday flea market, but at the cursed Saturday swapmeets.

I sat on the couch in the back. He gave me a squinted, short smile when he entered. He didn’t notice my keen observation of him—not then, or when the boys and I had spied on him and the other Swappers the weeks before.

He was an old goat moving through the booth. Peppered grey hair stuck out from his head in tufts. He clanked around, bouncing and twitching off the boxes and crates and stands. When certain things caught his attention, he gave them a slower, longer sniff (one of the cassettes, a clay bunny sculpture made by Joëlle Gervais).

He spent a considerable amount of time at the bookshelves, craning his long neck into the case and running his finger along the shelf’s edge. I could hear his breath do short little ticks as he read the different titles.

Working his way deeper into the booth, he stopped at a box of short prose just to my right. Placing the intake manifold down at his feet, he started picking through the loose papers. I watched him rifling through them and saw hands guilty of many dinner table spills. When he reached a particular set of pages, his fingers calmed. His eyes blinked long as he read carefully. Then his lips cracked open, forming a mail slot hole. His top lip quivered slightly as the words worked through him. I stopped watching him.

“I’ll take these,” he said while holding the papers up to me after another minute or so had gone by.

I stood up and took them from his hand. A couple of poems by Brandon Shimoda looked back at me.

I pointed down to his feet. ”What’s the intake for?”

”Ah, it’s for my 2003 Toyota Avalon. I’m trying to convince myself mine is warped and that the headgasket isn’t blown.”

I didn’t know where they sold intake manifolds within the flea market. But I did know the evasive blown-headgasket-dance.

After I handed the papers back, he bent down and picked up the intake. He held it against his hip, letting the weight of it crumple the poems still in his hand. He gave a quick lift of the hand before turning and leaving.

The Selected Poems:

Hinotama

by Brandon Shimoda

There is a simpler, more pristine life

inside the ball of light

bouncing above the barbed wire fence

A small incision made

in space

through which an entirely new fashion

of human being

is spying

on the people incarcerees,

we are supposed to call them,

that is the signal

of their expendability

motivating the whirling blades the wave-like crests

as the striving of a human

to separate

the calcified tumor

that makes the ball

a planet fallen

to ice

a simpler, more pristine life

pressing against the startled faces

rooting, together,

to describe the ephemeral achievement

of collective entrapment

the loss that is constant, rapid

The Pond Museum

by Brandon Shimoda

The fenestrate surface of the pond

surfaces in old companions snag ripples

namely, Saburo

I recommend his face for the pond museum

above the fox’s skulking face

the hare’s face, death’s polished stone

the crane’s larval pearl

eyes transmitting the code for a sodden voice

in the splintering reeds

And when I say I recommend

I mean the menagerie in the utmost dark

saviors hung from supping trees

gone the way of idiot flesh—where you

were endowed with a chance, and fucked up

Evening, I went down

on the pantry, pried open

a basket of rice cakes, grew

partial to eating in the dark

if only to concentrate the sound

of walking through the wilderness

at night, enlarged

without people

as wax I sleep in nectar

When was the flora brass

A woman kneeling among cranes

Willows waiting

for sticks to arrive

to burn cranes from her body

genital

wind through which

No, it has always been this way

blooms erupting

suspicion, husband

making sure each dawn

the sticks stay lashed to his back, the wood

she waits for

thin as blades, and cut as close

To fallow soil

sea dragon in hand

proper, yes, though petrified

crimson, pink, indigo, green

purple and yellow lotus

cradle in the hedgerow

I feel

faint exceptionally

hot here on the ground

Should I be sweating this much?

Should the sea dragon weigh so heavily?

Bronze skin festooning the trees

cutting a spirit loose?

Carrion flowers

slip

from my hand

and the label sweats when I’ve stared into the fog too long

I can almost see my dried spit walk away

arms linked with my explanation

delete-sun-words-excess

until the cold water condenses my want for what I perceive

and I envelop

contrary to what I feel tapping away on the inside of my chest plate

I am human,

says the fly in my nostril

two, fifteen, forty… six

with the sap from a popped bulb between my fingers

no matter how cursory or how puncturing

melted or frozen

with a rigid nail and a spotted tooth

when I look

I will always see

nothing

When I try to reach into John Williams’ Stoner, my hands grasp nothing. And it’s not just me—I’ve passed it around, and people always fail to describe it. There’s no window shopping. Insight into its contents only comes through the slow turning of its pages. That’s why I won’t even try to talk about it as a book and instead will explain it as a big iron soup pot.

Can you spoil soup?

When I climbed into Mr. William’s story, I found myself in a slow-burbling comfort. Nothing confronted me. I watched his seasoned world of words pass by without ever having to question its sum. So I kicked my feet up. And slowly, Williams stirred me into his brothy, innocuous words, and slowly, he baked the story’s meanings into me through a creeping braise. And I remained, throughout the book, oblivious to my cooking skin. When I realized what had happened, it was too late—the book was finished, and I was molecularly altered.

This, my being here, is a symptom of that molecular alteration. Other symptoms include how I drink coffee and how long I look out of windows and how often I throw myself down a hill.

Before first reading Stoner (a decade ago), I sought the richness in life only through sensations: speed, adrenaline, drugs, sex, etc. And I still have a sweet tooth, but now, when I bite into those things, I taste bandaids.

(here, take a hit of this. it’s a dram(a)idifier. don’t worry. it’s just CBD. it won’t actually make you superfluous or dramatize anything. what’s coming is scientific fact—costco certified. but, yeah, the ritual of it just helps disarm it just in case, ya know? that way if it’s too much, I can rub elbows and say hey I think they might have snuck something into that CBD dram(a)idifier, amierite? hahaha please don’t tell my wife)

The braising of Stoner opened me up to the vastness, the capacity of art, of creation. It boiled my marrow away. It filled the hallways of my bones with the nectar of the creative world, with rolling ladders on bookshelves, with weird names like Hermann and Heronymous. It showed me something intoxicatingly true, substantially human. And leaning into anything else seems like saying no thanks to my opposable thumbs.

I now have less of an urge to howl at the moon and more of a desire to stare at it until it howls back. I dream less of speed and spend my days blindly swinging my butterfly net (pen) through the air, hoping to catch some morsel of genius that is Stoner.

So, sink into Stoner at your own risk. If it leaves you undercooked, feel free to return here for other recommendations (our marrow comes in different viscosities). And if you really must know something about its contents before trying it, I’ll give you this gag: Stoner is more about nothing than it is about something, which somehow makes it about everything.

(please remember to support your local independent bookstore! if you’re in the U.S., you can use this site to find one near you)

***in trying to cook a Jo: please start by giving the pot gentle kisses. then, lather the inside AND outside with extra virgin olive oil. place Jo in the pot and play peek-a-boo until you hear Jo start to sizzle. add Christmas-flavored memories. add hot sauce. add compliments. good job. serve as desired. buen provecho.

we just need a few hundred thousand years

and for these words to form a religion

thEn with the commitment of humanity

we can all gnaw off our thumbs

fight sentience with sentience

devolve beyond the need for porsches

and ordering pad thai

until we turn into slugs

and forget to smile

amen

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