I stole a frozen chicken and tried some Voodoo. I prayed to Shiva but I'm not Hindu. Magic 8 ball said gotta go. The lucky charm I rubbed was actually just a dildo. I brought to Jesus all my desperate pleas, but though he loves the poor he loves us on our knees. So when's your home not your home? When it's owned by the bank you dumb fuck, and the bank wants you out. I diligently worked my way down every dead end street taking every detour I could take - like rubbing a dildo for hours until my hands ached. Now the neighbors line the street. Police pound at my door. Mr. Diligent Dumbfuck went and got a gun because dildos won't do anymore. Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief
Author Archives: luvgoodcarp
Mrs. Muzzle
By Monday morning, a furious Mrs. Muzzle pounced on Uncle's lap, took her petite paw and gave his smirking lips several wicked smacks. But he continued to talk as if he was used to that repeating a tedious tale about a dubious time when Smear the Queer was a Hunger Game the neighborhood kids would play. And everyone was proud and happy though no one was proud and gay. Problem people stayed silent otherwise they were gagged, and proper people spoke English with a Midwest accent - the same one Jesus had. Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief
Twins
Unlike some gentlemen, I was never tempted by twins. They never captivated me - until that pink-driven spring when I encountered your proud peaks in a downy form-fitting sweater. Then I couldn't get twins off my mind. I will also confess surprise that you pounced upon my timid feeler. I expected you three to ignore me. Even more - I expected you to run after that first fumbling night of errant probes and prods, but you stayed. Eventually, winter came, but you did not come with it. That left me cold and relieved. There was a time during that fevered summer when I was concerned I should love you less. But that would have been impossible. Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief
Jesus Saves – It’s Just a Question of When
Darcey Steinke’s Jesus Saves is a coarse and disturbing novel. It is a hair shirt. But you put it on and wear it, because even though the novel makes you uncomfortable you want to find out what happens.
The story opens with a car crash and a dead deer. Later, the deer’s head becomes the centerpiece of a shrine. To what? No idea. Maybe chaos or maybe random acts of violence. And that’s before you realize a teenage girl (like so many before her) has gone missing.
There will be blood. Literal and metaphorical. Blood spilled through cruelty, violence, negligence, and nature. “[Y]ou have to respect the earth, and if you don’t the earth gets hungry and wants blood. That’s what plane crashes are all about, blood payment.” And it’s not just the earth. Society is a vampire. Fortunately, there are plenty of vulnerable and desperate people to feed upon.
The story follows the parallel lives of two teenage girls in southwest Virginia – presumably Lynchburg or Roanoke (Ms. Steinke went to high school in Roanoke). Ginger is a minister’s daughter. Sandy is everyone’s daughter, and she has been kidnapped so she can be sold to a sex trafficking ring. The stories intersect briefly near the end.
Ginger is hardly religious in a traditional sense. “In the Bible [Ginger wryly observes], God was famous . . . for being more pleased by living animals and their slaughter than by a basket of inanimate vegetables.” Ginger’s mother recently died of cancer, and her father can barely function. It doesn’t help that the church’s major donors want him to become a televangelist. In describing a minister at a modern church, he tells Ginger the “head minister wore red suspenders and a blue striped shirt, like a Wall Street banker. They’re using corporate philosophies to make everybody feel like they’re moving up the church ladder, getting a raise or a promotion. But spiritual change is more subtle than that; you can’t just check items off a list.” Unfortunately for him, no one in his church is interested in spiritual change. They want to be entertained.
Our first introduction to Sandy is through a sermon by Ginger’s father. “Her mother says she has a dreamy side, that she collects stuffed animals, reads fantasy novels where horses fly and fairy princesses wear gowns made from flowers.” To Ginger’s father, Sandy is Christ-like, and the community must accept its complicity in her abduction. Everyone must “come to terms with the evil that resides within us.” Needless to say, the customers in his church are not entertained.
Sandy uses her childhood stuffed animals and the flying horses and unicorns in her fantasy novels to cope with the trauma of her kidnapping. As she becomes increasingly unhinged, these characters come to life. They are as real as her kidnapper. As real as Jesus. Sandy’s ordeal is brutal. Or said another way, it is realistic. The violence is not gratuitous or titillating. It is devastating.
So why is the book called Jesus Saves? We don’t know. Jesus is frequently discussed, but he never manifests. However, because we live in southwest Virginia, we would never suggest the title is ironic. That would get us shot. We accept, without question, that Jesus saves. We just wonder when he intends to start.
Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor
Hallmark Cards
Hallmark has nice sentiments, but they meander the gentle slopes of meadows laced with buttercups pollinated by crisp dollar bills. And we are too smart for the platitudes of enterprises that print treacle for profit. At least that's what William and Mary say. Though they annually ask us for money, so they would say that anyway. There is also no denying the obvious: we have been lucky - so far. Though we have stumbled on rocky trails, slipped on slick foothills and blundered over blue ridges, we've never had to scale the Himalayas. So while there have been obstacles, we have overcome them hand in hand. But perhaps that is simply the Hallmark card in me speaking - the one that blithely assumes our journey has been one and the same. Maybe your path has been different. Maybe you climb Himalayan peaks everyday. Maybe I am being foolish and insecure. But that exhausted look on your face suggests you ran uphill for miles today while I walked meters on smooth linoleum. Then there are these scattered scraps of paper - fuzzy phrases that spawn insipid poems parading my mostly muddled thoughts on everything. You can find them everywhere. And then there's you. Furtively writing in a diary I can never find. And I have looked everywhere. Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief First published in Blue Lake Review
Thoughts on the Dangers of Pretending to be a Poet (Part 3)
The dangers are legion, but this post pertains to mockery.
The harshest, obviously, is from your parents. “You are wasting your time and embarrassing the family,” my father says. Then he adds. “No one reads them anyway.”
“How can my poems embarrass the great Carp name if no one reads them?”
“Your unread poems aren’t the embarrassment. You are.”
My mother is gentler. “Muckypants, can you really be a poet if no one reads your poems?”
“You read my poems, Mom.”
“Oh, yes, that’s . . . right. Of course, I do. They’re very . . . quite long, aren’t they?”
“Well, I think they’re only as long as they need to be.”
“Oh, bless your heart.”
As anyone from Roanoke will tell you – if someone says “bless your heart,” you just said something stupid.
Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief
Thoughts on the Dangers of Pretending to be a Poet (Part 2)
The dangers are legion, but I will focus on the primary ones. This post deals with self-loathing.
There is one constant when you pretend to be a poet – rejection. 117% of my poems have been rejected by poetry journals I have never heard of. I don’t think I even sent a poem to some of them. Have poetry journals joined the military-industrial complex? Do they use blanket rejections as pre-emptive strikes?
It takes a massive ego to suffer these slings and arrows. I forget who coined that phrase. It was probably McDonald’s. Fortunately, a massive ego is the only thing about me that’s big. Wait, that came out wrong. Good thing I haven’t posted this yet.
Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief
Your Attention is Holy – “No One is Talking About This”
About a quarter into Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This , a character declares “[y]our attention is holy.” This is true, but it doesn’t seem like it in the portal – Ms. Lockwood’s term for the internet. That’s because everyday your “attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.” This is among the most apt and poetic descriptions of the internet. And the first half of this thoughtful and engaging story examines the internet’s weird vagaries and addictive adrenaline. And at times you will think you are reading poetry.
The main character, who is never named, is a woman who became famous in the portal (a “communal stream-of-consciousness”) for a single five-word post. After it went Corona-viral, people from all over the world invite her to lecture about the “new communication.” Frequently, her comments are inane, but so is the portal – so it works. She travels everywhere, shares bizarre opinions about everything, and because the world is connected, her name (whatever it is – perhaps it doesn’t matter) is now recognized everywhere. Still, oddly, she feels disconnected. “This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?” It brings her to that universal question asked by anyone who has been on social media for more than one hour straight. Have I been wasting my time? Probably, but let’s see what Twitter has to say about that.
Reality (in the form of a text from her mother – because reality these days always arrives as a text from your mother) soon intrudes on virtual reality. Her mother writes “[s]omething has gone wrong . . . How soon can you get here?” Suddenly, our nameless expert on everything is jolted out of the portal. “She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing.”
Indeed, something has gone dreadfully wrong. Her pregnant sister learns that her baby has a rare disease and will probably die in the womb – which also puts her sister’s life in danger. Against all odds, the baby and mother survive the birth, but everyday thereafter the baby’s survival is at risk. So what’s more real than the portal/internet? A baby with a congenital disease. And no one in the real or virtual world (is there a difference?) is talking about it.
The baby now has the nameless aunt’s whole (and holy) attention. “Through the membrane of a white hospital wall she could feel the thump of the life that went on without her, the hugeness of the arguments about whether you could say the word retard on a podcast. She laid her hand against the white wall and the heart beat, strong and striding, even healthy. But she was no longer in that body.” Eventually, the issue of whether the baby will survive is resolved. Then, gradually, the connected world calls our nameless friend back. But how connected is she to it now?
The internet says Patricia Lockwood is a poet, and the internet gets that one right. Her metaphors throughout are incisive and wondrous. Her style is a choppy stream-of-consciousness that would give James Joyce a happy little boner. The style suits an examination of social media’s impact on society. This is a poetic novella filled with humor and sadness. It is a smudge-free mirror reflecting what passes for real life these days.
Thank you for reading. Your attention is holy.
Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor
Thoughts on the Dangers of Pretending to be a Poet (Part 1)
The dangers are legion, but I will focus on the primary ones: self-delusion, self-loathing, and mockery.
Self-Delusion: I am not actually a poet. I simply think I am. But no one else does. Granted, this is far less dangerous (for everyone) than deluding myself into thinking I am an airline pilot when I don’t even have a driver’s license. However, a poet’s wardrobe is really expensive and typically ugly. I used to think tasteful clothes were expensive. Then I learned buying garish clothing that is three sizes too small is super expensive. And ascots . . . you should see the prices for gaudy ascots (as if there is any other kind). Unconscionable!
Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief and Adjunct Professor for Student Loans
Darwin’s Prophet
Is this a fist I see which approaches my face with steroid-assisted velocity? Or is this a fist of the mind, an immaculate conception, gestating in a beer-soaked brain? If real, that news report now rings true: we are indeed evolving into crabs because the fist is truly crustacean-like huge as a Caribbean conch shell with blue enameled calluses; spikey ridges serving as knuckles. Having now considered the fist close-up perhaps it was wrong of me to so freely and so loudly share my concerns about your too obvious and too intimate relations with your mother. After all, you are simply ensuring your odd traits will be inherited. So, good for you, Darwin's Prophet! Managing to crawl all by yourself through the septic foam fringing the shoreline and learning to adapt in a new environment. Your flat head and crooked legs proclaim that you are the pathfinder in evolution's wilderness. And well done, too, Darwin's Pharmacist! Opting for an unnatural selection of supplements to enhance bulk and brawn over brains. Your scrunched brow crusted with barnacles and those black pebbles passing as eyes affirm that in the future only mutants will be fit to survive. Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief and Adjunct Professor of Student Loans
Pungent Sound Journal of Pulp Poetry 