Micrograffiti: Stefany Anne Golberg & Sean Hill

we live to learn now to love

By Stefany Anne Golberg

He had been staring at that wall for like, he didn’t know, a half hour? It was a stupid phrase. The stupidest phrase he had ever seen, just like that, spray painted on a wall. It was the kind of phrase that aimed to sell you something, but he couldn’t think what. Ice cream maybe, or lady products. Anyway, he had to get going.

What can you say to such a stupid phrase? How can you just write that, out there for everyone to look at? Someone must be really embarrassed. Anyone who writes something like that only wants one thing. And then they had to go and paint a heart in the middle.

He took off his hat and sat down on the ground. He really had to get going too.

we live to Learn ♥ how to Love

By Sean Hill

An ocean and half the country away from Bemidji, Minnesota, this bit of graffiti. It takes me back to that Sunday night in the Hard Times Saloon. You’re out of town on business. I’m beginning to feel lonely and hungry. The saloon is open late and in walking distance, and I want a beer to go with the wings I will order. The guy on the barstool to my left props his forearm against the bar, and holds his right hand in the air—swollen, oozing blood—clearly busted. After a couple wings and sips, “What happened?”

“Got into a fight with my girlfriend; she made me mad. You know, it’s not right to hit a woman.”

“Yeah.”

“I took a walk instead, but when I got to the corner I punched the Stop sign. So I came down here for some beers.”

“I see.”

“She made me mad, but I didn’t hurt something that’s alive.”

“Right.” We talk some more while I finish the wings and another beer. He seems like a nice guy; I worry about his hand. I walk home stopping at every Stop sign, in no hurry because you’re not there.

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Stefany Anne Golberg (“we live to learn now to love”) is a founder of the nascent Huckleberry Explorer’s Club and writes for The Smart Set.

Sean Hill (“we live to Learn ♥ how to Love”), author of the poetry collection Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, lives in Bemidji, Minnesota, the first city on the Mississippi River and home to Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox.

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Editor’s Note: This week, two writers responded to the same image but interpreted the text of the tag differently, one reading it as “we live to learn now to love” and the other reading it as “we live to learn how to love.” -S.S.

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Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Click here to read more >>

Micrograffiti: Blue Grate by John W. Evans

Blue Grate by John W. Evans

At first, he told himself that grief was a shallow bowl filled with water, and when you carried it, it spilled, and when it spilled you filled it again.  Those were the days of walking across the state highway to the video store, coffee shop, supermarket.  Always, the same path back, in front of the same neighbor’s house, with the dog and the electric fence.  When the city replaced traffic lights with roundabouts, his name appeared in the paper.  He had said something about it to a woman outside of the hardware store.  That evening, he decided to leave the state.  The seal on his driver’s license was out of date.  His bumper: last election.  Later, he would miss the certainty of repetitive acts, day after night watching full seasons of old television shows.  They embraced variations on the same kinds of redemption—charity, sublimation, self-actualization—that he found comforting, then suffocating.  Too much stasis and compromise.  The homilies set to tasteful pop-rock.  Grief, he decided, should be linear, then unremarkable.  There were words for loss too finite for suffering.

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John W. Evans is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University

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Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Click here to read more >>

 

Micrograffiti: Ben Franklin by Michael Noll

Ben Franklin by Michael Noll

Drove across the Ben Franklin bridge from Philly to murder capital of the nation, and I said, not knowing one side of the river from the other, “I’ve always wanted to cross this bridge,” because have you seen it? Two towers, woven steel cables the size of your chest, spanning the river wider than anything from where I’m from, wide enough for that beluga whale that swam up the Delaware that summer. We’re halfway over, the port and dead shipping yards behind us, a dead city before us, she says that someone from her family is from there. He carries a gun, drives a van, picks up furniture off the street, couches with no cushions, no springs, no legs, no back, no upholstery, no arms – just an empty curb – rough town, even the couches got out. Babies point pistols through crib bars, their mamas hand over cigarettes and say, “Give it to me in the arm.” We’re on those streets now, circling to find the way back, facing a dead end, this guy, city of Camden on his shirt, prickles on his head where the hair’s growing back, my wife’s saying “Drive, drive,” and I think—

That’s all you got?

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Michael Noll likes bridges.

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Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Click here to read more >>

Micrograffiti: Me by Stephanie Czarnota

Me by Stephanie Czarnota

Three different teachers, three times in the ninth grade. They make you write an essay about your hero after you read that long ass poem, which doesn’t even rhyme, about the guy who goes on a long trip.

I’m not here because I love the story, that’s for sure.

Last year I called Odysseus a punk ass. Set a trashcan on fire in math.  Algebra.  Matches.  Principal called me destructive and sent me on a long trip, but nobody called me a hero.

Not tall, but I tower over the rest of the ninth grade.  Everybody scratches away at paper with a pencil, like it will make a difference. Like they matter.

The teacher stares.  I don’t know her name.  She doesn’t know mine. I think about that one-eyed monster eating the dude’s men.  I think about how weak that punk ass was while the ladies sang their song.  I wouldn’t have caved.  Weak ass shit.

I don’t carry a pen and I don’t have any paper.  On the floor next to my desk, somebody left crumpled homework and half a crayon.  Plenty of room on the back for me to write: Hero.  Me.

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Stephanie Czarnota’s heroes are high school students.

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Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Click here to read more >>

Micrograffiti: What This Is by Michael Wolfe

What This Is by Michael Wolfe

“We could fuck,” Sam said.

“Then what is this?”

“Killing time. Feeling crummy.” Sam pressed the man’s face against the woman’s concrete cartoon ass. “Remembering why we shouldn’t leave our wives.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Not driving my stepson to school.” Sam forearmed the back of the man’s neck.

“I’m not married.”

“Not cooking the wife banana pancakes.”

The man stepped out of the jeans bunched at his feet, replanted.

Sam gripped the man’s shoulders. “Ruining every hotel lobby, every airport terminal,” he said. “Everywhere we’ll bump into someone attractive.”

“Don’t shoot in me.”

“Thinking what all we can get away with,” Sam said. “Scoot forward.”

“Or on my jeans.”

“Wishing we made good money so we could get a room.”

“Let’s go on a trip. We could have the whole weekend.” The man pushed off the wall and turned his head so Sam could see his lips. “At the beach.” Light rolled at them from the left.

Sam locked his arms around the man’s stomach and his own chin jerked toward the ceiling. Soon the world above them would happen. He rested his chin on the man’s head. “You need a haircut.”

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Michael Wolfe lives in Albuquerque and doesn’t always write about sex.

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Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Click here to read more >>

Micrograffiti: One Green, One Blue by Stephanie Austin

One Green, One Blue by Stephanie Austin

Toni pushes Nat in a chair, climbs onto his lap, and pins his arms with her knees.

“I’m hungry,” he says.

“I knew you’d say that.” She peels the paper off an ice-cream sandwich and holds it up to his mouth. “Eat it. Use your tongue.”

Toni looks in his eyes as he wiggles. One green, one blue.

“I’m numb.” He shifts forward making her tip back. “I got you a surprise.”

She lets him go. Nat leads her out to the sidewalk and stands behind a couch.

“Ta-dah!”

Streetlights spray yellow. Clouds touch the ground. It begins to rain. The smell of exhaust and cement crawl into her skin.

She crosses her arms. “We have a couch.”

“It’s the fucking couch,” he says, coming around to the front. “A couch for fucking.”

She wipes the running mascara from under her eyes then touches the arm of the couch. Her fingers leave a black mark. A car horn beeps. She flinches. Nat reaches for her arm and squeezes. She looks at the white imprint his hand makes. She waits for the blood to rush in.

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Stephanie Austin enjoys drinking wine and long walks on the beach, but not at the same time because that’s how accidents happen.

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Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Click here to read more >>

Micrograffiti: Time of Death 8:32pm by Moira Muldoon

Time of Death 8:32pm by Moira Muldoon

The locusts had come back to DC, covering the ground, the bushes, the air. With each step, Michael inadvertently crunched them, and snapped wings clung to his socks. If he hadn’t needed to smoke, he would have stayed inside for a month until every last one died.

At 4pm, the hospice nurse – a well-built woman in her thirties with a master’s in theology – had told them that it would be only a few more hours. The locusts would live longer than his brother.

Michael heard his brother’s chest rattle and went outside. The nurse followed him, shook off a seat cushion. Bugs flipped through the air.  “Got a smoke?”

He slid her the pack and some matches. “Which plague came after locusts?”

“I studied eastern religions mostly. But I think darkness was next, then the death of first-born sons.”

The night before he’d watched The Messenger on the flatscreen, in surround sound. The film was about soldiers who deliver bad news – an old hand teaching a newbie the ropes. Never say “passed away” or “no longer with us.”  Say “dead,” say “die.”

“Your parents are good people,” she said.

Yes.

“Your brother too.”

Michael could barely hear over the incessant buzzing.

“You know, these are cicadas. Not locusts. Locusts are more like grasshoppers.” She spoke almost to herself. “Not that it matters a hill of beans.” Her back sagged a little as the sky began its physical darkening.

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Moira Muldoon is a writer based in Dallas, TX.

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Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Click here to read more >>

Micrograffiti: Yurt-erus by Jill Meyers

Yurt-erus by Jill Meyers

Our concentration is going and soon, who knows, it might be gone altogether. We are already becoming different people than we were then. Our brains reorganize themselves.

We had been filling up ashtrays, telling Madame Curie jokes, Googling “double rainbows” on our phones. It was an 80-degree night at the end of August. We’d chased the last of the beer with limes and were drifting through the yard when the brisk, efficient sound of Allie’s leg brought everyone back.

Donnie and Abigail were in the yurt-erus, and they’d let the lantern go dark. We all knew what that meant, even Allie, who was executing really top-notch flips on the trampoline. The yurt-erus flaps were painted to look like labia. When you came out of there, you were reborn—anywhere along the gender spectrum. John had painted that, too: tongues of fire spilling out of a goddess’ mouth.

A crisp snap, like someone popping a clean sheet off a clothesline. The wind knocked out of her for a second, sure. Then a slurp of breath. Joaquin took a picture of her fibula. Someone said we should call an ambulance.

Donnie pushed the flaps aside and called out, “I’m Donna Reed!”

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Jill Meyers has lived in consensus-based, vegetarian coops in Northern California. If provoked, she will break your fibula.

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Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Click here to read more >>

Micrograffiti: Breaks by Jeff O’Keefe

Breaks by Jeff O'Keefe

Sully and I loved wrestling the same and I wasn’t about to fight him for a slot. That winter I sucked down to 114 so he could have 121. I couldn’t get it going. Some dude from Glastonbury made me look foolish. Sully was undefeated, though. He was on a tear. Mom would fix him spaghetti the night before matches and I’d be there with my grapefruit, shivering. But I was psyched for him. It was like I was headed to States, too.

Then Coach cut me. He cut me. This is the breaks, he said. Give it a go next year, at 128.

That’ll be Sully’s slot, I said.

Well give it a go, he said.

At home I kicked the bathroom door off one hinge. I snotted all over my shirtfront, crying. Sully sat against the wall, his head low, watching me.

We’ll tell, he said, his lip trembling.

He meant about the magazines. The whole team knew about them – what drawer they were in, where the key was. Nobody told because why would you?

Twenty-five years ago, and still, when Sully calls, my first thought is: that was wrong, that was wrong, we ended that man’s life.

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Jeff O’Keefe lives in San Francisco.

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Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Click here to read more >>

Micrograffiti: Ripple Effect by Stacy Muszynski

Ripple Effect by Stacy Muszynski

The pain didn’t register until later.

At first it was a thought. Not even. This thing blooming in my chest, suffocating, electric.

My dry mouth, all that wet—he took me out for a drink.

I had to drive, his situation being what it was.

I give you two weeks before you do it, said Easy E, her mouth a silent “oh” while she painted her eyelashes. I watched her do one eye then the other. I’m no whore, I said.

It took 13 days.

But before that, the drunk swim in the hotel pool. We weren’t drunk. It just felt that way. His underwear looked like a Speedo. Yeah. I know. But they looked real good. And the groundskeeper came out of nowhere like a ghost, shimmering awful white in the dark. Pool waves leftover, from my body to his and back, flickering over the ghost.

He stood there in those underwear, his hair dripping, between me and the ghost, until I finished dressing.

You are so white, he said, at the airport before we left each other for just about the last time. Sickness does that, I said. But it was my heart attack, he said. Ripple effect.

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Stacy Muszynski is no stranger to pool-hopping.

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Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Click here to read more >>