| Rewind Fridays Mrs. Wampler would give in and leave the projector light on as the film wound from one reel to the other. At six, the world moving backward amazed us more than the world moving forward, though that amazed us, too. Full blooms squeezed back into buds; seedlings hid themselves underground, but our favorite was our claymation version of Beauty and the Beast. We would cheer as each petal affixed itself to the thorny stem and the beast grew stronger, clap as Beauty no longer wept at his deathbed. And soon, he was a prince again, too polite to ever insult a crone. This taught us that beginnings are always best, despite all they say about Happily Ever After. If we could invent the automatic rewind, bodies would expel bullets that would rest eternally in chambers, 130,000 people would materialize as the Enola Gay swallowed the bomb, landmines would give legs and fingers back to broken children. Right now, teeming cancer cells would be rebuilding blood and bone. "Rewind" appeared in the 2007 issue of Talkin' Blues and won 1st place in the general division of the Dylan Days Poetry Competition, honoring Bob Dylan. ©Shaindel Beers 2007 |
| What Will We Do With You? This Bone Has Almost No Flesh Protecting It— But I am like any porcelain doll, waiting to be destroyed by a hammer. Brothers do these things to incite the cries of their sisters. They think This is power. Someday they will learn that power is smiling gleefully up at the anvil. Where I am from, everyone looks like a corpse. We are ivory and blue-veined until cooled at 0◦ for 28-32 minutes. Then we begin to color up—cheeks become pink, eyes, a teary blue, lips, a red slash, sometimes painted crooked by a drunken artist. Because, as Linus Torvalds said, “there is nothing to do at home but drink.” Where I want to take you the mountain passes are cleared in July— until it snows at the end of August and some years Hidden Lake is always under snow, but I will climb until I find it. Though you seem to be made of sand and fashioned for warmth, I will lock you in a cabinet—porcelain dolls are dangerous like this sometimes. You and I are not so different, the same color when the sun shines through the khaki sheets. But this sun is too much. Even the sheets can’t stop it—It is scarier than the hammer. This sun, even in the morning, in February, is going to obliterate us all. "What Will We Do With You? This Bone Has Almost No Flesh Protecting It--" appeared in the 2006 issue of Eleventh Muse and won 3rd place in Eleventh Muse's inaugural poetry competition. ©Shaindel Beers 2006-7 |
| Why It Almost Never Ends with Stripping You start out doing it for the bucks— more than you’d ever imagined, enough, at first, to make up for the rest of the shit that comes along with the job— the groping despite the “No Touching” sign, the bastards who bring in straight girls to con- vince them they’re bi, the girls nervous and con- tinously fidgeting, while cash— sweat-stained tens—shake in their hands, signaling you over to dance while they imagine themselves anywhere but there. “It’s a job,” you tell yourself, you’ll just hold out the rest of the summer. But you realize the rest of the girls said the same thing, and they’ve con- templated quitting for years, give blowjobs in the back for fucking crazy money. You don’t want to be them but imagine living the way they do, see them signing five-figure checks on shopping sprees, signing feature dancer contracts at clubs. You wrest with the fact that girls who have the image of putting out make ten times more. Buy con- doms. Keep them on you just in case. The sugar’s pouring in—you’re only giving handjobs. You hear what you can make at outside jobs doing bachelor parties, you’re signing on for three most weekends, making it hand over fist, stripping at clubs the rest of the week. The girl who dances as Con- suela Cummings says she can imagine you being “the next big thing. Imagine your picture on boxes—Not just a job, a career!” You read over the contract— mark Xs for things you’ll do, or not, sign on the line—$5K if you check the rest— anal, gangbang, scat bring in the greenbacks. These days you don’t read contracts, you just sign to compete with the rest of the gravy- starved girls who try to imagine it’s just a job. "Why It Almost Never Ends with Stripping" appeared in Hunger Mountain,
Spring 2006, an issue on appropriated form, and is discussed in an
interview with Irish writer, Grace Wells, in the Spring 2007 issue of Contrary Magazine. ©Shaindel Beers 2006-7 |