Google Lyf

By Fiona Woodman

At eight years old, she sat on her knees in her father’s chair, her face small and keen in the blue screen light. Slowly she typed: “what is div…” and resolutely eyed the list of suggestions before clicking on “What is divorce?”

Two years older, she reached from between her mother’s arms to type: “are the tiny things that float around on your eyeballs when you’re zoning out actually microscopic bugs? ”

She rode home from school on her twelfth birthday without saying a word, waiting for her mother to comment on her sullenness. When they arrived home, she typed into their computer, “should you say sorry when you think it’s not your fault?”

Crouched on the floor of her closet at fourteen years old, she typed almost as a whisper: “porn?” She immediately slammed the laptop shut, exhaled, and with one eye closed tentatively opened it again.

Love, Like Lupines

By Sierra Adler

If love is a longing, I have never been lonely. –
I form you here as I reach for butter,
in the worst of the house, in my summer dress,
sowing seeds through pocket holes.
All the hours spent lying in bed watching the house shift,
the solar spin, the swamp lilies that bloomed too soon.
It was February, just a plea to fill the emptiness;
by March they, forgotten, lie like rotting stones.

But, where love is longing plants lavender in the backyard;
like how we look with our books, in the back room,
in our brown chairs. Nights to climb up the planters,
lay vertebrate-to-vertebrae just to weed the hurry,
my sweet pea confection. There;
nestled in my forearms, where the sky paints porcelain,
where you willed forget-me-nots,
love, like lupines, unadorned.

Sierra Adler’s writing is built out of long bus rides and big skies; it’s amalgamations of water weight and wanderlust. She likes to collect moments in little notebooks and string them together to make things suited for bigger notebooks. This piece can be found in Witch Haus PDX Issue #3. 

Fragments Of The Obvious

By Harrison Smith

Gripping a fork in one hand
and thrusting it into the wall socket.

With the other,
you hold mine.

The gaps in my teeth,
replete with clumps of
fruity flesh,
lips plump and itching.

The adder circling my inner thigh,
delirious for juices dripping.

Down my frontside,
those poignant droplets
feel like little lances.

And you, standing nude,
in your solitary way,
bristling with electric current.

Our hands bound together,
I kneel, head bowed.

Harrison Smith is Portland’s biggest Weezer fan (sike did you read my fanfiction yesterday). His music can be found at turtlenecked.bandcamp.com. This poem was published in Witch Haus PDX Issue #3.

An Ideal Pop Song: Rivers Cuomo walks into a bar…

Story by Cameron Crowell

Illustration by Caitlin Degnon

“In the 90s Rivers had made a charttopping pop album, which he immediately followed with a sophomore flop, sinking into irrelevance. For fifteen years he took notes profusely, avowing to write the perfect pop song. He studied every pop artist from Green Day to Beyonce, and could predict a 4/4 time signature after hearing the first note.“

* Rivers spins side to side on a plush bar stool fingering his Screwdriver with his right indexfinger, letting the ice cubes rattle and wishing he had remembered his tape recorder to capture this tiny sound. Perfect for an extra layer in a pre-chorus. In his left hand he clutches a white dotted black composition book. Scrawled in black sharpie is SONG BOOK 459. Orangejuicepulp clings to the three domecrested ice cubes when he stops stirring for more than five seconds. He asked for no ice. The bartender has a curlybrown beard with crumbs (from the seafood special). Rivers reaches for his pen to write this detail down, then immediately returns his finger to the drink.

Life Looks Like This

By Ciara Dolan

My brain is a lemon and every day I go to work and squeeze it for hours and hours. Sometimes I squeeze so hard my eyes turn red. These are the drips, all the little drips that drop when I’m not squeezing.

Closing my eyes, monsters casually walk back into the foreground of my mind like guests on a talk show.

Lidless eyes stare at me as I sleep, as I eat, as I watch cartoons, boring holes into the foundations of my life. I want to fucking gouge them.

All these condos sure would be nice if anyone could afford them.

I used to lust after those old houses but now it’s the shiny condos—they don’t wilt and sigh. I need to forget about everything wilting and sighing while I’m trying to live.

The city’s blooms dump bubblegum colored confetti in the streets, a seasonal party.

Joined a gym, partly for the air conditioner.

I’m afraid of heights. Succumbing to gravity, crashing into earth sounds like the worst way for the terrestrial and the cosmos to meet.

When the consumer becomes a character in the mythology they used to worship, nothing looks as gilded.

 

Ciara Dolan is a writer and editor living in Portland. In addition to editing Witch Haus PDX she is currently the Music Editor of the local alt. weekly newspaper ‘Portland Mercury.’ This poem was featured in Witch Haus PDX Issue #3, available now for $5.

on being there when they need it, and wondering where our fathers were.

By Emily VanKoughnett

I don’t know how friendship is born. It seems to come like knowing. Like the steps of our house in the dark, familiar and unexpected.

I knew you for just three weeks
but i knew i would know you for a while
so I held your hand as you cried on the kitchen floor. Rivers have not wept so much but we tried to dam it up anyways with vodka and spiteful words. Things we know do not last, things that do not hold. The door still open and stammering.

Lately it seems there are things blooming in our ovaries and the folds of our brains that make us cry – unwanted and sickening. The linings of our uteruses blooming, growing unkempt and wild. Side effects that sneak in like whispers, on the backs of other things.

Us girls, we eat circular pills colored like candy necklaces. We plant metal in our arms and put wishbones between our thighs. We compare results and stories like regularly scheduled programming. Conversations for closed doors, the comfort of your best friend’s sheets.

My father has never seen a bloodied piece of toilet paper, but he used to wipe the blood from my knees.

Emily VanKoughnett is a writer from Minnesota who lives in Portland. Her piece ‘tectonics‘ can be found in Witch Haus PDX Issue #2. This piece is included in the newest zine Witch Haus PDX Issue #3.

On Returning From Crescent Beach

By Journey Fetter

In the openness—
an openness that makes me believe
in powers beyond my own
(because that is too much vastness
to contain nothing)—
there is damp gray sky.
Crashing, crashing, crashing water
is a playful tick, tick, tick.
This water has touched many things
and taken most of them away.

I balance between ocean and land.
Traces of me are stolen as I move on.
Tick, tick, tick.
But I am still here.
Oh, God, I am still here.

I want to erase this place;
I will not have it again,
and it will not have me.
But I am Caligula, coming by to say hello
to this old friend of mine.
Hello,
old friend. I am not as strong
as I used to be.

Reluctantly I turn to go
and the openness is indifferent.

Journey Fetter is an English major with a creative writing focus at Lewis and Clark College. This piece can be found in Witch Haus PDX Issue #3 (The Movement Issue), which is on sale now.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Peanuts

By Cameron Forest Crowell // Editor

I cried on the bus today reading the biography of Charles M Schulz.
Actually not even a biography,
I read his Wikipedia page.

Sometimes I think I am Charlie Brown,
I’m long and yellow and I don’t know why I’m sad.
Even my cat “has gone commercial,”
He only eats Science Diet and ornaments.

Charles M Schulz made a four-panel Peanuts comic everyday for fifty years,
With only one 5-day break around his 75th birthday.
He developed a hand tremor in 1980 and could only draw
If he held his right wrist in place with his left hand,
Yet he still ached out comics for the next twenty years.

Skip & Paula is back with “Lavender”

By Cameron Crowell // Editor

Hey Hey, I have taken a bit of a breaking from posting these little prose/poetry/comics, but I’ve had a few saved up that I want to get around to posting. Here’s the most recent one I’ve wrote about Skip & Paula.  

Skip picked three stalks of Lavender on his walk and twisted one through the holes in his brown wool sweater, pressing the other two for Paula in his notebook. She loved tea and scents and flowers like he. They were sweeter than he’d ever remembered. Lavender grew wild in the open lot beneath the apple tree beside the other weeds. The lot was a mudpile, but a mudpile that would become overgrown grass in late Spring.

Spring

I wanna smash into Spring

like an I-5 bug on a windshield.

I may be bloodied and dead

But, I realize with the end,

comes rebirth.

There is a new watery hand,

that is guiding me.

A vanguard who is joyously setting me free.

To laugh with the sunshine,

And the daffodils,

And the legendary fields of Texas Bluebonnets

that are present in my mind.

I can hear a Willie Nelson tune,

forcing me to dance.

I have legs now

So, we can skip along the sidewalk

Hand in hand.

Glowing

with the Spring.

 

–Portia Sisten