Sown Sundered of Self and Son
By Whitt Castle


But Bernhard, he said that "one never knows who one is," sayin' that "the others tell you who you are, don't they? and [that] as you're told so a million times if you live a long life, in the end you don't know at all who you are. Everyone says something different," and that fucking "you yourself also say something different each new moment," but see, I just don't buy it, can't see myself as anything but myself, the I am me that mine myself meets alone when reposal rended bedwise, know what I mean, fuckin' bemong the swarming dark of angels descending as locus on the gutted virgin's flesh, the plague's thereon devourment in the silence screamt silent self-sundered of son and seed. Hello.

But that's what Pa'd say, dying in the back he'd say that the locus'd be descending on these virgins any day now, any-fuckin'-day now, that their flesh'd be swifted in the gorge of Bejeevus on the land, Sin Save Us.

He sits watching the day swirl above his bed in back, behind the house where the brush runneth and sun warmeth and the bugs they bed down in his ears. She sends me out, the prodigal of conscripted return, sends me to scoop the bugs fuckin' in the tuft of his earball. Ha'n't been back long enough to tend wet his death rattle, yet the fuck of family has me sweatin' spit-to-shit, splittin' wood in the crack of night, Sweet Bejeevus about me, mannered in his earthly manor, fucking nymphs just beyond the crust of dark in the wheeze of trees gusted to hush yond the house's cleared surround whereof nascence donkey-punched me without the womb to free fall to the good dirt Ma stood straddled above, Pa past the stumps fistin' the oak of lingered breadth that oversaw our Crime of Life, ashamed then of the tears born of him.

Then this cock-eyed prick, he said that "perhaps its inevitable," dig'um, articulating his perhaps that "one has to choose," fucking choose, "between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is," like we're all hog-tied to this fucking headboard existence and there looming in the lurch of lust and violence is Life with fucking chloroform fresh on His knuckles and you can't fucking scream, you can't fucking scream cos he's a ball-gag duct-taped tight in your gullet leaving moaning the only sound you can and will not make, screaming hateful fear flared wet through your red nostrils and the rope is thick but perhaps just thick enough to budge, the swarm of angels descending to savage ravaged he whose shadow crests your brow.

She used to sit with him, when he first demanded to be moved outside. It took seven of us, the Brewster boys past the quarry with us three Rex boys, strapped tight in sinewy youth but that sum'bitch bore a five foot girth in gut alone, laded leaden in the wallow of worship and pork-whiskey. Ma took the neck, wouldn't let anyone take the neck, and what with Pa's namesake, Steven, gripping thigh-wide ankles, and solemnal Solomon handfullin' Pa's right asscheek and me grippin' a good chunk of cheek myself, we grunted that motherfucker four whole feet 'fore his five hundred pounds bore itself gravity-bidden onto the barrow plank Steven threw together the night before.

Back then she would sit with him, and when the hiss of his lungs cracked to cough, spasms that buckled the beast, she would rub his chest, beneath the sun and moon, she would stroke his woolen chest, bare to glare still the pallid palling beneath the peppered-white thicket, and hum the hymnals of Bejeevus the Abject till Pa's settled throes whistled contrapuntal to her tight-lipped melody.

But Pa's been dying some time now, angel-ravaged or not, and I think Ma has had her fair share of shit. Tendin' death sucks fuck-luck outta skunks, licks pig prick to prig, dig? And he ain't fakin'. Jesus were he fakin', Bejeevus bedamn us—if he were fakin', I would bleed to earth that'un hoggen-wilde, fuckin' gut to ground his being in soil.

But he ain't fakin', been dyin' for years, seen him shit barf and sneeze cum, the man's just fallin' apart. Fucker of it all is that we don't know when the mass is going to pass, how long he can last, and if his dyin' word won't be the final function of Folly fain to fuck us all. But the man of burden is the burden of man, Blessed Bejeevus Bemused, as the child burdens till burdened—birth-written as heir damned air to err, he's sewn in me the seed of his undoing.

We played cards across his width when we were younger, though we ain't aged much now—Solomon pushin' driving, Steven pushin' teen, myself no caked out cracker yet—when Ma 'n Pa wept proud wet hot into my chest, my shakin' palms, they cursed me the first of them to matriculate, to wander urban the sprawl, past the confines of the oaken woods, branches noosed to swing Death in the black rustle of the courting night. So I went, I went and I saw and I lived like no other, burnt bridges and fucked queens, motherfucker, I've seen enough shit to know better, though shit if I've seen enough.

And she weeps. She always weeps come three, when he used to gather us for prayer, robed to hood in the black, purple, and grey of Bejeevus' Stigmatic Bruise. She misses that, Ma misses that about him. He was a passionate man, once.

She weeps now. It's three. Glare-beaten by the sun's relent ahind clouded walls of white, I consider again the blade in my boot, its serrate serenade cooing the calm of Pa's throatal length. I listen to Ma weep, and sigh fogged resolve onto the gleam unsheathed from Jocasta's brooch in the pale burn of fucking Phaeton's flaming flail arcing fatherless into the morrow.


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I am a writing instructor for an online college as well as the local community college here in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I have been published in the West Wind Review, Negative Suck, and here in Weirdyear.

Ducking the Moon
By Whitt Castle


We graced dance astral, then; limping wrists over my shoulders your fingers dipped caress at the hairs of my neck.



—The cat is hungry, you say, now, in chaised recumbence beneath the filtered sun slit patient through the blind venetian's rayed gaze of our gray these days static in repose.



Spin and dip, waltz and fly, our means were negotiable, within grasp, needing only will.



—And the children. They need food, too, you continue, a glance askance shouldered to the echoed madness never less than a step behind.

—Children?



Persistent atop silence's insistence, we would dance beyond the song, feet in adamant defiance refusing the absent presence then about us, submitting only to the dreaming still seeming to sing to our silent sway and spin, the song ceaseless in our soft embrace.



—Mary, Thomas, Phillip, Courtney, and Alex.



You used to say that as long as we danced, earth our feet would never know, would never need. And I would remark every time that truer words knew no birth as those through such fleshéd and sanguine lips. And you would repeat "sanguine," and I would laugh and bite your lower, your tears churning silver smiles to cheek when I wiped the blood across my face.



—Mine? I ask and you back your hand to violent heights and descent despite the distance that spreads me reading reclined across the room, but the volatile volition in your eyes is diffused as Debussey’s La Mer comes on the stereo and ushers our day to noon from dawn.



I hear no children playing, nor cats mewing. Only the sea, which we live none too near.



You would sing, back then, should the music be lacking, absent as ascendant and gliding steps soared our heads to the moon.



There is a television in the room, a layer of dust beneath a layer of post-its beneath a layer of scribbled reminders to clean it. It never laughs anymore. It never danced.



—Whose if not yours? you ask, though I’d forgotten what.

—I’m sorry, dear, as I was lost in the journey of the mad doctor's elliptical ramblings into nocturnal finality, —What was that again?



Your abrupt rises to tip the drink at your feet, a drink we’d both forgotten. I sip from mine tabled aside me, and you stomp towards a refill. I come erect, steps cautious though without intent to the window beneath which the chaise resides. And pull up the blinds.



A glorious day of gloriole-locked near noon light, and for years it seems that we’ve known no sun other. There is a sea, in the yonder-lust, and it cackles immortal with Time lapping the shore in the ebb and flow of Life. Behind me, above the recliner, there are pictures, five, facsimiles of each other blank grinning stares tight-lipped into the day awaiting account behind me.



You drink slow steps back, sipping clear, and neither of us can regard the waves now playing. Our moment is tired, appropriates the silence between us. It will not be long, though, before the wind and sea wax discursive, bantering our minds awake. Debussy plays us, is deft on the whim or wan of any given day: the desire and doubt our aging flesh can no longer act upon.



On casual evenings quiet, I would catch you unawares, dim lights casting dark your high cheekbones with the moon again managing to glare its peek through the bare glass of the pulled blinds, remove to the table your sinking drink from your thinking hands, and take you in my arms, a cooing delicacy of swoop and grace, dancing therein the night to forever.



—The dog has died, you say, as if it just occurred to you, and you startle briefly when then I take the barrel from your hand, a slight sip afore setting it to ring wet the dust of the sill's neglect, and step into your gait. Your eyes glint yesterday’s splendor, hue blue and deceiving. I allow the lie to live, release its throat to breathe. We are young again, ducking the moon in dance.

—We don’t have a dog.

—We did . . . dip, turn and glide. . . .

—Seventeen years ago.

—The children, though? Tell me our children are in the next room . . . glide to turn, to pause. . . .

—They are, poisoned to sleep with arsenic. . . .

—And the cat? It’s been fed? spin from glide, step to turn. . . .

—You’ve yet to feed it.



Spin to dip, kiss.


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I am a writing instructor for an online college as well as the local community college here in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I have been or will be published in the West Wind Review and Negative Suck, respectively.