Issue 5. Summer 2016.Contents.![]() return to the table of contents, or click ![]() To download a .pdf file of the issue, click here. |
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Letter from the Editors
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I so fragile? So frightening? So beguiling?
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Summer 1984
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![]() I first met Jimmy at an independent film festival in Burbank. Jimmy played a spoken word poet in the aforementioned Beat Angel, an independent film about Jack Kerouac coming back from the dead. In it, Kerouac’s spirit lands in the body of a hobo bumming for spare change during a poetry open mic held in celebration of Kerouac’s birthday. The filmmaker was from Bellingham, as were many of the actors and crew. Jimmy’s role was brief, just a flash compared to the rest of the film, but I must have watched and re-watched his scene dozens of times. He was so62 · |
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charismatic. He wore a Mad Men-style light-colored suit and a matching fedora. He was smoking a cigarette as he recited one of his original poems, I don’t remember which one, it could have been from one of his chapbooks—“It Takes a Whole Mall to Raise a Child,” or “Women are from Venus, Men are from Bars.” On the back covers of his chapbooks more established poets wrote glowing reviews of Jimmy’s work, saying he wrote in the tradition of Jack Kerouac, or Charles Bukowski. One of his bios described him as having worked as a bouncer on the Blackfeet Indian Rez, as a welfare cheat, and as a plasma donor.
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It’s no great associative leap to say that Jimmy was Neal Cassady incarnate. For one thing, he never stopped talking. And it seemed like most everything he said was either pee-your-pants riotous or some deep, philosophical truth, like a soothsayer, a soothsayer with a laugh track. A shaman with mic. When I told Jimmy that his vagabond life of riding the rails, eating in missions, and sleeping on the streets should be made into a sitcom, he immediately said, “Yeah, a sitcom called ‘Honey, I’m Homeless!’”
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him. “Like she was afraid I’d run off with a cheerleader or something.” He joked about a junior-squad cheerleader being too old for him.
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Tiffany Midge has published fiction and nonfiction in As/Us, Hinchas de Poesia, The Raven Chronicles, Yellow Medicine Review, Sovereign Bodies, Quarterly West, and more. The 2012 recipient of the Kenyon Review Earthworks Prize for Indigenous Poetry and recipient of the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Award, she holds an MFA from the University of Idaho and currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Moscow, Idaho. Her poetry collection Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed was published by Greenfield Review Press, and her poetry collection The Woman Who Married a Bear is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press. She is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
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This is Meant to Hurt You
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enough that life, it seemed, was normalizing. Joe was playing his drums in a band, even going on weekend-long Northwest tours. He was working. It started to feel like we were a normal couple in their early 30s again.
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hours in waiting rooms beside women with white permed hair and men with canes while everyone else his age seems to be traveling the world and having children and buying houses.
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would get him hired. Nice guy. Smart and easy to talk to. He got the job.
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when I was young, but I found an outlet for it through the punk and metal scenes. Anger, there, wasn't a scary thing; it was a shared human experience. Through our collective rage, we could disappear into the noise and feel more alive.
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beauty of the stars, as I knew them, would change.
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By 2016, Joe’s body starts working again. He can walk, he starts to work. He leaves the house everyday and suddenly—just as fast as he got sick—life becomes normal. Quiet.
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About Moss
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Issue Archive
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Call for Papers
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