NOVEMBER 2019 | NEW HOME NOVEMBER
fiction | T.J. BUTLER | the children
You’re beset by the burgeoning odor, and by the silence. You can only control one of the two, so you break the silence by softly crooning to the children on each hip. You’re distracting the three of you, and you have authored a fact; there’s no third child because you have no extra place on your body to scoop, and tuck, and settle it. Now it is also written that there never was a third child’s room; you cannot conceive of a third child in a room you walked past because you did not enter, because you did not save it. And so there are two. They are real, and you have them both. The top of each head smells milky and warm, and you’re breathing in the scent of life, two, and breathing out the scent of life, two.
On Springsteen and Other Fathers | Things I Can Easily Imagine Elon Musk Doing | Strongly Agree | Retired Stripper | Showgirls (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1995)
I try to be as approachable and, like, common of a writer as I can. I don’t want to stand at any degree of remove from the people reading my work. I really don’t want to be self-important. People walk away from my writing thinking that I seem like their pain-in-the-ass little sister, which I’d call a success. I write (and dress, and talk) in the hopes of conveying, always, that my major preoccupations are with sex and any bits of pop culture that partake pointedly of sex. I like fake sugar better than real sugar, and Kraft Singles, and the movie Showgirls, and anything else that’s a plasticky imitation of the real thing. If someone were to derisively describe my writing as a plasticky imitation of the real thing, in fact, I’d be thrilled.
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poetry | amy watkins | mosaic
I have seen your blood mix with the grout pressed
into jagged patterns and known why you
can’t resist touching, even in museums,
tracing stone curves or running a thumb
over ridges of thick oil, and I know
that’s part of my love for you, your bold need
to understand, your willingness to bleed.
ESSAYS | seth fischer | martin
In the memory, my mom is afraid, but she accepts this man as her graduate student. She lets him play with me, but it makes her nervous. Should I be proud of her tolerance or angry for her disquiet? Especially when she insists none of this ever happened? If I did make it all up, what does that say about me? About us?
In the second memory, maybe a year later, he is again at my house, his blond hair still full, but his face is grey and blank, I can see too many of his bones, and his clothes and skin hang off him.
film | jeanne obbard | key life lessons from the best movie of the 90’s, PRACTICAL magic
Witches do not decorate in Danish Modern. Some witchy design ideas to consider are: antique furniture, New Englandy houses, overstuffed kitchens, a truly insane number of candles, and an entire greenhouse full of plants. Once you have all these items in place, compound them by several orders of magnitude. There will be no Konmari-ing of anything.
Art
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