Orion headless

don’t lose your head

This little litmag has been around for a whole year. So many exciting things have happened here that they number like the stars.

Here’s something else that might be good: send a submission for this special section with the theme: don’t lose your head. Include the theme in your subject line in an email to submit@orionheadless.com. They’ll appear here as they are received and accepted! We’ve lost the birthing documents, so we’ll keep submissions open until the end of April, just for argument’s sake.

Thank you to all our contributors and readers, who have made it a great first year.

Happy birthday, headless wonder. Here are your presents. The guest registry is at the bottom.

story by Prasanna Surakanti

Why we sleep in the night?

Dont wake up in the night
to a ticket
to a big stone churning in
the stomach
you are not a bird
no gallstones to grind

To break the string of red
beading down
To seperate the pains
emanating from the body
are they temporary,
endemic to an organ
or a function ?

The brain goes reptilian
wants to crawl like
an amphibian
half on the carpet
rest on the tiles

Then you want to lay
the head and not hold it
rest the honor

May be Mac Lean is right
about Russian doll brains

On Sphenoid bone

In everyone’s head
is a dog
with a happy cow face
flat ears
bat wings
front legs extended
hind legs pulled together
all projected onto the plane

Ducks to Water

An alarm ushers me into
the world as we know
with remains of Ganymedes
still in my head

A wooden mallard in a
keychain with its
plastic green head
lying on a window sill

In another world
a broken bird of stone
stippled
unpolished snow obsidian
Holding the broken pieces
to form a whole

Somehow only one gets
restored the mallards
head or the owls
broken wing

story by Len Kuntz

Orion Headless

She beats him with a broken hockey stick using the blunt, boomerang edge.

She strikes shoulders, arms, ribs, thighs, knees, soles of feet, his penis. She always avoids the face and neck and hands because these are reflective places.

Most of the time he clutches and ducks, but she has hot slicing swings, wood-paddle wings, and so he only ever blocks two or three blows at the most.

She spits yoke-yellow loogies. She hawks acid. She shouts, “You are a worthless piece of crap. You’re disgusting. I can’t even describe how much I hate you.” And when she says it, she means it, she really does, because the arc of loathing flashing across her face is nearly lethal, and certainly far more painful than the barrage of jagged wood splinters biting his skin.

His friend J__ y says, “Dude! She’s frickin‘ female. Why don’t you fight back? Knock her fucking eyeballs out.”

He stops going to see J___ y, even though J___ y was, once upon a time, his best man.

He spends weeks living in an underpass down by Olympia where on a cement-gray, warped wall someone has spray-painted KURT COBAIN SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT.

Homeless people nudge him at night. “Roll over,” they say. “Hell, I’m freezing here.”

The sky wears a chattering set of teeth, stars like chocolate-covered raisins, white molars.

He remembers being a boy and finding constellations. He recalls comparing her freckles to Orion on their wedding night when she took too long in the bathroom and bit her lip a lot. On the hotel mattress she said, “Touch me here. And here.” She meant through the gown, not on actual skin. Her suggestions were clipped yet entirely descriptive.

When he enters the house now, she runs the hall like a dyslexic donkey before falling into him clutching, whispering, “Baby.. Baby.. Baby..” each word and syllable a bomb, a blade, a slice, a suture.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, with a straight face. Then: “Never again.”

She’s said that before, called him a coward no less than an hour later, grabbing the broken hockey stick.

So he winds up. “Do you love me?” he asks.

She licks his neck like a salt-starved lion and says, “Are you kidding me?” The size of her pupils and the deflated form of her face reveal that she means it, at least for the time being.

While they hug, he roots inside his coat pocket, finds the garrote, burns the handles into his palm, tells her, “Hey, look at me. Let me see your beautiful face” before snapping, before beginning to wring.

story and ceramics by AE Reiff

Help In The Steps

If you call that any kind of life studying shadows on the wall among smoke, it reminded him of the lake at the bottom of world where he used to live. He realized he was a monster, it said so right in the text, which made him wish for the rest, but the head was gone.

Who knows, did he have the head or the body? This did not help in The Steps.

Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. I have the advantage on this one, he thought. He believed in a power greater than himself, the glory hound, the heaven hound. He believed in Beowulf when even scholars did not, scholars and dragons. Up and down, up and down, the mere was churning with polar bears and eels. If you doubt everything you have no story at all. As to being able to recognize the error of his ways, his inability to control himself, did he have to grow back his arm?

It’s a little delirious to have a searching moral inventory of yourself. The beastie had written in the margin, “they see life without observing it. They see it but they don’t see. They think I don’t see, but I do.”

This denial caused consciousness and being to increase. The word “buried” wasn’t just scrawled, it completely obliterated the page. That was Step Ten, inventory of the serious monster alive. He sounded like the Apostle praying for delivery.

He admitted to God and himself, but where was he to find another human being to tell the exact nature of his wrongs? Where was he to find “another human being?” Not likely! What was he anyway but the other without the an?

Humbly he asked to remove his shortcomings. These were not small. Now he was outside, a bird flew up in the margin. He saw a dark figure, aegis of his cry for help. The margin of the book had a series of connections missing. A bone stuck up out of a plate.

OK, that was a shortcoming.

He added it to the list of all persons he had harmed.

Further evidence of a monster in the bush was when a bird seemed to be waving a weed wacker.

Amends to injure he stood in the door.

It was like an entrance to the letter H, one line he bet Dante wished he’d never wrote.

It said,“I’m going into the letter H,” but without the bar. Monsters were all about, but the illustrated version was worse, saved only by his failure to visualize and their ability to forget. In the new age it would have been a hit he saw, as he read the hard parts, the tortures.

“If their classics are like this how do any of them pass the twelve steps?”

If you’re thinking that you’d rather not go into the letter H or even the M to face this we sympathize, but can offer no assistance. H and M are two letters of the four that vexed him. Continued personal inventory! Also they were backwards, the M came before the H, which was like asking some stranger at a light whether he had ever looked into an O, but that was not one of the letters he was after.

If he could solve these things it would be better. The puzzle surrounded him, grappled him. Smoke, tallow, lapped at the water’s edge. The mystery was not confined to the alphabet, even if the letters were almost the same, in case you don’t know.

To improve his conscious contact with God as he understood Him he took the cipher of “OKU” that occurred in the right hand corner of his book as a sign. The tail of the O went through the K and paralleled the U. To him it made a “hum.”

“What am I to do,” he thought?

He began to hum aloud.

This correlated with the statement that “it was not unusual to hear them contradict themselves,” the point of his inquiry, which was to find the end of contradiction in its beginning. It reminded him that the best proof yet that he was human was to find another being to admit it to. It reminds us all. Why can’t we just say that and be done?

Having a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps he was ready to carry out the next level. He thought the Helmings deserved such symbolic action. How best to communicate? In one age the priest would become an Everyman commentator and say whatever was real or covered up.

Ur-Mon, reporter, lawyer, editor, was somebody telling you what to do. Mainly to doubt. He thought he understood. The emendation looked like the beak of a stork going after a fish. It could have been a goat with horns. He was looking down at Unferth, who didn’t notice, as if from a crag; he was busy corralling Hrothgar’s sister. This hardly seemed like anybody’s business except it was magnificent, an into the body experience that enthralled. The sister was being offered to the man who looked anonymous in a business suit. He lay down on a bed and a carrot flew up from his legs.

The smoke made him dizzy, the smoke and feel of the fell, as if symbol and story and present and past were changed. He didn’t know there were handbooks printed to get over these tough spots, to correctly see symbol and fact. You need to get the handbooks. He didn’t know whether they were going to make the book into a movie.

At least, he tried to carry this message to others, to practice these principles in his affairs.

There was a large cursive E which also looked like a 3. It was bisecting an ampersand. This was in the book. Science called it the E3 bisect. He was new to reading. In his eyes it was a Z. He thought it looked like a dragon at the throat of another dragon, that one dragon was twisting the neck of the other out and down. He knew that was how dragons got their wings, by killing another. He could not escape carnage. To add to this plight, the girl Wealtheow, who had appeared earlier, struck her attacker Unferth with a large fork. It made balloons go up in his mind. He couldn’t see but she poked them and they popped and he lay on the ground.

There was a lot of violence portrayed in the old days which explains his take. A lot was written about Unferth in the unforth. She wrote books and he did too. Wealtheow, the wife of the king, published under that name. Whether these other characters wrote depends on the meaning, he thought.

Things were getting a lot more dense, feeling as though time were speeding up. A lot of people thought it was a spoof of literature, but it was more. An unnamed youth, meaning the young man on 118, who read on his bed with his knees raised, looked like a hyper-ventilating Mordred. Maybe he was a prototype. It didn’t exactly say what he read, but it was monster food Grendel knew. It was bigger than anything that was made. Super sizing. How do you get the key. Inflation yes, but selection and magnification.

I don’t know if it’s worth mentioning, but if you blow anything up several times life size you can get one. King Arthur backgrounds it, but it’s more than youth rebellion, kids with guns and apples. Graphs pointed back into the book, except there he saw the hand had gotten elliptical. Next to the text’s phrase it pointed its finger like a gun and said, “the blessed OOK!”

The door of the H must be into the OoK itself. H, Ook, O, M. There’s no time to reveal the other letters, but never look at an Ook. It rhymed his head around like a train blowing little puffs of smoke: Never look in an Ook! Never LOok at an OOk!

He wondered what to do with an Ook? They misspelled it in the monograph, a small point because the sound is the same no matter how you spell it.

The turning point came when he learned that the OoK was the only living being to ever interview his mother.

This is coming under separate cover. But since monsters have by now eaten about half the population everything has slowed down again. The survivors have armed their kids with cell phones. Grendel got online, but enough of that.

Page 156 saw marked in pencil a large star struck in the middle of a storm.

“Star struck, star light, which I might.”

The hand was disintegrating. Overstrikes and crossovers, some triangles surfaced under the OoK. He did not look at it.

He made a decision to turn his will and life over to the care of God. Leviathan, behemoth did not understand the signs. He did not understand the headless text in his hand.

poetry by Kenneth Gurney

Building Atlas

The bigger world fell from the sky
as an illusion the eye played
as the eye opened that wide for the first time
and gaged the multitude of unknowns
that happen all about
whether we think of them or not.

And this includes consequences
that have nothing to do with intention.

A virus enters the blood…
A neuro-coupling misfires…
An ankles turns…

And God materialized as a solid thought
when I transported back in time
to a instant when father came to the rescue.

But then I swallowed down my fear
and stepped up to the situation
and met it head on with all my ability
to feel and think outside of boxes
and asked my friends for help
with what is beyond my ken—

imagery by Elizabeth Daube

Anatomy of loss

When a person loses his head he loses himself. There is a man who is beginning to see through occipital distortions rather than his own eyes. His temporal lobe is on the fritz and he hears only what he wants to. Leading a life of a headless man, one will drain himself of exactly that, himself. Spitting out circulatory thoughts, his porcelain image is smudged and cracking. What was once a man is left to trickle out of him, slowly drying up his frontal lobe. The medulla has been severed and any understanding he previously had is now lost. With his torso left intact, his mind is shriveled. A man has lost his head as it spirals down a rusting tunnel.

2 poems by Michael H. Brownstein

The Path to Riches is Covered by the Broken Steps of the Ladder

I am lost in the channel, lost in the chapter.
fields of French verbs everywhere, nearby water
black snake skin cool, thick and slippery.
I do not know the opening to where the emeralds lay
nor can I find the hiding place of the gold nuggets.
The Light of Fate has moved to another province.
Turn the page, swim across the water.
Given the gift of turning stone to gold,
I would refuse it. Only gold can be gold.
Stone always reverts to stone with time.

The Divorce

knocked the earth out of me,
thick clods, mud worn,
blood listing from the Bodhi tree,

and pain rickshawed through me,
splinters of rock root
a drenching of rock water–

the essence of essence,
the perfume of perfume,
the depression of sleep.

Special thanks to:

Prasanna Surakanti is an electrical engineer interested in literature. Her previous work has appeared in Terracotta Typewriter, Ignite, The motion in Motive chapbook, Di Mezzo Il Mare, Caterpillar Chronicles. Her poem ‘Who’s your role model’ appeared in the March issue of Urban Confustions.

Len Kuntz is a writer living in Washington State. His writing appears widely in print and online at such places as Moon Milk Review, The Legendary, Xenith and also [here].

AE Reiff: In his career with the Narberth Post Office transporting surfactant to poetry spills AE was a mediator for hydrocarbon degradation. This constant practice brought opaque maturation to issues of writing and making mythic plants and animals, though the bioremediate agency, that is, to accelerate the rate of hydrocarbon degradation so that oil droplets are cleaved into molecules small enough for microbes to effectively digest, Alcohol Ethoxylate (exulate), is still packaged. This is not to confuse but to cleanse sub-surface components of coalesced lumps. Surfactant of commercially available AE is similar to baby shampoo. More surfactant can be obtained at various listed [sites].

Kenneth P. Gurney lives in Albuquerque, NM, USA. He edits Adobe Walls, an anthology of New Mexico’s poetry. To view a full biography, publication credits and available books visit [here].

Elizabeth Daube is a senior in high school and currently resides in Hampton, VA. She is passionate about art and finds herself carrying her camera around everywhere she goes. She loves capturing the peculiar things in life.

Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published throughout the literary press. His work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Free Lunch, The Pacific Review and many others. He has been featured in a number of online poetry journals including Milk and poetrysuperhighway.com. In addition, he has eight chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samisdat Press), Poems from the Body Bag (winner of the Ommation Press Poetry Chapbook contest), A Period of Trees (Snark Press), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press) and I Was a Teacher Once (Ten page Press). Brownstein taught upper grade science in the Chicago public schools; continues his studies with authentic African instruments; conducts grant writing workshops for educators; and records performance pieces with grants from the City of Chicago ’s Cultural Affair Department, the BP Leadership Grant, and others.