by Brenda Mann Hammack
Punks get up to get beat down[1]
A body? What did I know about rattling around on skateboards that weren’t even skateboards, but short stories we tell each other before smoking cigarette after cigarette. Skin? Skin I knew and in the knowing didn’t understand the costs of pleasure or of borders. Bodies did things. Played guitars, rode in cars, jumped fences, jumped river boulders, inhaled, drank, fell down. I’d truck my skateboard to concrete pads cornered behind the mall and the mall was everything to those who live without great green fields and hills and creeks that had sprung me into combat boots and black jeans. The mall gave it up and then didn’t tell the truth about it later. No great sport, no great trick, nothing but distraction from being broke and jobless. Sam Goody’s though, all the Misfit records in a row, sleek section curated by the guitar-slinging Costello who smoked out back and kept us rats moving to a new place to drop off, cut left, jump and scrape. A body, dressing to black, racing sleep for sure; for sure unknowing how tenuous and time rotten age is and falling out of love. A body, for all its flesh, for all its failings. Bodies bracing against the teeth of macadam black and macadam blue, bodies, for the moment, knowing grace, the crunch of X through car speakers, get out, get out, get out[2].
[1] With apologies to Brand Nubian (“Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down”, In God We Trust 1993)
[2] X “Los Angeles”, X, 1981.
Stephen Scott Whitaker (@SScottWhitaker) is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the managing editor for The Broadkill Review. Whitaker is a teaching artist with the Virginia Commission for the Arts, an educator, and a grant writer. His poems have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Oxford Poetry, The Scores, Crab Creek Review, & Third Wednesday, among other journals. He is the author of four chapbooks of poetry and a broadside from Broadsided Press. Mulch, his novel of weird fiction is forthcoming from Montag Press in 2020.
In addition to serving as managing editor and web designer for Glint Literary Journal, Brenda Mann Hammack teaches folklore, modern poetry, women’s literature, and creative writing at Fayetteville State University where she also serves as coordinator for the BA in Creative and Professional Writing. Her book, Humbug: A Neo-Victorian Fantasy in Verse, was released in 2013. Other work (poetry, fiction, and digital art) has appeared or is forthcoming in Menacing Hedge, The London Reader, The Fabulist, 3Elements Review, The Hunger, Anthropoid, NILVX, Rhino, A capella Zoo, and Lissa Kiernan’s Glass Needles & Goose Quills. Her collaborations with Maureen Alsop appear in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press 2018). Brenda also collaborates with wilder folk. Some have antlers, others wings. Their portraits can be found on her Instagram gallery (@brendahammack) along with additional collages from her ongoing series, “Flipping Art History.”