Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 20

The Dark Sunshine by Len Kuntz

#1, this was a great book.

If this review was written in the style of the Dark Sunshine, it would be incredibly concise, dark (of course), expansive in use of both imagination and pulse. Instead, this review is going to amble along, crash into walls, smile too much. This review will have wasted words, The Dark Sunshine doesn’t have a wasted word, letter, even a wasted comma.

I feel good after completing Len Kuntz’s collection of pitch perfect flash fiction, like I just attended a workshop. It’s the kind of writing that reads like an instruction manual on ‘how to master brevity’, ‘how to flesh out entire worlds in the narrowest footprint possible’, ‘how to introduce a protagonist/antagonist you’ll never forget in the same space as a 120 character Twitter transmission.’

The collection seems prototypical, as Howie Good puts it in the blurb on the back of the book, “Len Kuntz’s flash fiction is everything flash fiction should aspire to be–surreal, macabre, humorous …”

He’s damn right about all that.

Dark Sunshine has a thread running down the middle: the tread is a l’m unease, a dysfunction, a mysterious problem–but it is not just between a man and a woman, or the children; it’s beyond the house and it’s domestic troubles, it’s the town too and the the strange neighbors, cops and therapists; there’s an existential crisis stretching over the entire globe, wrapping around this universe, and alternate universes, planes of existence. It’s all troubled.

Okay, before we get any farther with all the darkness, doom and warranted pessimism–I should tell you something, Len Kuntz is incredibly funny. His comedic timing is startling. These are jokes that we might be laughing at in self defense, but the good news is, Kuntz has mastered minimalism so well, we can’t be sure anyway if we’re the brunt of the joke. Often it’s society at large, the way we look at things wrong, the way we fail at loving each other.

The joy in this book lies in the simple things, the smallest factors, that somehow shine the brightest. It comes down to how fresh the characters are. They are very much alive on the page, reacting to their various situations, completely unpredictably.

Spring Poems

Prayer Hummed

At Waitstaff

sangria

saves

lives*

(*repeat)

 

Terms and Conditions

our small emergencies

mostly oxygen and energy

the failing orbits in the sludge

of our awkward bodies

I am yours

whenever/wherever

you have my cookies.

 

 

Cuevero and Elderflower

the afternoon crash lands

it’ll be alright, right, cat?

been so busy/what a lazy life

over-efficient, salt mine ready

prayer really didn’t work for me

lemon light broke the kitchen window

outside, day-noon-night

suffer ice cream truck music

inside, claw draw blood, spikes

fucking cat

and while it licks itself

someone on the TV always

wants to save me

solution: get couch horizontal

double vision pitcher frame

fluff pillows, meditate, yeah okay

lime, ice, tequila, salt, st. germain

“I’ll get a dog, and it will eat you.”

 

April 27th

cherry blossom

and dogwood

going crazy

all in bloom

or at the door

what a good day

even here, sitting

on the guard rail

car hissing.

 

Fried Paradise, 8:15am, Saturday

I usually drive into a strip mall

and first things first, swing

around the back

to see the loading dock

and the card board

dumpster

the shadow’d woods

behind …

you ever do that?

I wonder why

either way.

Prompt

Follow these directions to write a poem. Click here to start

Readings Coming Up

I’ll be doing three reading.

Two at Belmar Books in Belmar, NJ, Sunday, April 27th, 12pm and 2pm. At noon I’ll be reading from Everything Neon and at 2pm, I’ll read from Tollbooth. Should be a good time.

May 14th at 8pm est, I’ll be doing a reading that you can watch on your dang computadora via LitDemon It’ll be poems from Everything Neon + some new ones + a short story. Should be fun. Links to follow.

Tuesday

 

The seashell spoke to me. Nice things. Nothing harsh, or anything to be alarmed about, don’t alert the guards or anything. The seashell was encouraging.

It was usually before dawn, before work, while I sat at the kitchen table. It’d say things like, “Big day today, bet you do good.”

“Big day? I work as a janitor.”

“Oh, god, quit that job.”

“Sure.”

After work, if I came home and needed someone to talk to, I knew I could always count on the seashell. As a joke, it would even mimic the sea, the waves, seagulls, but it would sound like if me or you just did it as a gag.

“What’s your name?”

“You don’t wanna know,” it said.

We left it at that.

On Tuesdays, we had Quiz Night.

I enjoyed it greatly, partly because I always won.

The seashell would ask me question after question, and I always knew the answer.

“Who invaded Spain in 1814?”

“Napoleon.”

“What is the strongest muscle in the human body?”

“The tongue.”

“Why is the sky blue?”

“It’s a reflection of the sea.”

I don’t know exactly when I started to carry the seashell, but I did. It acted as a guide while I drove, “Turn left here, turn left here, okay, go about a quarter mile and then veer right on Ithmus Place.”

But it didn’t like to go into my pocket, it’d stab me severely, and I can’t blame it, so I began to wear the seashell around my neck. It looked like an oversized iridescent amulet.

People thought I was a mystic. That was weird.

As I pushed the cart around the grocery store it’d suggest things that I’d never thought to try; fresh tarragon, beets, natural pink sea salt from the Himalayas.

On Tuesday I was hit by a car, crossing the street, arguing with the seashell. Both my legs were shattered. My arm was broken in six spots. My skull was half flattened. The seashell had been reduced to dust.

Yet that night, while the ward was quiet, and the drugs hummed in me, I heard a voice say, “What’s the capital of Venezuela?”

“Caracas,” I said.

The night nurse looked in, I said, “I’m fine.”

Spring’s Out There.

It’s Saturday and I have the window open next to my desk, that feels some like some kind of victory. I’m listening to the self titled Crystal Castles record, and drinking a cup of coffee that was so hot, I had to put an ice cube in it: that’s what happens in my percolator, maing.

I wanted to share some poems and stuff today, before this three things happen #1 I exercise so I don’t wind up a fat crippled old man #2 I take Spout on the train downtown for some brunch in the sunshine #3 I meet up with some writer friends at a roof top bar for a birthday party for a good amigo of mine.

 

Violas

there was a woman

on the radio

talking all about

eating flowers

how great it is to eat flowers

bees like them for the nectar

so will/do we

and the texture!

try them in a fucking salad!

I look at my dying

window plants

shriveled up

all sunshine doomed

and take out a carton

of eggs

instead

 

Keep Replaying Side B

when I’m all busted up and lost, I realize it

because I’m not seeking out new music

I’m just sitting in this same floral chair

lifting the arm with the needle

and going back to the start of track five

but all that will be fixed, today

the flowers are jumping out of the sidewalk

the cardboard boxes are there in an army

filled with cheap wax, three for five dollars

yesterday, I got a recommendation

Dvorak, The New World symphony

that sounds about motherfucking right.

 

See You Later, Alligator

interests include: opening the window, letting the birds in off the fire escape; watching my wife get tan in white sand; grey bats criss crossing the moon, fireworks not burning any houses down, but maybe catching the top of an insignificant 300 year old maple; swimming, always swimming, arms outstretched in an aqua marine hot spring

not to mention: dark rum, shirtless in the afternoon; driving reckless down a mountain, sheer drops on either stupid side; new sunglasses found on the sidewalk; everything stinking like coconut, finally; the dew running off the branch, slapping the ledge outside, like an alarm doing its job right.

but this: the other night, for the first time, the ice cream truck arrived. It parked and played its broken glass circus song on loop for an hour. It would have been more, but I finally put my shoes on and walked out of the apartment. The sidewalks were empty and the sun had gone down. I was the only one, troubled. I said to the ice cream man, “why don’t you move along–you’re parked right underneath our goddamn window.” He said, “Not going anywhere.” The song continued. The truck stayed. I went back upstairs. My wife said, laughing, “Looks like that didn’t work.” I said, “I know what we’ll do. I’ll get a bunch of watermelons. And I’ll drop them on his truck, one by one.” She said, “Nothing feels more like summer than a watermelon war.”

 

I hope everybody has a good weekend. I’ve got the music going pretty loud here now. And, outside the window, the birds are going crazy. There’s guys doing construction on my street. I can hear them yelling back and forth like crazy, not to mention the goddamned bike riders, those peeps dressed in full spandex, they zoom by yelling at the construction workers, “GET OUT OF THE WAY, YOU’RE IN THE BIKE LANE!” I’m waiting for one of them to get knocked off their bikes with a shovel.

:)

SPRING!

Everything Neon Reviewed by Len Kuntz

Nice day over here. I’m eating a couple hard boiled eggs and drinking some unsweetened ice tea. The sun is shining and I just this new review of my poetry collection Everything Neon by Lun Kuntz, the author of The Dark Sunshine. Check the review out here

Fun times in the wild. I’m humbled to have peeps read the work and then have the kindness to write something up about it. That’s a wonderful thing.

New Work at Entropy and Red Fez

Things have been going on, the moon got all red, the mustard pollen descended from the jack pines, I brewed another pot of coffee. Been doing a bunch of writing and submitting these days, wanted to share two links.

1. An article/essay about a video store called “Commando Video” is running at the site Entropy.

2. My review of Zach Fishel’s collection of sonnets. Windsock Etiquette is running at Red Fez.

Hope all is going well in your world. Things are okay over here.

Much love,

Bud

Now Serving # 86

the girl behind the deli counter is in love with me

I realized it in the cookie aisle

there’s something about the way

she slices the cheese so thin

the moon can glow through it

I took a package of chocolate chip from the shelf

and stepped away, but only on red squares

the floor might be triggered to explode

a man at the end cap had samples of Costa Rican coffee

fresh brewed, I took two small cups

and hopped on red squares, past the seafood

past the international canned vegetables

at the glass case, stopping with the unspilled coffee

and the uncrushed cookies

there was one customer ahead of me, a lady

in a blue coat getting a pound of sale pastrami

I waited patiently beside the pickle barrel

when we were alone, the deli girl blinked at me

and said, “Number 86”

I stepped forward with her gift.

Yesterday was a strange one

all in all it was a pretty odd day on the writing front: edited some stuff in a bath tub, participated in an email exchange interview while I was on my cellphone inside a giant oil filter, got a bizarre email from a random person in England who wants to feature my website in a book they are putting together for how writers do their websites (really, me?), got word that a poem I’d sent to TheNewerYork was accepted, which made me do a dance of joy, etc.