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From November of 2008 until December 2009 Greying Ghost Press published 45 works of poetry and prose through The Corduroy Mtn., an online literary venture. In an effort to make the material easier to access, Greying Ghost has decided to publish all 45 pieces in three ebook volumes. This first volume collects the contributions of Judson Hamilton, Sean Patrick Hill, Emily Kendal Frey, Daniel Casebeer, Mathew Timmons, Mark Maxwell, J.A. Tyler, Ailbhe Darcy, Conor Madigan, Eric Beeny, & Sasha Fletcher.

The Corduroy Mtn.Archive Vol. OneAugust 2011

Published in conjunction withGreying Ghost Press---..#/&0)..1"2(.!"'

#01

C/+/3#0(& S+%'3/# [45] Judson Hamilton

Anthony Michael Hall was wearing a fedora of an unforgivable hue and groping me under the table. He leaned in for a quick one-two peck on the lips but I put my hand on his chest, (in a completely asexual way), thereby halting his advances. Then, with the help of various charts and diagrams, a laser pointer and our waitress’ aid by way of physical demonstration, he was given to understand the incompatibility of our natures and the meaning of the word ‘platonic’.

#02

W1/) T102 B"##"-/$ C6# B%#)2 Sean Patrick Hill

We’ll loiter toothless by the sea.We’ll shepherd ourselves and make new languagesof tire treads. Of plover prints. Of anxious dogs.

We’ll remember the black rectangle the gas drippedeven when the ice scrapes it loose. Beating 7ameswith a leather hat. Windows sucking in like plastic wrap.

We’ll look off into corn 8elds where we slept as kids.By kids I mean teens. By teens I mean not old enoughto drink, let alone speak the music of raw bone and muscle.

How could we? We were eighteen. The tent was 8lled with smoke.

#03

E!"#$#%&'Emily Kendal Frey

We don’t want to pass one another but the escalator will end.I choose some objects and rub them. You choose a thing to say that is horse sounds.When we pass it is like a glass box.It is like our glass box broke on top of us.

#04

L63"# Emily Kendal Frey

We’re selling my mom’s house to my dad.Someone mistook the strawberries for weeds and they’re lying on the lawn like gasping 8sh hearts.I open the drawer and it’s full of rubber bands.

This is one of those situations in which I feel like a failure.

#05

P%)!1/2 Daniel Casebeer

An of8ce building is being evacuated; a crowd of professionals is wrapped, or perhaps coiled, around the street; they are craning their necks but there is nothing to see; the building looks the same as it always does, sixty stories of 7oor-to-ceiling glass that may or may not resemble Corey Hart; no one knows why the building was evacuated; rumors circulate; a pipe bomb was discovered in one of the copy machines; Punches is holding the shipping department hostage with a putty knife; Punches?; the one with the funny teeth?; no, Punches, the one with the crooked 8ngers; I heard that his wife left him; I heard that he left his wife; there is a young woman in the crowd; her name is Michelle or perhaps Dana, and she is holding a white coffee mug from the Blue Spot (note: check to see if the Blue Spot sells coffee mugs, and, if so, if any of them are white); instead of staring at the building, however, Michelle or perhaps Dana is looking at a homeless man who is leaning against a wall beside a hotdog stand on the opposite side of the street; the man’s name is Aaron or Shamus (Seamus) or Molly — at any rate, something Scottish, or perhaps Irish, it’s dif8cult to tell from across the street — and he is not really homeless; he is, however, strikingly beautiful; his eyes are blue (the color of a robin’s egg, not one that has fallen from the nest; rather, one that is still nestled between color-ful pieces of string) and his hair is brown; there is nothing special about the color of his hair, but it falls across his eyes in such a way that he never has to buy his own drinks at the bar; regardless, he is very handsome, but this is not why Michelle or perhaps Dana (let’s call her Blair) is staring at him rather than up at her of8ce building, which may or may not have a pipe bomb in one of its copy machines; Blair is staring at him because he doesn’t have any legs; he is playing a song that she doesn’t recognize on a blue guitar (you and I know “Caring is Creepy” when we hear it), and people drop money into his guitar case / without noticing his deformity.

#06

U)(0(+/$ Mathew Timmons

If I cover the sensor hole in the left pillar, the overall sound is less, but the fan speeds up and is high pitched (like a vacuum cleaner when you cover the hose with your hand). I started a sound deadening project last week, and for this application I dissolved 3% sound in water at 95°C to hydrate it and then cool it down. Once the noise is cooled, you can brush it on one piece of the calcium infused fruit and lay another piece on top. Then we vacuum seal. The second most important part of the process is to stimulate business activity in order to increase sales tax revenues and to support real estate and increase property tax revenues. In the context of these realities, it is apparent that we are currently looking for a good, classic, hushed voice with experience re-leasing notes that supply more than simple information. You contacted a variety of groups, sites and specialty teams on our behalf, but in this society of researchers, no one can provide that kind of audio service. Layout, lyricism, nonsense, playfulness, stillness, description, intimacy, ambiguity-in a poem, anything can be an end.

#07

T1/ A#( B/6( Mark Maxwell

There’s a scene in a 8lm where the audience is to believe the criminals have already left with the classi8ed police records, and all is lost. But they are really still in the room hiding just beyond the edge of the frame. What a cheap trick, but ful8lling, no? This is a modern 8lm but in black and white.

There’s a song by Elvis Costello and the Attractions about Oliver Crom-well. It’s on the shittier side, as lyrics go, commenting at once on British imperialism, the sel8sh aggression of the upper-class population, and Winston Churchill’s war-like tendencies. Well, it might comment on those. I don’t know anything about Oliver Cromwell.

There’s a statue in the city of a now-dead women’s rights activist. By design, the statue has a patch over one eye, which is the same eye the activist herself had a patch over in real life. The statue is made of the ugliest of all stones, which also says something about the sculptor. I know some women who don’t care for the statue.

#08

9 (/+/*/)) J.A. Tyler

The Other watches from a space across, from over the wooden 7oor, from above the world. The Other, in this room, in this expanse of walls, listening to the unbreathing of a man, dying. This man, dying.

The window, silled and sick, a pocket to the outside, showing gray from four corners, trees lacking leaves, wind or no wind, as the day steeps, turning the air to tea. This outside, where the man lived, where the man, this man who is dying, where he used to exist. But he is a bed now. He is unbreathing. He can amount to nothing. He is dying.

And the Other is watching the window above his unmoving chest, seeing the sun fade, bruising the clouds, puncturing the lung of winds, letting the cold air in.

The window and the Other, facing each other, watching each other, waiting for the right moment to speak. They don’t speak. No words happen. No language 8ts. No sentences to melt in the right drooling directions. They stare and unbecome. There is nothing for them to do. Move forward. Keep watching. This man, dying. This Other and a window to the world.

&

Going back. To the man working with his hands. This man, the one dying, the way his 8ngers prowled wood, lined the curled edges of logs and heaps. Cedar or a drift. Pieces of a forest from over the foothills, into the mountains, a place he is seldom or infrequently. Him now, in the lateness of a dying day, living in a gray and wintering earth. But then, this same man, plucking the wooden air, dancing with the branches of a fallen tree.

This man, making a chest. Opening his own chest and placing his heart inside. Feeling hollow, without a heart, but the chest glows and emanates. The chest becomes an echo. The chest takes the punch out of life, the way he is dying, or will die, or is thinking of the end, the conclusion, the resolution. He has no resolution. He makes a chest from the trunk of a cedar. The limbs hugging his heart, placed on a velvet lining. This man, his life in a box. Dying.

But he was a man making things, creating from another, not the Other, but the world, the tripped down statues of timber. He was hands that crept back and across those dead trees, burrowing in their insides, making them into everlasting. And him, this man, never everlasting, unliving in fact. His heart back to his own chest. The echo an echo now of his lack of breath.

&

The girl, 7ying, remembers well the cedar chest, its echo, his heart pounding on the inside.

&

This will be the story of how this girl, 7ying, knew this man, and his dying, and the echo of his heart. This story will be that kind of a story. This will be the story of them. How they separate and connect, how the air in between becomes more and more, how the structure of the world so often collapses. This will be the story of that, in some way or another, somehow.

#09

O) A M6) R%))0). D"-) S(60#2 I) H0.1-H//+/$ S1"/2 A)$ A C1/6: K0'")"Ailbhe Darcy

“Straight to the Adam’s apple my dear,”you’ve told me eyes go. And I resent youthat dear, your lurid, and the fey.But just now I see none of it.You are 7uid shapes, the turningand settling colour 8eldsof a kaleidoscope turned. Your breasts lift,your eyelashes fall. You begin to landand take form.A painted manatee, moving through water,unbounded, not in8nite, weeping, antemundane. I make a mobius strip of my hands,prepare to give appropriate inadequate sounds

#10

P/)2// #; Conor Madigan

Station lights glow train platform blue and white light on and off. Bell sounds underground through double-doors salt-men lift from cold nights snow 7akes great falls. We smoke. Trains stock yards before South En-trance. Pressured steam and brake liner smoke travels dry-cold drafts.

Beaten cats huddle leaned conductors. They drink, steam and smoke. Sign above: Conductor Hut. Max says, “Can’t we go in for even a fucking warm-up? Christ.” “No,” I say, “They know it’s three hours wait.” Speaker bleeps from silvered pole and speaks: outbound-train, number 5688 -- delayed three hours -- track maintenances. “Six hours,” I say, “Let’s see if we can’t.” Con-ductors pet their felines and wave us over. Max leads. I follow with bags.

Inside, breathed moisture proximity clears sinuses and men spit dirt 7oors. “Not coffee, tea,” says Conductor 593. Three rail-men convene, stand silent, and stare from woodstove corner. Conductors sit around Formica tables, pitted pocked chrome. “Milk?” asks one. I take milk. Max takes sugar and speaks with men who laugh his cold warm over the stove. I shed ice-stiff jackets for scarf and Henley.

“Alex,” a conductor greets. “Thirty years,” he answers. Lunch pales line ice thick windows. Tin cups hang hooks below bookshelf held directories. “We’re just off for Christmas. Breaks get us sick waiting like that.” “Sure.” His high voice rings in low voiced din of twenty men broken by Max’s laughter-Max whose father taught conversation by example, paid his children not to speak, 8ned for petty talk.

#11

A(+62 H/6$ O*/# H//+2 Eric Beeny

Then time came when the whole world’s water swallowed the whole world’s land, all except for one spot, one tiny patch of land big enough for one person to stand on.

All the world’s people built a ladder, seeing the water advancing toward them from all directions, and they 8gured that to be the best way out.

The ladder wasn’t strong enough, and 8rst the rungs snapped, and then the support beam things the rungs tight-roped across themselves to buckled.

Under the weight of everyone in the world who had a chance to climb the ladder it collapsed, and everyone in the world who’d climbed it fell on top of one another.

The ladder wasn’t nearly tall enough anyway.

The water was getting closer, slowly rushing inland, and they looked at it and got scared and started trampling each other.

One of all the world’s people, Stacks, suggested they make a ladder out of themselves, and he offered the woman standing next to him a boost up onto his shoulders.

Her boyfriend got offended and went to kick Stacks in the balls, but she grabbed his pantleg.

He stopped, and she convinced him to help her up onto Stacks’ shoulders and then to climb up onto hers, and then Stacks had everyone else in the world climb up onto her boyfriend’s shoulders.

Everyone said, “Okay.”

All the world’s people started climbing each other as the whole world’s water was in the distance slowly rushing from everywhere toward them, thinning out some as it reached the shore of their shrinking island.

Whole cities, neighborhoods, buildings, homes, schools, hospitals, movie theaters, community centers-the whole scene was a full scale model of a miniature disaster.

The water stopped at Stacks’ feet, and he tried to not think about it or 7inch under the weight of the world’s population he was kind enough to let go on over him.

Stacks held his breath until the water stopped at his feet, and it went over his ankles a little and then he blew all that air out, hoisting his brows and blinking real fast.

The last person to climb the human ladder got to the top of the sky.

It was a teenager named Gorman.

He climbed onto the shoulders of a heavy-set politician who hoped he would be the 8rst one out.

The hole in the ozone was basically a submarine hatch.

It was just out of Gorman’s reach over his head, and for a second he thought about jumping up to grab hold of the ledge, but then he thought that was stupid.

He yelled down for everyone in the world to stand on their tiptoes, and by the time it got all the way to Stacks the guy who wanted to kick Stacks in the balls’s girlfriend said, “Tears for Fears rocks.”

“What?” Stacks said.

The girlfriend looked up at her boyfriend and said, “What?”

Then “What?” was the message on its way up toward the submarine hatch of a hole in the ozone, to the guy, Gorman, up there stretching and who couldn’t reach the ledge of the hole, and who thought maybe jumping would do it.

It was like a rosary of echoes climbing a prayer’s noose up out of a sewer.

“Stand on your tiptoes, I said,” he said. “Keep it clear.”

An estimated 6.5 billion people passed that message down carefully like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a sip of water, spitting it into each other’s mouths and hoping the person below them didn’t drool or swallow it.

The message made it down and arrived missing not one drop, nor did it contain new drops of anything super7uous like saliva or tears, and Stacks used all his strength to get up on the tips of his toes under all that weight, and everyone else in the world got up on their toes, dug them into the shoulders of everyone else in the world they were standing on, including that guy Gorman, the teenager, at the top.

Gorman stretched out and, with the extra height he got from the world on its tiptoes, he touched the lip of the hole in the ozone, and there was a hatch, a manhole closed over the sewer the world was.

It was real dark all the way up there.

Gorman felt like he was in a submarine.

“Be careful,” the heavy-set politician Gorman stood on said.

Gorman popped the hatch and took a deep breath, and his face got sucked off his head, his whole body slurped out into space.

Down below no one had any idea what was happening, and they all tried keeping as still as they could to prevent the human ladder they were from wobbling.

More than 97% of the world’s population was afraid of heights.

They were surrounded by water.

they all tried keeping as still as they could to prevent the human ladder they were from wobbling.

More than 97% of the world’s population was afraid of heights.

They were surrounded by water.

A lot of people were thirsty.

The politician under Gorman held Gorman’s legs and got sucked out into space with Gorman, and the person under the politician clutching his legs got sucked out.

One by one, beads from the rosary of echoes were popping off, rungs from the human ladder 7ung out into orbit like splinters 7oating in water around a bowling ball.

Lots of people down below had to pee.

“What’s happening?” Stacks yelled.

Everyone was anxious, holding on tight, clutching the legs of whoever stood on their shoulders, clamping the heads of whoever’s shoulders they stood on between their ankles.

One by one, the whole human ladder and all its rungs got sucked up like coke through a straw, snorted like coke through a rolled-up dollar bill.

The boyfriend on his girlfriends shoulders, and her on Stacks’ shoulders, they didn’t let go in time and they got sucked up with the rest of the world’s population, but the girlfriend’s legs slipped out of Stacks’ hands.

“No,” Stacks yelled.

The hatch slammed shut after the girlfriend got sucked out.

Stacks stood there a moment, looking around.

He was the only person left in the whole world.

He wondered if maybe the boyfriend and girlfriend got sucked up so forcefully he simply couldn’t hold on to the girlfriend’s legs and they were torn from his grip, or if maybe he really just let go, on-purpose like.

He didn’t think he could answer that question honestly.

He looked down at his feet, water covering them up to his ankles.

He heard a faint sound, like someone screaming, getting closer.

He looked up, and the heavy-set politician hit the Earth like an asteroid, landing face-8rst in shallow water near where Stacks was standing, shaking the ground, splashing big waves toward Stacks.

Stacks jumped back.

He slowly walked over to the politician’s probably dead corpse, and nudged it a little with his foot.

The politician didn’t move.

Stacks turned him over.

He nudged him again with his foot.

The politician’s eyes opened wide.

“AHHH,” Stacks yelled, afraid.

“UHHH,” the politician’s dead corpse went.

Stacks sat on the politician’s dead corpse.

He rested his elbow on his thigh, and his chin on his closed 8st.

He thought hard about why he might’ve let go on purpose.

The sun was going down, and it was getting cold out.

#12

I H6*/ B//) T#&0). H6#$ Sasha Fletcher

i thought i was something else, like a small pearl handled revolver or a stained tooth. or the sort of thing that swallows other things whole, or a bird that eats things you need, but not necessarily good things though, or the dead, the undead, an afterlife, i thought maybe i was up in heaven, where it was cloudy. i was a de8nition in the dictionary. it seemed solid, like a sturdy thing to be. then i was an old country singer surrounded by weeping strings and pedal steels and weeping women singing and every-one weeping. sometimes, she says, she doesn’t know what i am talking about. i feel the same way. i say this in my head. i also say in my head that it is good she lets me get things off my chest like this. the other day i thought there was something very heavy on my chest like an anvil, but when i opened my eyes it was a bandit crouching there, and that turned out to be a dream. it was raining. big surprise right?

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