Shopping Cart
    items

      ←

      January 2, 2010LoveHeather Bell

      The truth about Klimt is: when he painted “The Kiss,”
      he was also beating his beautiful wife. He beat her
      with one hand and painted with the other. He got
      two sad blisters on his right palm from this. His wife
      sometimes slowly pulled up the roots to his favorite
      willows and cut them, delicately, and then buried
      them again. He jokes, “that’s what I get for marrying
      a woman from a sanitarium!” but she was from
      Vienna, they met in the street, he stopped her and
      she believed his eyes said, “I do not want to die,
      do not let me die,” so she touched his face, there,
      in the street, as a person touches a comma on a
      page after they have returned home from a place
      that has no commas. On their wedding night, she
      ran him a lukewarm bath and his testicles looked
      like overripe plums. He raped her until a low moan
      seemed to come from the walls, as if wolves were
      angry and coming and Klimt went to bed forcefully
      and his wife went to bed with dirty blood around
      her nostrils and mouth. It goes on like this for years,
      just as it goes on for years for everyone who marries
      someone they cannot love. You step, body over
      body, into the kitchen to kiss your sweat and rot
      good morning. “Let me tell you something,” she
      says on the day that he paints “The Kiss” and he
      hits her in the head before she can remember the
      something. She thinks it might have been important.
      It might have been something. When he shows
      the painting to his friends, they say he must be
      the most romantic man in the world and she nods.
      And the man in the painting pushes the woman
      down further, flows into her, gold and angry, and
      her eyes are shut and they do not look clenched
      and this is puzzling, but no one else seems to notice.

      from #31 - Summer 2009

      Heather Bell

      “Recently, I backpacked down and back out of the Grand Canyon. The hardest part was my intense fear of heights and panic attacks when I see sheer cliffs or drop-offs. I didn’t bring a journal. I think that was the most important part—no journal. Instead, my husband and I sat in the dark in our tent, playing cards, eating granola, and talking. Sometimes I wonder where all the talking has gone in this world and then I know where it is, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, still, where I left it. I find myself writing more now, all these things I couldn’t say before the expedition. Sometimes you just need a place to put your words when the cities get too loud and no one can hear you over everyone’s talking and screaming.”

      →

      Related