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      December 15, 2014On My First Trip to the Strip ClubMichael Meyerhofer

      You’d better jack off first
      one of my friends advised the night
      before my eighteenth birthday,
      the group planning
      to drive me up to Davenport
      where the treatment for birthday boys
      was a lap dance on stage
      while their friends cheered—
      the implication being it wouldn’t do
      to get too excited over
      the proximity of all those fake breasts
      and press-on nails, bad hip-hop
      twisting out of the speakers,
      the regulars using this as an excuse
      to step out back for a smoke.
      I remember the lead dancer had
      a gap between her teeth
      and no one raised their eyebrows
      when they smiled. Later,
      a brunette with roots like fools’ gold
      talked me out of fifty bucks
      in a back room where I made
      too much eye contact while she opened
      like a desert highway. I remember
      thinking how all of this seemed
      a little related to the rape
      reenactments they showed us
      in Health Class, Susie and Brian
      struggling in some cardboard room
      full of bottles with the labels turned away,
      interrupted only by a narrator
      as far removed as that
      announcer from The Twilight Zone
      who breezed in with his gray jacket and tie
      and told us what we’d just seen
      and what to think and how to feel.

      from #44 - Summer 2014

      Michael Meyerhofer

      “There’s a passage in J.D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction that describes writing as religion. That was probably the truest thing I’ve ever read, even twenty-odd years later. Sometimes, writing is a monastery on a hill, surrounded by dogwoods; more often, though, it’s a bottom-of-the-valley shack full of snakes and loud music.”

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