PURE FRANCIS

Francis is on a Brief Summer Vacation

Thanks for visiting Pure Francis!

Pure Francis is currently on a two-week hiatus while Francis reacquaints himself with his Hungarian roots.

Fear not, Francis will be back on August 1st with all new work to delight your eyes, ears, and kneecaps.

Until then, we invite you to check out (or perhaps revisit) the Pure Francis catalog via the menu to your right.  There's some good stuff in there.  Some good, good stuff.  And there's more good stuff to come when publishing resumes August 1st. 

And yep--while Francis is away getting his Magyar on and working on his tan, we are still accepting submissions for the Fall.

See you soon,

pf

Communitas Lost

by Timothy L. Marsh

            It’s one or two or three in the morning and it’s nothing you haven’t seen before or couldn’t imagine even if you hadn’t. The pool tables are in the back; the touch-screen juke is in the corner; the athletes are stuck in perpetual highlight on seven mounted televisions tuned to ESPN.
            Somehow you’ve made the acquaintance of a bell-tubby little man who’s just gotten fired from his job and is happy about it, but concerned about the economy and the thought of looking for another gig. He’s weighed 225 pounds since he was twelve-years-old and once worked as a logger in Alaska before he was hit by a tree and shattered like movie glass. “Internal stress reflex,” he explains with something in his voice like the latches of Willy Loman’s briefcase flipping open.
           Apparently internal stress reflex is how most loggers get killed on the job. It starts with a very old tree that has been standing around for hundreds of years. There’s a lot of pent up stress in these sorts of trees, and sometimes when that stress is released too quickly the trunk jerks out at the speed and force of a Greyhound cruiser and crushes to hell the unwitting little logger that ever started cutting into such a stuck and tired thing.
            The tree broke 48 bones in his body including all of his face and six vertebrae, though he hasn’t a scar, limp or missing tooth to show for it. In the time you’ve been sitting together he’s also had his throat slit by an Eskimo gangbanger, been attacked by a colony of carpenter ants, and come within nine bee stings of setting a new Guinness world record for bee stings. No doubt he could have easily just barely survived a parachute malfunction or a plane crash in the Andes if, in the middle of all this Looney Tunes ill-luck and indestructibility, he didn’t also suddenly develop an extrasensory perception for the histories of strangers.
           “I’ve had it all my life. Like a crystal ball in my head, except with the past. All I have to do is talk with a person and I can tell where he’s from, what he does, what his family is like, if he’s ever been married, got children. Everything.”
           “Everything?”
            “Like you. I can tell all about you. Like I can tell you got two brothers and that you’re the youngest. And that you’re not from around here. But from like out West someplace.”
            “California.”
            “See. And you’re a teacher or like a writer, right? Something with words. And your parents are still married.”
            “Almost. I’m a teacher, yes. But my parents were murdered in a carjacking when I was a kid. Three Mexicans dragged them from their van outside Dodger Stadium and shot them in the street. They were Giants fans.”
            “Oh yeah. I know some Giants fans.”
            “They found the car in Guadalajara but never the men. So my brothers and I were sent to a Catholic orphanage in Santa Monica, which was very hard for us because we were Jewish. The nuns picked on us every day. They held us down and rubbed sunscreen in our eyes. They made us pray for the Clippers.”
            “Oh. Right. The Clippers.”
            It might occur to you at this point that this man has just spent the better part of the evening destroying himself for your companionship, and that the gracious thing to do would be to sip your beer and smile along the way he is used to. But this is one or two or three in the morning and you’re in no position for kindly solicitude.
            “That chick’s got great tits,” he says with something in his voice like we could’ve been beautiful. “I think I’ll get her number.”
            “I think I’ll sit here and catch the Dodgers’ score. For my parents.”
            The waitress brings another bowl of peanuts. The touch-screen juke plays something by Queen. A single thirty-something slot machine blinks pick-up lines across the bar. Above, the seven mounted televisions have formed a nimbus of Derek Jeter highlights for whatever hill-of-beans reason and you hate the goddamn Yankees and don’t give a piss about Derek Jeter or anything he does. 
            If Derek Jeter were here right now you wouldn’t even act like you knew who he was. 


Tim Marsh is in for some serious trouble, and you're in for some serious fun.

Feldman at the Sock Hop

by P. Scott Cunningham

I’m a New Yorker, it’s impossible for a New Yorker to be an elitist.
                           -Morton Feldman

            In all things, Arleen,
the rendition’s what matters, paper lanterns
strung too low, a too-spiked punch bowl,
the threesome of freshmen singing
The Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon to Know,”
my arm as it circumnavigates half-
way across your back and pulls you closer,
the view of the gold cross around your neck,
the moon asking permission from the gym
to glow, that Greek vacation your parents took,
their bedroom forbidden and cavernous,
the sound of buttons as they lose their grip,
how your tongue says, “You can’t stay,”
            then seems to forget,

            how the sun arrives
with nowhere else to go, how carefully we strip
and wash the linen, sit naked on the balcony,
me smoking, you declaiming on the history
of the park, how the designer’s death between
the plan’s completion and the city’s review
allowed his vision to pass untinkered with,
hence the view, hence why I remember how
the mulberries were planted to frame the lake
and shade the bathers resting on its edge,
hence why I remember how the berries tasted—
I picked a few on the way to the train—
like every hour of their making measured
            and compressed.


P. Scott Cunningham is in the hot tub.

Joel & Heather

by Kimberly Bunker

         Joel felt that school was a gigantic joke played on him by someone who had not yet shown his or her face. To him, it was clear that what teachers were saying and what students were tested on was of secondary importance, a red herring--but you were supposed to go along pretending it was primary. He felt that all the while his third grade teacher went on about conglomerate rocks, while his sixth grade teacher explained sentence diagramming, while Miss Hart made them rewrite their spelling tests if the words were too high above the pale blue line and Mrs. Salvatore read excerpts from Heart of Darkness, they did it all with a wink. “Here is what I’m saying,” he heard, “but listen to what I am not saying. Everyone knows today’s spoken lesson is useless and boring, and you’ll forget it after the test. But I dare you to remember something.” He had seen patterns in the eraser swipes on chalkboards and heard them in the rhythm of the Pledge of Allegiance. He watched his teachers rearrange the children’s desks and sit and stare, almost defeated, at their own desks after dismissal. He had been both friendless and marginally popular. He went along with the joke and learned to follow arbitrary rules in order to accumulate abstract rewards. He observed how his name looked at the top of every page he handed in and understood that the formation of identity is ongoing, flexible, a choice you repeatedly make that no one else pays that much attention to, as long as it’s there. He learned mental liberation in physical captivity, that by being forced to study something so mind-numbingly dull in such an unnecessarily uncomfortable setting, one was being trained to look inward, to explore the recesses of the universe. One would not learn the nature of reality by being told to think about the nature of reality. No, Joel’s teachers were smart enough to know that one will only begin to think about that while suffering--so, to inspire thought (that is, to teach) the nature of reality, they must incite suffering, preferably of the mildest sort. Joel thought that his grade school was really stellar.
 
         Heather was terrified of solar eclipses. She remembered one happening when she was in second grade; they had spent the day learning about it, and when it happened, they were allowed to look out the window with special cardboard glasses on. Heather had closed her eyes behind her glasses because she was afraid of going blind and she did not trust whoever made them, or the teacher who said they were safe. The other children looked, though, and the rest of the day they were bouncing of the walls, describing to each other the black circle and the flames. She mimicked them and no one knew she was lying. One girl had claimed that she’d removed the glasses and later complained that her eyes hurt. Heather didn’t know whether that was true, but for weeks afterward, she felt uneasy whenever she saw the girl, and wondered when she would come in to find the girl’s seat empty, and she, Heather, would eerily know what the teacher was going to say before he said it: “Boys and girls, Lindsey will not be joining us in school anymore because she is blind…”
         That afternoon stayed with Heather, and now she was terrified of solar eclipses, because she did not trust her ability to resist seeing what one looked like. She was uncomfortably curious to know, and was sure that the next time one occurred, her rabid curiosity would overcome her, and she would stare at it with naked eyes.


Kimberly Bunker's hobbies include livin' in the tenth dimension and trying to figure out what on earth that means.

Retrieval

by Skye Shirley

When the neighborhood women
meet for their Wednesday book group
I stand at their sinks and guard
their children sleeping.

As infants they clenched
my smallest fingers and only
ate soft food. Now they read
mysteries by lamplight as I

rinse plates downstairs.
Across the street, my
driveway is plowed.
Snow scatters as I gather

their Lego pieces. I know this
flurry well, and love the tasks,
rituals. I give vitamins, brush teeth,
unfold pajamas, light the dark.

And downstairs load
the dishwasher and sit
on the old loveseat.
The skylight is blanketed

with snow: don’t you
marvel at this bliss?
Even the cold yearns
to touch me.


Skye Shirley checks this forecast before the weather forecast.