Caterwaul Quarterly Archive

Peppi Feller has lived in the same apartment in Brooklyn, New York for over fifty years. For the last thirteen, she has lived here alone and struggles to find joy in life without her husband.

Most of her days are spent inside, where she keeps the apartment immaculate—a window into a life once lived.

I wake falling,
speaking my own language,
the rain spilling down in sand dollars,
dark and too rich
to earn.

My mama leaves rocks shocking bright
in my lunch box, and when I was little
I lined them up one by one by
one in my desk’s lip and learned them:
amethyst was a language class, means royal,
and citrine is yellow from “lemon” in French;
spinel imitates rubies like Benedict Arnold;
morganite was named for the robber baron
Granpa’s brother met; opals look like rainbows
and jasper is a little countryside locked
in rock and that’s geography;
Noah steered by garnets at night,
and the Aztecs worshipped emeralds.

The buildings downtown seemed as if they were hewn from one solid block of flawless glass, and the sunlight they reflected stung poor Tar's eyes. Some had ground floor windows covered in sheets of reflective film; they forced him to look at himself as he waddled down the street, and he saw a fat, shambolic triangle of a man. Tired of himself and his surroundings, he looked warily on the world. Woe walked with Tar, dragged behind him like an atrophied tail.

Audible

B,

For at least a couple of years I have advocated for the abolition of the Super Bowl as we know it, although not for the usual and often valid reasons: those who claim the game has largely sucked have largely been correct. This year's game between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants was exciting enough, and I seem to recall a good one a few years back, but I'll be damned if I can tell you which teams were playing.

“I laughed. There I was, dick in hand, philosophizing about sexuality.”
Walter Mosley, Killing Johnny Fry