Brian Pilling has been published in In Parentheses, The Berkshire Review, Cutbow Quarterly, Down In The Dirt, New Pop Lit, Hidden Peak Press, and elsewhere. Brian has two chapbooks, The Poet’s Struggle, by Bottlecap Press, and A Substitute Algebra Teacher With A Penchant for Poetry by The Main Street Rag.
B. Pilling was published in the Fall issue of In Parentheses (Volume 8)
A Beach Concerto for Clarinet
When I hear the onshore wind in the morning, I hear it as a composition of clarinets, played by naked boys running bow-legged, scurrying between beams of sunlight, imitating ghost crabs—carrying the amber of sunrise on their translucent backs. The boys hold out only one cupped hand. The others are preoccupied, covering their sand encrusted privates. Their fathers are still in the parking lot, their heads buried in their phones. Their mothers pay no mind, already yesterday’s sunburns have been reset ablaze, by tales of Atlantic pirates coming ashore. The women drift in and out of romance and betrayal, riding the waves with bodice rippers on violent seas, waiting to be rescued by a long-drawn-out kiss. At the far end of the beach, teenage girls erupt in laughter—tipsy silhouettes on slippery rocks, their knees buckled by stolen nips of liquor, their salty swoons pretending to drown in the effervescent spray—waves drawn back to an invisible moon, neither waxing nor waning. For now, it is only the wind that dies.
We Live in a Time of Magical Thinking
when men in daisy print dresses read Dr. Seuss at the library, and now your son has a flair for the dramatic—when shelves empty themselves of obscenity before doors close for fear, a time when lapel pins and bumper stickers are thought to settle generational beefs, a magical time when you can wake up a whole new man; sport-star, giant of industry, congressman— because genre bending memoirs are life, and Webster changes definitions daily, because it’s a magical time when a Madam Currie can face off with a D student and lose, just as a leash of foxes (a skulk), can court and win Supreme decisions, a time when artificial intelligence can fool the noblest of Nobles, a magical time of butterflies in your stomach—because you can buy P.F. Chang’s General Tso’s Chicken in the frozen food aisle, and say you love the Chinese and believe it, because now every lie in this world can be franchised—because we live in a time of magical thinking when tech giants show you what to search for in life.
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Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 8
64 pages, published 4/16/2024
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