X for the Straight Edge Kids
heaven
In the woods we built many forts with lumber we found (oops, stole) from around the neighborhood. We’d build platforms, sometimes they’d fall. We knew not to touch Lady Slippers—they were endangered. I don’t think I ever saw a mammal in the woods that wasn’t human.
We thought the woods were haunted. That is, we pretended the woods were haunted and we never let on that we each knew we were just playing a long con. Woods, I guess, ask any child, are spooky. So much darkness and uncertainty among the paths within, who knows what could be there. Maybe workers smoking pot or drinking day beers from the apple processing plant behind the woods most likely, but they never fucked with us.
If I went back now—aw, who’m I kidding? I’d be freaked out about ticks or looking like some kind of wandering adult creep. It’s not a hiking trail, these were dense woods who belonged to nobody or perhaps the municipal government. We thought nothing about wandering through them, making them our own. I think I’d still know the paths as they were in the 80s and 90s, but they’re grown over, different now. Nothing the same as it was—this isn’t the oil of nostalgia, two of my friends were suffering horrible abuse at home. My other friend’s parents were splitting up, fighting behind the thin walls.
Childhood better because—no bills? I sure got punched in the face a lot more when I was a child than I have in adulthood (zero times since turning eighteen but I live a pretty boring life where I don’t get in people’s faces or do road rage, or I try not to anyway).
This was all Canada of course. I was never allowed to wander far when we moved to the States, land of murder and best selling memoirs by murderers. I mean, there are murders aplenty in Canada too. We imagined them in the “big cities” like Moncton or Halifax.
I made maps of the woods, maps of every street in town. This was the kind of place I grew up in—small, of utmost consequence only for the two thousand people who lived there. And not even for some of them. An apple blossom festival, children dressed as bees. Some kids set a homeless man on fire and he burned to death in the 90s. They called it a prank. The newspaper said this wasn’t Berwick.
My friend’s father was a surgeon, he had to operate on somebody who attempted to die by suicide but only shot off his own face. He survived until the second attempt. We all survive until.
The woods had a little creek running through it—it abutted against a strawberry farm. Could a heavyset adult in his middle age climb a tree do you think?
earth
X-Acto knives. Xylophones. Xactly my point. Xantham gum. Xenophobia, here more than elsewhere, and also here less than elsewhere, it gets complicated. Xcellence in a variety of fields. Xoneration for my previous crimes, whew! Xavier’s School for Gifted Children (made up). Xylitol if you’re nasty. Xylophones made of a rib cage, are we to presume heh this is some sort of magical xylophone? X Post Facto. X, the punk band, I don’t like playing their hit song Los Angeles because the white singer says the n-word even if she is saying it to criticize a midwestern racist. Xenon. X-Rated. Xpress yourself. Xpatriate. X-Men (blue team). X-Rays. Xcisions to remove the growth. Xperience is overrated. Xcoriating reviews, ugh! Xindi from Star Trek Enterprise, an interesting idea for a planet where five different species evolved into sentience at the same time, though the show bungled the whole season that focused on them. X Ray Spex (RIP Poly Styrene). XXX Rated. Xogenesis. Xultation. X Machina. Xplosions, they look cool but they are mostly evil. X marks the spot, wanna start digging? X Factor. X the unknown. X the variable. Ximenas from all over the world. X for straight edge kids, sorry you don’t drink or smoke. XX. Xpelled for drinking behind the loading dock in the senior smoking area. Xquisite pain and pleasure. Xi’an Famous Foods. Xoskeletons, I’m sorry I’ve broken so many of them, it’s instinctual. Xsanguinate. XXXXXXXXX Rated???? Xerox, are they even around anymore? Xcommunicate, sounds kinda nice actually. X-military. Xhuming McCarthy by REM. Xhumation in general, gross I presume. Xfoliate daily. XO Manowar. XOXO, Gossip Girl. X really does look like a kiss, and I get the O for a hug. X the coolest letter, and also the most useless. Xqueeze me, bacon powder? X-Lax, jokes and jokes and jokes. Xplain it to me like I’m five. Xplicate it to me like I’m an Associate Professor. X-Men (red team). Xgirlfriends in a few different states, not Texas though the song is good. Xamples of relationship failures sewn throughout our bodies. Xtenuating circumstances. X Nihilo. Xhaustion. XCOM on PC, 1994. Xpectations. Xclaim! Xacerbating a great deal of painful truths. Xmas lights on the side of the feeder. Xians hoarding all the outrage. XTC. X-Statix. X-Ray of a baby’s skull in utero. Xcellent.
hell
A pixelated mess, red and scrolling on the screen. I found it fun to kill demons, I didn’t believe in them. Parents and pundits blamed teen violence on the games, Doom, Doom 2. Shouldn’t they have been happy the Christian message of suffering and death was being spread?
Just kidding! I love my neighbors all the way down.
I too tried to make school into a map, but I didn’t want to kill anybody. It was the only place I knew that well that didn’t have a basement. Doom and Doom 2 couldn’t handle stacked levels.
High school, we had bulletin boards before the internet. What that meant was there were little individual computers locally we could dial up with our 2400 baud modem (very slow—it would take ten minutes to download a picture) and insult people. In a flame war some enemies made a digital image of me sucking another guy’s dick. Quelle rude!
I don’t know if anybody’s nice at age fourteen or fifteen. Angry at … something, a little tick burrowing its armored head into the armpit.
My flame war enemies evolved into EDM enemies. We called it Techno. We all wrote it, got jealous of each other’s tracks. But we made nice and they picked me up to hang at the local joke of a mall (a Dillard’s and a JC Penney and maybe a pretzel store somewhere in between). They said they were really gonna take me out to a field and beat the fuck out of me. Just kidding! I took em a little serious, thought about ditching out of the back seat of the moving car.
We had “total conversion mods” for Doom. One turned all the demons into Simpsons’ characters. One changed all the levels to center around Evil Dead, one the Aliens franchise. I liked violent video games, I still do. Little caveman shouting blood, licking the wet skull.
What happened to all those BBS guys anyway? The internet let us deal with other people who weren’t roiling in the Lake City cauldron.
Friends showed me in the woods a ruined satanic church—it must have been, the cross laid on the pulpit was upside down!
But couldn’t the preacher have just stood on the other side?
Mini-interview with Glenn Shaheen
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
GS: Listening to Sonic Youth and Miles Davis for the first time in high school and learning to revel in the notes what make people wince.
HFR: What are you reading?
GS: I always have a giant pile of books I’ve bought and have yet to read, but a few great books I read in the past month have included Bianca by Eugenia Leigh, Watcha by Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal, and the chapbook In Arcadia by Craig Beaven.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “X for the Straight Edge Kids”?
GS: “X for the Straight Edge Kids” is part of a long series of lyric essay triptychs in which I meditate on various ideas or conditions of heaven and hell, with a sort of abecedarian sandwiched in between. X is one where I do kind of have to cheat—a common practice for hitting X in any abecedarian (here using a lot of X in place of “Ex” for example). It is my favorite letter though, tbh, even if honestly it’s a little useless in modern English.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
GS: I’d like to mention my editorial work with Tram Editions, the chapbook press I co-edit, which is always free for submissions! We’ve done five chapbooks so far and hope to have our sixth out by the beginning of 2025. Check us out at trameditions.com
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
GS: Free Palestine.
Glenn Shaheen is the author of four books. He is the President of the Radius of Arab American Writers and teaches at Prairie View A&M University.
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Heavy Feather Review 