Marcus Speh

Publicity photo from MAX ERNST — MY VAGABOND LIFE, MY DISQUIET

Max Ernst in Sedona

He talks to the rocks. He tells them who he is and he’s impressed by their stoicism. He hasn’t lost his good looks but the Navajo women aren’t interested in the painter who sits half-naked under a Jojoba tree and asks about spirits and sauces because he likes his potatoes with thick sauce like Germans do. This is, for him, a sign that he’s alive. Nobody here has heard of him but they believe him because he can draw like a god. One of the women tells the others: his lines come alive like snakes. He shows them his ankles where the painted serpents bit him. He bled red ink. He calls every Indian ‘lady’. One of them reminds him of his mother another of a whore in Berlin. He looks at the sky long and hard as if the sky could come down and settle on his canvas like a tamed animal. His dreams, at night, get up and walk around the compound all by themselves, making up landscapes.

CP

Marcus Speh lives in Berlin, Germany, where the tradition of Dada and surrealism are still strong. He curates the One Thousand Shipwrecked Penguins project, serves as maitre d' of the kaffe in katmandu and has got nothing to flawnt at http://marcusspeh.com

Marcus Speh

 

Hänsel und Gretel

The heart is a limekiln and it always burns. Gretel is stuck inside: sharp nosed, short sighted, she carries the corners of her mouth a little higher than you would expect in this land of the drooping moods and her glasses in the bag because she's vain and wants people to look at her eyes and not at her spectacles. Her sample sentence: are you joking? It's tight in this oven: Hänsel is here, too, a Russian-German but that doesn't matter now, he's got one of his large hands, the right one with the crooked cut nails, on Gretel's left boob and milks it gaily to the rhythm of the music that rises all the way from the shop full of African artifacts and up to the roof and into the kitchen where Hänsel and Gretel share a baking tray. Hänsel's sentence isn't really a sentence: ah nah. Gretel looks at Hänsel and pushes his hand aside: are you joking? Hänsel puts his hand back: ah nah. The music has no climax, instead it returns to itself just like Hänsel and Gretel. Where's Hänsel's other hand? What's covering Gretel's other boob? Why don't you leave symmetry alone. Ah nah? Are you joking? I wish I was, so that we could laugh instead of stew here slowly. Perestrojka is rad. Their joint sentence: the witch can stuff it.

CP

Marcus Speh lives in Berlin near a large selection of fine coffee houses and an even larger selection of fine writers. He writes mostly in English. His short prose - sometimes published under the pseudonym Finnegan Flawnt - can be found or is forthcoming at >kill author, elimae, Emprise Review, Mad Hatters Review and elsewhere. More about him at marcusspeh.com