kitchen

the forgotten sam pink interview

2012-02-21T00:02:00.005-05:00

Things have gotten slower. Sorry. Maybe we've gotten pickier. We still read things but like less things. We're still looking for things but will not post things just to post things. We're hibernating I guess you could say, waiting, like that Swedish man lost in the snow. Waiting for things to come to us and say: love me, tie me up, beat me. No, just kidding. To wake us out of our great sad slumber. Then the other day we came upon this fragment (or maybe it is the whole thing) of an interview we did with Sam Pink at some point after having read one of his books. Smiles have frowns too? No. Something about friends. Frowns needs friends too. Maybe. It's on the side there somewhere. It was good (you should read it) so we decided to accidentally run into Sam Pink and ambush-interview him. Then we completely forgot about it. Maybe it was the holidays. Depression. The olympics.. Anyway, as we think this might be a valuable document in the eyes of future small press archaeologists, we will now publish the small fragment. THE FORGOTTEN (AND LOST (BUT FOUND)) SAM PINK INTERVIEW.

--------------------------

K: Apropos “THE SELF-ESTEEM HOLOCAUST COMES HOME” (FALL 2010). How is

writing Good-ass plays different from writing say a Good-ass poem or Good-ass fiction, and, if held at gun-point, which Good-ass form would you go down writing?

SP: it's no different. i wouldn't go down writing anything, i'd say, "shoot me, do it."

K: W.H. Auden liked to start the day early with a Dry Martini, something that was critical to him getting his creative synapses firing. What does a typical Sam Pink breakfast consist of and does it somehow influence your creative process?

SP: i usually just eat whatever i can. and yes, it does influence me because i get weird if i am hungry.

K: We see that you have already done about 17 interviews. That's a whole lot of interviews. We apologize. You must be tired. What makes a good interview? Nevermind, don't answer that. Is there anything that haven't been asked that you would like to ask? We'll do our best to

try to find an answer.

SP: i would like to ask, "why don't i feel peaceful."

--------------------------

Well that's it. Kind of sad really. Oh well? Happy valentine's day!

Find Sam Pink here: http://www.impersonalelectroniccommunication.com/

If you would like to be interviewed by kitchen that probably means that we don't want to interview you so don't write to us at poetkitchen@gmail.com. If you however want to interview someone other than yourself who is interesting you can do that and send us that interview. Thanks.

Helen Vitoria: photography

2012-02-11T09:27:00.002-05:00

"cup"

"cutlery"

"fire"

"muerto"

Helen Vitoria’s poems can be found and are forthcoming in: elimae, PANK, MudLuscious Press, >kill author, Foundling Review, FRIGG Magazine and Dark Sky Magazine and many others. She is the author of four chapbooks and a full length poetry collection: Corn Exchange forthcoming from Scrambler Books. Her poems have been nominated for Best New Poets & the Pushcart Prize. She is also an angsty photographer with photos forthcoming at Phantom Kangaroo and ken*again. She is the Founding Editor and Editor in Chief of THRUSH Poetry Journal & THRUSH Press. Find her here: http://helenvitoria-lexis.blogspot.com/

Kimberly Ann Southwick: metrocardpoems

2012-01-23T08:38:00.009-05:00

front / back

Kimberly Ann Southwick is the founder and editor in chief of Gignantic Sequins, a literary arts journal. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches grammar, literature and writing to college students. Visit giganticsequins.com

good-er film

2012-01-20T10:46:00.005-05:00

The stunning Eiko & Koma, Occupy Wall Street and our own relentless resident poet James Browning Kepple as "The King of Harlem" in this fine reel by Johanna Arnow.

Cinematography Reel from Joanna Arnow on Vimeo.

Our one-man research team of all things Philosophy and Letters, Daniel, supplies the following fitting thought by Theodor W. Adorno: "Not only were all good things, as Nietzsche knew, once bad things: the gentlest, left to follow their own momentum, have a tendency to culminate in unimaginable brutality."

reading small press: the best fucking poem series 1

2012-01-18T22:40:00.026-05:00

An Introduction

In response to the Welsh/Jewish or Jewish/Welsh poet who noted that "There's a Million Poets Writing a Billion Poems and No-one Reading Them" we wish to make our contribution by turning kitchen from a magazine of writing into a magazine of writing and reading. The nerve, indeed, to suggest that Poets can also simultaneously be Readers. The Welsh/Jewish or Jewish/Welsh poet also noted that "someone's been fucking diluting my pot" to which we want to say, it wasn't us.

We bring you therefore, in a first step toward becoming a magazine that also reads, The Best Fucking Poem Series. Here we will make notations, promotions and flirtations with a number of written pieces found (and oh so quickly forgotten) in the endless pool known as The Small Press, or Independent Press, or Underground Press, or whatever it is now known as. These are the literary magazines (including our own) spread around the interweb that are small enough as to be read mostly by their own bearded editors and the occasional struggling writer's polite friends. What seems to be missing in this very strange world is not writing, however, but, as the Welsh/Jewish Jewish/Welsh Poet so snappily noted, Readers, but also, we would add, any type of conversation about the work outside of the congratulatory Facebook "like" thing, where poets who write similarly and/or once shared cousins have formed a community of "liking" with the occasional "awesome" or "let's webcam" thrown in.

What would Kafka think?

Indeed, but what is a poor poet to do? The nature of the poet's failure to make economical ends meet (he can survive for weeks on a single acceptance and a thin slice of rye bread) can be seen as a glossy shine about the work as he learns to maneuver the ever changing landscape. Love Thyself. Persistence. Multiple Submissions. Hard Work. Fuck The New Yorker. Let's Start a Magazine. One Poem a Day is 365 Poems a Year. Multiple Orgasms. I Am a Man of Steel and Incredible Sadness. Ashbery Who? Let's Do it! Can I Write a Vagina Poem as a Man? etc. Eager to adapt the poet furnishes for himself a Consumer's Cold Dead Heart and becomes, it is only a matter of time, Poet Machine. Poet Machine is a state of heightened poet-hood where the poet consumes only his own poems together with the occasional (Diet) beverage. This is a very dangerous condition. Signs include hair loss and loss of human emotions as well as updating your "bio" daily and listing as your favorite poet of all time some dude named Rob or Bob who once positively reviewed your chapbook. Please see a doctor immediately.

In the light of this (or lack thereof) The Best Fucking Poem Series will feature poems that rise above the clonk and mumble of their contemporaries. They will be relatively recent (it is sometimes hard to see if a magazine is dead or alive). The use of the word "fucking" does not mean that the poems have to be about fucking but is our way to emphasize authority where there is none. A question of aesthetics and taste, no doubt, and who are we to say what is good and what is not? We have impeccable taste! The use of the word "poem", furthermore, does not mean that the writing has to be poem but is our subtle way of hinting that beneath the best of prose linger a poet's sensibilities (as the best of poems display some, however flighty, grasp of narrative). Poems by people that we know will not be featured in this series. We like to read and poems will be selected purely based on Readability and whether or not they entice in us a feeling of, what the Jewish/Welsh Welsh/Jewish poet once called, "Fucking Goodness". Feel free to add your comments below telling us we are wrong. The purpose is not an arbitrary handing out of imaginary awards but an attempt to stimulate reading and conversation about the writing that is there without being read.

The Best Fucking Poem, 1 (January)

Gloria Kills Many Things by Ofelia Hunt, published by kill author.

The first poem selected is not a poem but a short story (or maybe a flash story, so many categories) that goes straight to work being a short story. Reading this story we thought "Fucking Goodness" and then we thought "We Love This Ofelia Hunt Whoever Now She Is". There is none of that annoying fluff that most stories start out with that screams "This is a story!" or "This is not a story!" followed by "Hold on, the story will begin shortly, I just need to write this paragraph first." Though a story mostly made up of descriptions the descriptions are not passive scene settings but vital and active components that drive the story. Joy William's bleakly funny and often surreal underbelly America came to mind, so did the Borgesian idea that you should imagine the story as already written before you write it and instead of writing a story summarize the story already written. The bare bones of a story. Let the bigger story rest in the folds of the small story. Linearity is fucking overrated. A poem-story-poem-story-poem. Definitely a poem. How can anything with a line such as "Carson wants to research the orange-ness of all things" not be a poem. A fucking poem. So there.

visit ofeliahunt.com

Krishan Coupland: 2 flash

2012-01-16T00:08:00.002-05:00

VLAD

Vlad. Poor Vlad. He doesn't understand English. Doesn't understand the country, the strange place he's somehow ended up. Vlad fizzes. He's got so much inside him and it won't all come out. Won't come out smooth anyway. He has to bite it off. To spit it out in so many words, so drowned in ums and ahs, like kittens spilling from a cement mixer. Has to wave his arms around like this, as if to try and snatch the words from the air, or to ward off misunderstanding. Has to keep his friend close, to borrow language from, to fish out meaning when meaning fails him. How you say? Study? To study? Studying? Say again? Say again but...please, slowly. Sometimes he cannot contain it all, the rush of thoughts that gutter like fireworks in his brain. Sometimes it spills out of him in Russian, clean and angular as broken glass. And people stare at him uncomprehending, his words breaking over them in a pointless, ugly torrent, and he shakes his head and turns to his guide for meaning, and his guide cannot help him and he turns himself leaden again, to leaden English, and says sorry, and says it is hard, you know? And says, let me try again, and starts from the very beginning, stumbling like a blind man running over rocks.

YOUR FIRE

In the dream you open the cupboard door to find not the array of coats and boots you were expecting but a fire, so hot it's blue and raging. The kind of fire that's a black hole for attention, for fingers, sucking you towards it like a tidal swell. The walls are burning. The floor is burning. You just stand there and stare, gripping the edge of the door like you'd grip the very edge of reality. There's no heat. No noise but that gentle hiss-anger-roar that fire makes as it moves through air. And somehow you're sure that this fire is your fire, meant for you, waiting for you laid there special like a snare. And it can be patient, you know that too. It won't come for you in the night because it knows it has you, it knows, and it's happy to wait. Your fire. You special fire. And when you wake to a darkened room and a sleeping wife you can't pretend you don't still hear it shouting.

Krishan Coupland was born in Southampton, and recently graduated from Staffordshire University. His work has appeared in Brittle Star, Aesthetica and 3AM Magazine. His website is: www.krishancoupland.co.uk.

an excerpt from "The Life and Times of Larry Sparrow"

2012-01-09T16:38:00.003-05:00

LarrySparrow: is this the gay domination room?

CmInMyBm: Yes larry

LarrySparrow: ah awesome

CmInMyBm: Dom or domd?

LarrySparrow: I want someone to totally dominate me

LarrySparrow: I mean, someone other than my mother that is

(long pause)

LarrySparrow: did I not say that sexy or something?

vypers: Naw

CmInMyBm: U want to dominate me here?

LarrySparrow: no, dominate me

CmInMyBm: no

LarrySparrow: wtf, can we take numbers or something?

vypers: Lol?

LarrySparrow: ha I just thought of something

LarrySparrow: in a weird way, you refusing to dominate me is a kind of domination

CmInMyBm: Vypers u want me or him?

LarrySparrow: oh, you are good

LarrySparrow: maybe we can just all sort of dominate each other?

firecroch: Who wants to be my master?

LarrySparrow: me

LarrySparrow: I mean wait, well okay, yeah fine, me

firecroch: Wat do u want me to do

LarrySparrow: my taxes, jk

LarrySparrow: a few questions first

LarrySparrow: are you into pain?

(long pause)

LarrySparrow: fire, answer me now, you worm!

LarrySparrow: no one is dominating anyone

LarrySparrow: man this stinks!

CmInMyBm: Larry do u hav a cam?

LarrySparrow: yes

CmInMyBm: It helps if u turn it on

firecroch: Sorry larry what do u want me to do?

LarrySparrow: I know that cuminmybum, but if I turned it on now that would be like I was listening to you and then you would be dominating me and I am trying to get my dom on with firecroch here so all in all, this is pretty distracting

CmInMyBm: So u want to dominate?

LarrySparrow: no! I want you to let me dominate but now the whole idea is just starting to seem silly!

firecroch: I have needles and wax

LarrySparrow: mmmm, that's hot fire, but now my mother is calling me. I'll try to bbl. Peace out, gangstas.

Larry Sparrow is a problem. Larry Sparrow is a big fucking problem. He can be found causing all kinds of mayhem and perversion at showforstars.com. He steals ideas, feelings, and human souls right off the Internet and nobody can do anything to stop him. Log on any time and join his mission to change the world from inside a chatroom.

Larry Sparrow is a performance artist living in Alaska (according to his profile). He has no other hobbies and has let his O.C.D. take control over his life like a God. He barely sleeps and nourishes himself solely on cola and tortilla chips. He never gets fucked, he is the thing that fucks.

9

2011-12-18T09:11:00.006-05:00

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers
that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women
that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

-Jorge Luis Borges

9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9

9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9

9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9

9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9

(Just take me home)

Ice Cream Man

2011-12-12T09:49:00.006-05:00

by Denise Falcone

After a month of crashing on the floor of a friend's living room, a nightmare of velvet and rococo swirls, Randall found an apartment with a roommate never there. Chummily joining in to form a lineup of good karma was a coveted view of river out the small casement kitchen window - stick your head way out and look to your extreme left - a decent gym around the corner, and the most important thing of all, a job.

“Do you have any restaurant experience?” asked the boy with the eyebrows whose friends had apparently deserted him.

“Yes,” Randall replied, “back in North Carolina.”

“I'm from South Carolina,” said the boy who could have been a model. It was serendipity.

A queue of hungry patrons dressed for the tropics spilled out onto the sidewalk. Some teens laughing too loud at dumb jokes blocked the way, while the girls looked forward to getting a glimpse of all the adorable waiters.

Everyone complained about the wait. Jim, the manager, would report wearily that yes, it would be two hours before they could be seated, and yes, right two times, even though they only wanted mochaccinos.

“Come with me, honey,” he said to Randall, pulling him by his clean white shirt.

Randall was terrified he was going to be fired.

“Listen darling,” said Jim amidst the furious noise of the kitchen, “we are dangerously low on vanilla. Don't ask,” he said, pressing a handsome upright finger onto Randall's tender lips.

“Do you know where The Plaza is?”

“The Plaza Hotel,” Randall said.

“Hurry up. Take a cab and see Henry.” Jim literally pushed Randall out the door.

A blanket of smog hovered over everything. Randall gazed out the window of the taxi as it growled through the traffic, to the pedestrians keeping stoic as if the slightest movement of any part of their bodies whatsoever, including eyes and tongue, would stoke the heat even more.

Finally, and if only his friends back home could see, he stepped out onto the red-carpet.

“Randall?” called Henry, trotting down the stairs.

“Are you the ice cream man?”

“We use the same company.”

Randall wondered if there was more between Henry and Jim than the same manufacturer of vanilla. Perhaps those two queens got together for the old onesie-twosie once in...

“This way,” Henry said, as he held the door.

The posh gilded spaces looked like the inside of a palace. Tones from a harp and the tinkling of good china from afternoon tea caused Randall's heart to swell in thinking he was going to be a part of all this now.

Henry beckoned him into a service elevator, where in the drab grey box they sunk into the bowels of Paradise until they landed with a thud.

“Exactly how much am I supposed to take?” Randall asked with a wan expression as he surveyed the stacks of tubs lining the freezer's walls.

“Three, said Henry, shaking Randall's cold deflated hand.

A man named Owen carted the ice cream out the side entrance to the curb, where he abandoned Randall to an eternity of incessant waving until the wonderful yellow of an air-conditioned mini-van bulleted up to the curb.

The driver, fresh as a daisy in a crisp plaid short-sleeved shirt, shook his head emphatically when Randall asked for help.

“No! No way! No!” he hollered angrily in an unknown foreign accent.

Randall looked down at the ice cream and thought he was going to faint.

“Hey, brother! What you got there?”

An appallingly filthy homeless man was standing before him.

“Ice cream,” Randall muttered.

“Ice cream? What kinda ice cream?”

“Look, I'm trying to catch a cab.”

“With ice cream? No cab is gonna take you with ice cream. Besides, it's all meltin, man.”

A thin milky river was starting to cut a path.

Curious passers-by quickened their pace as Randall stared back at them with the hatred of fanatic. His shirt was drenched with perspiration and he had to pee.

Suddenly the homeless man reappeared with a smashed up rusty supermarket cart. Randall could only watch as the man placed the ice cream in it.

“Come on, man! I ain't got all day!”

The deafening drone and clangor of metal hitting the sidewalk warned everyone out of the way.

“Move aside stupid people! Can't you see we got something here?!”

Poor Randall struggled to hold back an explosion of sobs as he reluctantly followed.

Love Noir 3 | The Enemy Tree

Blackpool by Night

2011-12-12T09:48:00.006-05:00

by Rachel Stevenson

Unlike the supertrams in other British cities, Blackpool's trams are not uniform; there are old ones, new ones, red ones, yellow ones, green ones, single decker, double decker, 1930s heritage cars, but they come together to form a transport system.

The town is crowded full of folk taking advantage of the early Autumn sunshine. Residents of Yorkshire and Lancashire put away their imagined grievances for a go on the shooting range and Danelaw descendants queue with Italian tourists for the “Valhalla” Norse-themed ride at the Pleasure Beach. People leaving the theme park offer new arrivals their polythene rain capes for the wet rides -- the spirit of the Rochester Co-operative movement lives on.

Later, the town shines up as the illuminations comes on. Muslims in traditional dress stroll along the promenade, mixing with kids out too late, and hen and stag parties that started twelve hours ago. Hens are dressed as fairies, construction workers, characters from Alice in Wonderland, whilst a man in a frock, separated from his fellow stags, stands forlornly outside of a pub. A woman yells: "Does anyone want this melted slushie?" An elderly lady wheels two Scotty dogs in a shopping trolley. Amanda and Rory pass us; she has his name tattooed on the back of her neck, he has hers. Horses trot up and down the road, some are traditional pony and traps, but others pull pink Cinderella carriages.

The air smells of marijuana and manure, sugar and vinegar. All day and night, people eat candy floss, chips, donuts, rock shaped like bacon and eggs or parts of the anatomy. A tram dressed as a ship sails past and when it beeps its horn, it's not the poot-poot of a tram but the parp of an ocean liner. The top of the tower lights flicker on and off, lighting the town green, purple, pink, white, blue, yellow, red; the colours mingle to form a magical sheen.

Love Noir 1 | Ice Cream Man

Onward to Castle Lake, Český Krumlov

2011-12-12T09:46:00.005-05:00

By Kirby Wright

I stroll infinity road through oak, tripping over a drainage ditch made of wood. Thrushes scurry through the forest. A caretaker passes cradling a pitchfork. I reach a gazebo with support posts disguised as scrolls and a ceiling frescoed with newborns. Babies with the faces of old men. One squeezes a carp. Rococo clamshells and grape leaf garlands. Onward. The oaks become giants, mist swirling trunks the size of redwoods. Limbs arch the road, creating a tunnel.

I reach a tiny dock. The lake is before me—a jade square with lily pads riding its surface. There’s an island of birch. A rowboat, tethered by frayed rope to the dock, lies frozen in water. The boat’s floor glitters korunas. Footsteps. Are those feet? No, just oaks on the road dropping acorns. The boat rocks. The White Lady stands on a lily pad. She’s wearing a bone-white dress with gold fringe. The sash around her waist is strung with keys. “Hey, babe,” I greet. She pulls on a pair of black gloves. “Babe?” I go. A breeze kicks up—the lake shivers. I smell fireplaces, the stench of dungeons, stale mead.

Love Noir 4 | Day Trip

The Enemy Tree

2011-12-12T09:44:00.003-05:00

by Kirby Wright

Dadio paints a face on a coconut shell, ties dental floss to a furniture tack, and sinks the tack into the shell’s crown. He dangles the face off a jacaranda out back. There must be fifty faces already hanging on that tree. Each represents an enemy. Some of the faces have Xed out eyes. Others look like demons. A few remind me of stooges. Who are these people? I know he hates Ross the neighbor. He also hates that Marine down the street with the RV. Sometimes he even hates Mom. I spot one on a lower branch with slits for eyes and a big mouth. “Who’s that?” I ask, pointing. “This tree knows your future,” he replies.

Boogie Woogie | Latin Temperament 1

Revelations from a stack of antique postcards

2011-12-12T09:42:00.004-05:00

by Gary Glauber

I’m working now,

trying hard to save some money.

I’ll send what I can in the months ahead.

I miss you.

That Steppenwolf eight-track

jammed up the player

in my convertible yesterday.

Now the top is down, the weather’s great,

yet I can’t play anything.

We had a picnic. Weather was beautiful.

Wasn’t the same somehow with you gone.

No one can approach those chicken cutlets of yours.

Hope life is treating you well.

You crushed my heart in a hurtful way.

Yet you continue to affect me more than any other.

Why is life so cruel?

Paris in the springtime truly is a delight.

Small children play around the fountain.

The gardens are incredibly lush.

Nature is beautiful here, as is the architecture.

It all reminds me of you.

Moved into the new place. Small, but affordable.

That’s life on a budget. Write when you find the time.

You. Me. Destiny. Can’t you see?

Never made it to Woodstock.

Never served in Vietnam.

Seems I missed out on a generation

of experience. Can you forgive me?

The snowdrifts here are higher than my head.

The temperatures are so frigid that

when you breathe in, your nostrils freeze.

The February sky is bleak and gray.

And yet thoughts of you warm me.

How’s my little baby adjusting to life in the big city?

I understand you’re busy, but I miss the weekly phone calls.

Don’t forget about those who love you.

Oh, and your father sends his regards too.

After tonight’s cub scout meeting

It dawned on me that I’m not really cut out

for this kind of volunteering. Where others

are rah-rah, I’m definitely blah-blah.

But I did teach them to tie a square knot…

Perhaps no one noticed.

Every time I hear those variations on a theme

I’m reminded of you

And that time I came home to find you

practicing in the altogether,

wearing nothing but lipstick

and a knowing smile.

Found this card in some dusty drugstore

in the middle of nowheresville.

What it lacks in fancy it makes up for in heart.

If only you were here, you could transform

this lackluster place into paradise.

20,000 Frenchmen

can’t be wrong, they say.

Quel mec a volé mon pantalon?

Wish I knew more useful phrases

when traveling abroad.

Heard you weren’t feeling well.

Hope this little card helps

brighten your day. Feel better.

Still working, but finding it

increasingly hard to save.

I promise I’ll send something soon.

Love and miss you much.

My four-chambered heart

aches for you daily.

pumping a message to my brain

that says “Please come back.”

Holding you close

or just watching you sleep

I am struck by your beauty,

the odd feeling of pride it inspires,

and the comfort of having you near.

So much to see, so little time.

Postcards like this are the proof.

Cheap souvenirs of breathtaking places,

that trigger a wealth of rich memories.

Ice Cream Man | Love Noir 1

Paddy on the rye

2011-12-12T09:36:00.008-05:00

By Lily Murphy

‘You are a no good dirty drunk’ she screamed at him as he lay face down on the floor. Tuesday was here, yet Paddy was still struggling out of Monday because Paddy was on the Rye. It had killed his father, it had killed his uncle, it had even killed his oldest brother but Paddy loved Rye whiskey. His first taste of Rye whiskey occurred when he was only twelve years old. When that strong liquor touched his twelve year old tongue he spat and squalled in disgust at such a rotten taste but its after effects proved to be better than the taste and that is what induced Paddy into its ways. Paddy loved rye whiskey and with that Irish blood running thick in his veins, he also suffered from that cultural heritage of an adoration of all things alcohol.

Paddy lay face down on the ground, his nose dug well into the carpet. All of that days dust going right up his nostrils but he could do nothing about it because when Paddy drinks Rye whiskey and drinks a lot of it, Paddy tends to lose his ability to do anything about anything. Before he loses the use of his limbs he firstly loses the grip on his tongue. After many scoops of whiskey, the tongue in Paddy’s head is loosened and sometimes words come slipping and sliding out of his mouth that either gain him friends or gain him enemies. Then Paddy loses all responsibility, then he loses his sight, then his sense, then his legs and then he loses his dignity.

‘I am leaving you here. I’m not going to break my back picking you up and bringing you to bed, you can get up yourself when that whiskey wears off and you get the use of your legs back’ and off she storms up stairs and into the bedroom leaving her husband in the same way he had entered the house in, when after staggering in through the door he hit the ground face first.

When Paddy is on the rye he transforms into a mighty mess of a man. When Paddy is not on the rye he is the best public representative you could ever envision. Twice mayor and always elected whenever he runs for office and all because when Paddy is not on that rye whiskey he loves so much, he gets things done, Paddy satisfies those who vote for him. But at this moment with his nose dug firmly into the carpet in the sitting room he fell into, Paddy’s on the rye and he is anything but a great man.

Blood Tree | Revelations from a stack of antique postcards

The quiet room

2011-12-12T09:34:00.004-05:00

By Fiona Sinclair

You wince under the waits’ added load.

Squashed seating arrangements anticipate

breasts squeezed into scanners.

We are blind to fresh flowers, pastel curtains and carpets.

Receptionists and nurses maintain the default cheeriness

of shopping channel presenters but

fear runs amok amongst us

strangling our instinct to chat.

The pages of ‘Hello’ are turned with shaking hands,

eyes skim bikini clad celebs,

whilst we strain for a bustling nurse to pop her head

around the door and sing your name.

A girl in Sainsbury’s uniform nuzzles

her boyfriend’s shoulder.

It must be confusing for men,

this switch from ‘Carry On’ fondling to

reluctantly tracing a lump insidious as an IED.

Afterwards, we watch other women liberated by

‘Every thing’s fine you can go’

But for one woman, the nurse in sotto voce voice,

‘Would you come through to the quiet room?’

My eyes meet yours,

we remember boxes of tissues and the private exit.

15 minutes trudge by.

‘For God’s sake’

You re-cross legs, switching your coat about you,

I sit with every muscle clenched.

Discharged suddenly, we scurry from the building, high on relief.

I slam the car door on the nurse with the valium voice

and her open invitation for me to join her in ‘that room’.

Baby Birds | Blackpool by Night

Baby Birds

2011-12-12T09:32:00.007-05:00

By Fiona Sinclair

She is a baby bird who despite our own fractured minds

we want to feed with comfort, as week by week,

she tears the dressing off her history.

Father’s cudgeling of her confidence taken up by brother,

40 years of return to sender devotion.

Her husband seeming to arrive like the rescue services

and carry her off to the safety of a marriage

but two months after the honeymoon a stranger moved into his head.

No space in her life for babies

when she must hourly check the temperature of his mood.

Sometimes must get out of the house so walks and walks

until she feels the yank of her tether.

On Fridays when he’s had a difficult night,

despite aching for the spare room and barbiturates,

she negotiates the several buses to arrive

raw faced, beruffled hair, indoor clothes,

and politely listens to group members’ whining:

I haven’t had sex for years,

I ‘m afraid of being myself with people.

My friend phones to deliver a news round up

of children’s gap year and a wedding anniversary jaunt to Bath.

I sketch the members in the group.

She pounces on baby bird as if personally insulted by her.

Why doesn’t she start a new life like I did?

Gripping the receiver I recall some fifteen years before

when she had looked up from literature revision

to find her Heathcliff leaving with bags packed.

So had stared at exam questions,

with thoughts of him touching another woman

fusing her first class brain.

How rolling up my sleeves I had instructed:

tell your tutors, ask for concessions……

Six months later, mother was on stand by for child minding,

brother’s ministrations prolonged the life of her elderly car,

and father tapped the side of his nose telling her

not to fret about the mortgage.

Latin Temperament 1 | Love Noir 2

Day Trip

2011-12-12T09:31:00.007-05:00

By Fiona Sinclair

On the road, uncle’s sat nav commentary directs

us back to his salesman days,

I’ve stayed there often

They always bought tea towels.

At Chichester Cathedral I insist on photographs of aunt and myself ;

because discounting chavs , petty criminals,

and those who keep us at Christmas card distance,

she is my only relative,

and time like a bowling ball is scattering her 70s .

After lunch at Bosham Quay,

an hour lost in a bijou boutique

as we ransack clothes rails

daring each other to buy.

Outside, uncle has the engine running,

he points the car homeward

Quick route or pretty?

I try to squeeze the last dregs out of the trip

suggesting tea and a look round Lewes.

But we shuffle out of the café

relieved to find that the day has already been snuffed out.

Blackpool by Night | Baby Birds

issue 9: about

2011-12-12T08:48:00.016-05:00

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers
that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women
that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

-Jorge Luis Borges

_______________________________________________

Frances Bildner

"Latin Temperament 1"

Denise Falcone

"Ice Cream Man"

Gary Glauber

"Revelations from a stack of antique postcards"

Lily Murphy

Fiona Sinclair

Melinda R. Smith

Rachel Stevenson

"Blackpool by Night"

Kirby Wright

"The Enemy Tree"

"Onward to Castle Lake, Český Krumlov"

_______________________________________________

Frances Bildner is represented in collections throughout Europe and America. The paintings are in definite, almost aggressively joyous, dialogue with the viewer and their presence is hard to ignore. New York’s Village Voice declared Bildner’s work to be “varied and vital enough to renew a jaded spirit”. For the last 18 years she has also been writing stream of consciousness poetry and recently has started combining some poems with her paintings. Visit www.francesbildner.com aswell as on Flickr.

Denise Falcone's stories have appeared in Antique Children, Kerouac's Dog, Why Vandalism?, 6 Tales, and others.

Gary Glauber is a poet, fiction writer, teacher, and music journalist. One of his works was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, another was named “A Notable Online Story” by StorySouth’s Million Writers Award panel. He took part in The Frost Place’s conference on teaching poetry. His work has appeared in 42 Opus, Hobart, Word Riot, Pindeldyboz, Smokelong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Some of his poems will be appearing in upcoming issues of The Compass Rose and StepAway Magazine.

Lily Murphy is 24 and comes from Cork city, Ireland.

Fiona Sinclair's work has appeared in numerous magazines. Her second pamphlet 'A game of hide and seek ' is due out from Indigo Dreams press later this year. She is the editor of the on line poetry magazine Message in a Bottle.

Melinda R. Smith is a Los Angeles-based poet, playwright and digital artist. Her chapbook Tiny Island is available from Finishing Line Press, and her digital art has recently been shown at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. Visit www.melindarsmith.com.

Rachel Stevenson grew up in Doncaster and now lives in London, UK. She has been a contributor to Pygmy Giant, Smoke: A London Peculiar, Dr Hurley's Snake Oil Cure, A Cuppa and Armchair book, the Utopia Arts Festival, and has had her work turned into a short film for the Tate Modern website. She is currently studying for a MA in Creating Writing. Find out more about Rachel Stevenson here.

Kirby Wright was a Visiting Fellow at the 2009 International Writers Conference in Hong Kong, where he represented the Pacific Rim region of Hawaii. He was also a Visiting Writer at the 2010 Martha’s Vineyard Residency in Edgartown, Mass., and the 2011 Artist in Residence at Milkwood International, Czech Republic. He is the author of the companion novels PUNAHOU BLUES and MOLOKA’I NUI AHINA, both set in the islands. Find out more about Kirby Wright here.

Boogie Woogie

2011-12-08T12:45:00.010-05:00

By Frances Bildner

Revelations from a stack of antique postcards | Blood Tree

Freedom + Chains

2011-12-08T12:45:00.008-05:00

By Frances Bildner

The quiet room | Paddy on the rye

Blood Tree

2011-12-08T12:44:00.004-05:00

By Frances Bildner

Love Noir 2 | Latin Temperament 1

3 Dancers

2011-12-08T12:43:00.005-05:00

By Frances Bildner

The enemy tree | Love Noir 3

Latin Temperament 1

2011-12-08T12:41:00.004-05:00

By Frances Bildner

Onward to Castle Lake, Český Krumlov | 3 Dancers

Love Noir 5

2011-12-08T12:40:00.007-05:00

By Melinda R. Smith

Paddy on the rye | There there, Theseus

Love Noir 4

2011-12-08T12:39:00.010-05:00

By Melinda R. Smith

Freedom + Chains | The Quiet Room

Love Noir 3

2011-12-08T12:39:00.009-05:00

By Melinda R. Smith

3 Dancers | Onward to Castle Lake, Český Krumlov

Love Noir 2

2011-12-08T12:38:00.004-05:00

By Melinda R. Smith

Love Noir 5 | Boogie Woogie

Love Noir 1

2011-12-08T12:35:00.006-05:00

by Melinda R. Smith

Day Trip | Love Noir 4

issue 8: myths&zombies

2011-12-05T12:52:00.007-05:00

rachel marsom-richmond "2 poems"

james lacroix jr. "3 poems"

virginie colline "1 poem"

daniel ridges "2 spoken word"

robert vaughan "2 flash"

peter schwartz "1 poem"

eleanor leonne bennett "photography"

"Better be with the dead,

Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie

In restless ecstasy."

- Shakespeare, Macbeth

Ben: There are stories being told, Bob.

Robert: By people who are out of their minds with fear.

Ben: Maybe. But there are too many to be just coincidental. Stories about people who have died and have come back.

Robert: They're stories Ben, stories.

-The Last Man on Earth

8.7. Eleanor Leonne Bennett: photography

2011-12-05T12:13:00.004-05:00

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 15 year old photographer and artist who has won contests with National Geographic,The Woodland Trust, The World Photography Organisation, Winstons Wish, Papworth Trust, Mencap, Big Issue, Wrexham science , Fennel and Fern and Nature's Best Photography.She has had her photographs published in exhibitions and magazines across the world including the Guardian, RSPB Birds , RSPB Bird Life, Dot Dot Dash ,Alabama Coast , Alabama Seaport and NG Kids Magazine (the most popular kids magazine in the world). She was also the only person from the UK to have her work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus run See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010. Only visual artist published in the Taj Mahal Review June 2011. Youngest artist to be displayed in Charnwood Art's Vision 09 Exhibition and New Mill's Artlounge Dark Colours Exhibition www.eleanorleonnebennett.zenfolio.com

8.6. Peter Schwartz: poem

2011-12-02T08:36:00.005-05:00

octopus myth

most intelligent & behaviorally flexible

of invertebrates, apparently you’ve evolved past the point

of needing a skeleton, funny how in our world

that just makes you mush

you taste everything you touch, which is maybe

too straight forward a way of being, all that salt

has to age your brain, it’s what gave you 3 hearts

& a soft body that can turn anonymous

they’re calling you a reflex because you have no

mental image of the shapes you handle & must rely

on texture variations, they’ve proven you have no

neurological path to the big picture

sometimes you change color to communicate

but you can also use the muscles in your skin

to change the texture of your mantle for even

greater camouflage

& you’re not above detaching a tentacle

to distract a predator, romantic for something

that doesn’t know if it’s stretched or not

without its tension sensors

you swim by pushing water out of your

contractile mantle because you’re doomed

(or blessed) to never understand the complexity

of your own motions

your myth says the present cosmos

is but the blossomed wreckage of the

one before and that you are

its sole survivor

you’ll die shortly after mating

but not until she lays you

200,000 eggs

Peter Schwartz's words have appeared in Pank, Wigleaf, and Opium. See more at www.sitrahahra.com.

Photography by Eleanor Leonne Bennett

8.5. Robert Vaughan: 1 flash, 1 poem

2011-11-25T10:29:00.006-05:00

Spin-the-bottle

The red and white coke logo came into focus against the clear glass as it stopped on the red floor planks.

I clapped my hands together. “You two have to kiss now!”

“That’s sick,” Tracy cried. “We’re cousins!”

“Gross,” Timmy added. “Let me spin over.”

The July heat pressed through the roof slats. Cicadas buzzed in their high pitches.

“Do you ever get bees in here?” Danny asked. He stared at our peanut butter and raspberry jam sandwiches, half- eaten, stacked on paper plates.

I nodded, sweating. It was like heaven, hosting everyone in my treehouse. Just like Mom and Dad’s parties where everybody ends up with different people in the poolhouse.

Stone Wall

A wall that curves,
not into an S, still
senseless, stuck aside

a serpentine, soggy beach
evidenced by creeping vines atop
a lichen paint-by-number,

not oils or mosaic
but liquid planets:
what increment of life sheds stone?

One wall
scales another…

If only I could tell
where one stone ends,
this ruin cleaves

forever on
into a wooden copse
without relief

Photography by Eleanor Leonne Bennett

About:

Robert Vaughan’s plays have been produced in N.Y.C., L.A., S.F., and Milwaukee where he resides. He leads two writing roundtables for Redbird- Redoak Studio. His prose and poetry is published in over 150 literary journals such as Elimae, Metazen and BlazeVOX. He has short stories anthologized in Nouns of Assemblage from Housefire, and Stripped from P.S. Books. He is a fiction editor at JMWW magazine, and Thunderclap! Press. He co-hosts Flash Fiction Fridays for WUWM’s Lake Effect. His blog: http://rgv7735.wordpress.com.

8.4. Daniel Ridges, 2 spoken word

2011-11-16T12:29:00.013-05:00

“She Loves Me Knot”*

She found her way into my bed again
The continuous accident
She was walking; maybe in a cab
Something made her think of me
The neon sign on some Chinese restaurant
Misspelled graffiti
Some wino’s gait
When the sun comes up
(“it’s a different story”)
When the sun comes up
She’s changed
When the Sun comes up

She was never here.

"Epiphany Lite"

I don't normally
like to drop names,
but I was in the back
room of Bohica's Tavern
on Archer Avenue shooting
dice with Jesus.

He leaned in, flicked
his Marlboro Light
towards the bar sink,
and whispered Life
is like a Box of Chocolates

I said Really?
That's where you are
going with this? That's
all you got, Jesus?

Seriously?!

It was his roll, and he
rattled the bones next to
his left ear; then, next
to his right. He said

Well, who do you think
put that bug in that Gump
guy's ear?

He proceeded to crap out
four times in a row, which
he later divulged to be a
lesson that would reveal itself
to me in some kind of
future epiphany.

I think he also drunk-dialed
my wife at three ayem.

Photography by Eleanor Leonne Bennett

*Words and melody by Daniel Ridges. Drums and various accents by Uncle Steves. The track will make an appearance on Uncle Steves' up-coming album.

About:

Found myself here after twelve years of trying to convince high school students they should write for a living. Asked to leave the Taliban due to 'creative differences'.

8.3. Virginie Colline: 1 poem

2011-11-09T12:26:00.003-05:00

FOUR HAIKU

the bride bites into a rosebud

flight of white napkins

in the breeze

Arabian dream

a sandarac tear

captures the sun

moonlit Paris

the glimmering scales

of the sea monster

after the storm

she cracked her door

he held his breath

Illustration by Catherine Buca

About:

Virginie Colline is a French translator living in Paris. Her poems have been published in The Scrambler, Everyday Other Things, Haiku Journal, The Scarlet Sound, TrainWrite, among others.

8.2. James LaCroix Jr.: 3 poems

2011-11-04T08:18:00.015-04:00

Okey Dokey, Zombie

A zombie rises,
vomits on the lawn at dawn.
An appetite for life,
but can’t keep it down.

A cigarette and an Okey Dokey.

“Are you okay, baby?”
“Okey dokey, baby.”

A creeping, grieving march to nowhere,
A clawing at the perpetual horizon,
A beehive embedded in the ribcage,
A slashed tire for a maw
A drive to work and a sad song,
Another cigarette and a sad song,
A silent world and a ragged pillow.

An empty wait to lie back in the grave,
where his dreams can have at him.

A zombie rises at dawn.
Buries his honey heart,
In his wrinkled suit,
And passes through a perfume cloud.
Some mouthwash and an Okey Dokey.

“Are you okay, baby?”
“Okey dokey, baby.”

A long, drawn out, overdone poem,
A symphony of strings,
A love; a loss,
A spinet broken to bits,
An absence of divinity,
A drive to work and a sad song,
Another cigarette and a sad song,
A world suddenly silenced,
by Yama’s spinning lasso.

Okey Dokey, Zombie,
The wheels of life will turn again.

The Cream That Covers Yr Bones
(for Michelle Demery)

When you came into this world,
I could have held you
in the palm of my hand,
but you would grow
to be a macrocosm
of a woman.
The Birth of Venus
Botticelli’s dream
A Renaissance beauty
Only a master from that era
could capture yr essence and
lay the celestial cream
that covers yr bones
to canvas.

My fingers have traveled
a million miles across yr back,
to the hidden heavens in yr hair.
Yr eyes sing the song of sirens.
Distant diamond planets.
Libidinous astronaut poet
on a crash course
to Sirenum Scopuli.

Yr essence swells inside me;
balloons out of every pore.
I am suffocating
in my love for you;
in this restless quest for ecstasy;
in this dream of half a century;
under the belt;
over volumes of evidence,
where the darkest hour is done
and the light burns true
where you look to me,
and I,
to you,
and the cream that covers
yr bones
is as sweet as ever.

Photography by Eleanor Leonne Bennett

Where Are Yr Legs Donnie?

A paid day to reflect on the life of a barfly.
I only met you once that I can recall.
Only ten or eleven trips around the sun.
Mediating, without the life experience
to grasp the complicated nature
of stubborn old men.
Who have battled a lifetime
in the landscape of the low.
A thief, a wife beater, and a drunk
A trench coated, mumbling madman
with donut offerings
and a weekly allowance for drink.

Where are your legs Donnie?
Where are yr fucking legs?!
Brother George has come with his giddy parade
to rub yr red nose
in the outcome of gang green;
to offer prophecies
that there shall be no funeral for you
when that time comes.

But now that time has come,
though Big Billy left long ago,
to keep company with the eardrum girl.
No one to sponsor yr marathon of death.
14 siblings and not one at the finish line.
The final stretch was just you,
and the other chewed up noses,
tossing yr whiskey marinated hearts
at the stopwatch.

A silent mill town death.

About:

James LaCroix Jr. is a neo-beat poet, photographer, and clay artist from Lawrence, Massachusetts. James was published in a collection of broadsides by Sore Dove Press entitled, MEAT/BEAT (2005), which featured works by many notable Beat writers and poet laureates. These poems are from his latest collection in progress entitled, Okey Dokey, Zombie. He currently resides in Wallingford, CT.

8.1. Rachel Marsom-Richmond: 2 poems

2011-10-27T11:16:00.005-04:00

Ring Around Her Neck

She’s taller than you think,

and sun shines off her cinnamon skin.

Her face is small, cheekbones carved

into her face. Shells, blue as a dragonfly,

dangle from her nose. Rings stack

their way up her slender neck, gently

pushing her collarbone downwards,

stretching the muscles. She wears

the rings that tell her wealth, wanting

to show suitors her farmland, fertile

and green. She brushes a bead of sweat

off her forehead, desires a dark-skinned man

who sees past the shimmer of yellow.

Photography by Eleanor Leonne Bennett

Pull Out the Dental Records, Sarge

The car exploded after,

no ID on the body. She,

black and charred, still sat

behind the wheel. She looked

like a statue made of ash;

if touched, she’d crumble.

The coroner noticed a hint of color

on the back of her hand. Faint

outline of a circle, a lady-bug maybe--

pigment, deep within her.

About Rachel Marsom-Richmond:

I graduated with my M.A. from Northern Arizona University in May of 2009, and I graduated with my M.F.A. from Georgia College & State University this May. My poems have appeared in Three Line Poetry, The Bijou Poetry Review, and The Camel Saloon.

issue 7: anonymous

2011-10-24T16:29:00.004-04:00

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

Anonymous reads the bible

Hey no! Hey NO, you can't do that God!

I didn't know that. Then he got some boo boos.

So God is me, he's sweet a lot. And now he crashed.

Now give the cross back to me. So none and none sorts of things.

God said nothing.

So God said nothing. He prayed about God.

So God is a baby and now Jesus is a baby.

So now God is me or you and God prayed together and now, so Jesus done taught, he was sleepy.

So God said nothing. So God is family, is me. I'm the perfect size.

God said prayered.

So Jesus didn't talk anything and He didn't know.

I didn't know about that.

So now the cross gets here.

So now together is me.

So God has turned the page and God said nothing and Jesus just sleeped and I just didn't.

And now the day is together, and me on the prayer.

So now that God is me, and now in me and Jesus God to me.

And now to get God, so God and me and set together.

The family's together.

And now God and Jesus said, nothing to the Ark.

And the Ark is me.

Now say I didn't know that.

Now sing this song, 'Noah Noah Noah.'

And now God prayered.

Anonymous is 4 years old. Anonymous said (omitted) would read more after dinner.

Bye-bye.

(Bye.)

7.10. About anonymous

2011-10-22T14:50:00.005-04:00

LYOGRAPHY (1-11)

1. I joined a cult in Amsterdam because they did laundry.
2. An Irish girl named Jackie slapped me because I told her she had a spunky face. We were in a bar in Ulan Bator.
3. I visited a friend in Montreal who kicked me out of her house because I didn’t love God.
4. My girlfriend left a note on our hotel bed to tell me that she’d be right back.
5. I called my mother from a Berlin jail and told her I was dead.
6. I’m French.
7. I met a Spanish girl named Carmen in Denmark who was a fashion photographer. I slept with her at the same time her fiancé was taking a train to meet her later that night. He called her while we were in bed but she didn’t answer her phone.
8. I’ve written 76 poems about construction cranes.
9. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from Yale but I changed my name.
10. My name is Sean.
11. I remember being born.

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) 10

7.9. Anonymous 9

2011-10-20T13:51:00.007-04:00

Future Tense

That dragonfly matches

the paper. Impudent fucker.

It cannot blink with pasted eyes.

Maniacal laughter from

a five year old tempts me

to carve my name

into the table. Backward,

in Hebrew. Peacemaker.

Matchmaker. Ensnarer.

Yes. I have a captive

audience.

I could carry the future

in my own womb.

This insect with a 24 hour

life-span, maturing while I

slip to my knees. The floor

will be cleaned. There will be

no funeral. I cannot even find

the body

until it moves inside me.

They learn to fake it

at such a young age. Life.

And what will I name you,

precious?

Display the artwork, unframed.

The wall is safe enough. Those

wings are glued and we

are not ones to look

too closely.

Dexter sat on the white wrought iron chair at an outdoor café

Dexter sat on the white wrought iron chair at an outdoor café. He smiled as he handed her the vitamin pill. Her face remained fixed, the blush radiant on her cheeks. She took the vitamin and let it slide down her throat without the benefit of a beverage.

“It is for your own good,” he told her.

“Yes, Dexter. I know.”

He filled the artificial silence with mumbles of well wishing, then reminded her that this was the very table at which the witch had sat not so long ago. She did not know what he was talking about, so she busied herself with the dessert menu. When Dexter began to babble about the ice of the angel, she stopped him.

“I can’t understand a word you are saying,” she said. Her nose began to bleed at that moment so there was never any time to explain.

Two days later she was still bleeding intermittently into her pillow case. Dexter sent her a postcard and a bottle of vitamins. She figured it was just as well. She never liked sweets that much anyway.

Anonymous believes that tequila is the best way to time-travel.

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) 9 (10)

7.8. Anonymous 8

2011-10-17T11:21:00.005-04:00

excerpt from “hurdle bardface”

rio carnegie / carney

shot up into the woods replacing rio in the hat-standing department

i shor i never bladder

rum bubble

locarno no sign of urgency at all

those matticles ladykillers hornswaggleboondoggle arthur st nasher papatacuch uk at gerry odoms don were born disserted

magherafelt, eu noblerets a good plays.

hedwig golding munny maw mouths ons dup laburundun whiskers

lentil i oppose

my commander janes lawrunce (nose of the sheikh)

white back of hand (igh) s

cat face eyes. green?

soreness heart, tit? bung a way to tip. eric bugggles am mistress nurse’s apron maddy prior. bu we hv a meetng hands on hips.

that my warmth day.

can we really (th’s) oh i like a lifeline torycucles twist. stairs, oron type here/there

hello! (man) chitle loaf at my stats. there, that’s (eye white rolling)

lower teeth mandible

skull move lays in alien smirk melincholy o please whoever wins go awhs

crak your teeth. neat inages

what the birds are saying (near dusk)

i've got an earring

you're going to a shoe shuffle swing

you're going to leave here

i seen you, you're in the fingal

what do we do? deep sleep.

what if you get in a hurry

do it, do it.

never.

we're going away now.

(dusk. wait)

see you, see you

cheerio.

wait wait wait wait wait wait

sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep

sleep

Anonymous suffers from, among other things, the inescapable insomnia that we call life.

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) 8 (9) (10)

7.7. Anonymous 7

2011-10-14T09:49:00.006-04:00

To Russia With Love

for Jozef Szczypek

they fed you bread mixed with sawdust

smashed your trust like pound cake

and made a good portion

of a whole generation of Poles

half-fake going on for the rest

of their lives

the trains that brought you

to Siberia held no water, no milk,

no light; the trees in that

Katyn forest must have wept

themselves to sleep to see

little boys with cans

tied to their belts and spoons

in their pockets because

whatever was served

you put in the can and

walked away; the bugs that

crept over you at night

were confused too, searching

for a sweat that doesn't come

from 200 to 400 ounces

of bread, the dead mixed

with the living to form a dull

glow, the very last possible

stage of love, the part even

past forgiveness that sits with

giant mute eyes whispering

please, wake up, this is not

how life should happen

this isn't us.

Anonymous believes in harmony but (omitted) once lost (omitted) karma while riding (omitted) bicycle down a slippery hill and though “It was worth it” had to stay in (omitted) room for a week without (omitted) dinner/supper.

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) 7 (8) (9) (10)

7.6. Anonymous 6

2011-10-10T09:16:00.005-04:00

Nighthawks #23

I am the gray man

whose face does not exist--

my hat and suit speak for me--

business brings me here.

Hopper is a bastard

for leaving me so alone.

I am the orange woman.

If you move in closer

you can almost see the softness,

touch the tenderness of my breasts;

I lean in close to him,

I’ve perfumed neck and ears,

but yet we do not touch.

I am the man with the face

lit up by Hopper’s light

yet I do not see how the space

between us can ever be bridged

my hat is oh too heavy, my vision

obscured by the brim,

I think I smell

her perfume, but cannot touch her arm.

I am the man in white,

pouring out the coffee

cleaning all their ashtrays.

I check my watch until

my smile becomes a grimace—

wondering when they’ll leave.

I have a wife and children

a warm bed I want to visit

if Hopper had not marooned me

in this damn cold lit place.

Anonymous likes to go to the museum and look at the paintings. Sometimes (omitted) finds (omitted) looking at a painting for so long that the guards have to tell (omitted) to move it along.

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) 6 (7) (8) (9) (10)

7.5. Anonymous 5

2011-10-07T08:37:00.005-04:00

Knock-em-out-and-Fuck-em Eddie

Knock-em-out-and-Fuck-em Eddie wasn’t an anti-semite. Knock-em-out-and-Fuck-em Eddie didn’t know Jews from juice. It might be suggested, simultaneously, that Eddie added to the stock of available reality more than any poet ever will whilst never questioning the right of a man to turn up at another man’s door to prove (by pointing at the pages of a Bible) that that guy’s home was now this guy’s home because this book he is pointing at says that God made a pact with some donkey-nomad called Avram who had met God on the way down from Ur of the Chaldees.

Eddie couldn’t care less about God. God never hung around the bus station toilets in the tight blue jeans which Eddie liked to see on boys and girls. Eddie would invite nice looking boys and girls of the age of consent back to his house to party. If it just so happened that they didn’t drink he’d knock 'em out and fuck 'em anyway. And Knock-em-out-and-Fuck-em Eddie would get sent down for it and if he was lucky they’d put him in with a nice looking boy and then sometime after the lights went out for the night Knock-em-out-and-Fuck-em Eddie would invade the boy, whatever the UN or the Fourth Geneva Convention said.

He’d get sent to solitary confinement so he couldn’t knock anyone else out and fuck them and then the day would come and Knock-em-out-and-Fuck-em Eddie would have paid his debt to society and he would be out on the street again and inviting nice looking girls and boys back to his place where he had all that was needed for parties. He wouldn’t sit watching the news with them and attempt to show his caring side by saying “those fucking Israelis” or “those fucking Arabs” or “war is bad, it kills babies”. He’d stick a video on instead and drop a triple vodka into the orange juice and he’d turn up the heating and watch them drink down the orange juice and wait and see what he was going to have to do to this one.

Anonymous was discovered at an early age to be keeping matches under (omitted) bed.

(1) (2) (3) (4) 5 (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

7.4. Anonymous 4

2011-10-05T08:46:00.005-04:00

because you're big now

that means I can't hold you anymore upside-down forever.

that means you know about all the buttons the world wants you to press, and in what order.

that means your heart will start hurting after every meal. and after every year.

that means the sun reflecting in the grass when you go outside will become less and less intense.

you will also go outside less and less.

outside will become more like a place in between things.

you go through going somewhere else.

instead of looking at things directly you will learn to glance.

because it's too intense.

because you're big now.

you must find your own somewhere else.

to glance is to pretend you're not looking when you are looking.

I will be what you go through.

you will stop saying “look at me” in that way and find other ways to say it.

sometimes those other ways are not so good.

a not so good way of saying “look at me” is to start a big war and kill lots of people.

so try to find good ways to say it.

“look at me” will no longer work, you'll just look like an idiot.

because you're big now.

balloons will become increasingly less fun but pop less often.

and nothing will ever even out.

if everyone cried every time a balloon popped there would be peace on earth.

that would be a good way of saying “look at me”.

a glance inside a glance is what we're doing now so pay attention. it's very hypothetical.

at best, the balloon will become a metaphor before it disappears from your birthday party and into that big blue sky because someone couldn't hold on.

the balloon means nothing.

and in some strange way that means that love is possible.

don't ask.

love is possible because failure will be less instantaneous.

remember that time we went to the doctor and we held you down and made you scream bloody murder.

that's not love.

because you're big now. it will linger.

that does not mean you will stop crying.

crying is seeing those failures and accepting them, which is a good thing.

don't stop crying.

that means instead of holding you upside-down forever I will say that I am proud of you and “good job” when we meet at random dinner parties.

just use the napkin over there when you feel the crying coming on. wipe your mouth.

that means you will have both feet on the ground.

that means you know you can't fly and you start to stop trying.

that means you know you can't cry and you cry anyway.

that means soon you will be able to wear the same pair of shoes for the rest of your life.

but shoes is not the answer.

that means you will want to buy lots of shoes to make life seem longer.

because you're big now.

but that is only your psychology talking.

sometimes life is over before we get the right glance angle right. there are just too many possible glances.

pick one.

if you zoom in you will see that it says “if you had just looked”.

that means instead of running around in a circle and then suddenly fall down laughing you will start making conversations.

conversations is the agreement that we both look stupid but lets agree not to tell on each other.

lets agree not to tell on each other.

I can still hold you upside-down but not forever, for a little while.

because you're big now.

because love is only so strong.

because when love becomes a mountain it will no longer move no matter how much you feel. no matter how many balloons you attach to it it will not move.

and when you try to talk some sense into it it will only throw rocks at you and say “just go away”.

and someone will have to stop holding on.

because love is the heaviest little engine that drives nothing.

and that is all.

because you're big now.

you must aim to be a good person.

remember. a good person is someone who says “look at me” in a good way.

knowing not everyone will look.

knowing that that heavy heaviness will never go away.

knowing but doing it anyway.

I will look.

granada

I keep coughing things up

and this single bar-stool is all the time travel we will ever need.

When I spin it becomes clear that we are all “one”.

When I spin the stupid in me becomes the stupid in you.

Hey stupid.

I keep saying things that might hurt you

and call it honesty. That's not right.

Like people that keeps driving over the dead raccoon in the road

in order to prove something. Like keep picking

at a scab that's not even there. Like

gasoline on the driveway. Like

setting shit on fire.

Tomorrow we will all know what we mean.

Hey beautiful.

We took the dirt road to Granada

and watched the last matador in the world

watch the last bull in the world die of natural causes.

Anonymous regrets having wrestled you to the ground once and calling you a stupid liar.

(1) (2) (3) 4 (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

7.3. anonymous 3

2011-10-03T08:24:00.010-04:00

memorial loss

the unit is unlike others I have visited

rounder, flowinger, welcominger
but there is still this-

"these were my things that i, what was that place i was,
who are you, where are you taking me,
don't you look nice, is it dinner yet. hello."

her lostness is mostly upbeat
i hadn't visited her in this place
she is my best friend's mother

in visiting i lose something too-
i believe it's called immunity
i have lost that feeling

and don't think i'll ever find it.

mississippi backwash improv sweet

her saxaphone was a honey bee
honey,
she never played on basin street
sweet,
her saxaphone was the hottie hottie
buzz of the river rats-

when the water rose,
she squeezed
& squeezed

&

squeezed that horn
til the juice ran out
til the juice of
crescent city
ran way on out

saxaphone sadie and her sweet honey bee.

Postcards from the trees

dear ruth,
hope you are having a nice trip. spring has come.
the birches are putting forth their catkins.

love,
gladys

i want to steal that catkins line
but it just wouldn't be right
-seems to me i've written of it before
(attributing it to its rightful owner of course)

before ever writing a decent poem
i had that one to sleep upon at night
the line that was never meant for me
but for my mother.

Anonymous likes to watch the leaves fall and forget what poetry generation (omitted)'s suppose to be a part of. "Beatnik jam, surrealist biscuits, minimalist red-eye gravy, it's all the same to me. If it smells good, I'll eat it."

(1) (2) 3 (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

7.2. anonymous 2

2011-09-29T08:53:00.007-04:00

the everyday

The nostalgia for the past is perceived in the pit of the stomach, as well as in the corners of the mind. Entering these corners engenders a rare vertigo. No one knows to what neighborhood these streets belong. Whether the memory is mild or bitter, if the memory is lost, or if a particular corner reminds one of another, similar corner.

My shadow tells me that a silent mountain is without sun.

That in silence, words will spill forth; from memory they will explode

telling the story that is buried beneath.

The story is told in an uncommon way.

It is invented by recalling the presence of a man, lost on a path.

While walking on this path lost, time began to storm.

Rain began to fall, from the ground to up, and the man could not run to shelter.

Lacking his own words to cover him, time dripped onto his body.

It dripped down his back, and onto his hands, and gave him a name.

With time running down his cheeks, his tears fleshed out time.

They fleshed out her figure, and he saw, that she was always there.

Turning down the street, only seconds before, he ever glanced in her direction.

My shadow speaks no more and I find myself in loss, even while I speak.

The everyday ground is cracked and cracking.

Scars bleed, uncovering, their lost source of silence.

A silence that inflicts the wound of a scar

that is written then,

as story.

Anonymous likes to call random numbers on (omitted) phone and tell little stories into the ether but don’t bother trying to call back. Anonymous’ phone was disconnected a long time ago.

(1) 2 (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

7.1. anonymous 1

2011-09-26T12:48:00.010-04:00

There You Are

black eyed and whisky breathed
pissing all over 50 years
like it was some cracked ceramic
hole in the wall
in some dive
down town.

there you are

pissing on her couch
telling her to leave
full of paranoid fucked up spirits
like she was some whore
you met in a bottle
at the back of
Alberts bar.

there you are

the man we love
loved?
filled with bitter angry bile
telling her to leave
telling her you're better alone
all those years my hero.

there you are

a zero.

There You Are 2

black eyed and broken
frail and helpless as a baby sparrow
fallen from the nest

there you are

bruised and broken
yellow eyed and ghostly pale sweating
pulling at my childheart

there you are

reminding me i loved you
love you

there you are
dad.

The Bar is Closed

open the bar
i want to drink to
a drunk
who used to be my dad

i want to toast his health
admire the golden
feel the heat
slide down deep
fire in this belly

open the bar
i want to try and understand
pour me some bitter
pass me some paranoid

who gets to decide

who gets to choose

where is the man
who raised the girl
who became the woman

who wishes him dead.

Anonymous lives here-and-there (and nowhere) and have been published (or not) by so-and-so but mostly hangs out at (omitted), drinking, blowing smoke out (omitted) ass/arse.

1 (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

issue 6: the blues go like this

2011-09-22T09:53:00.003-04:00

beau johnson | victor crivilare | david yost

theresa williams | steve moran | ricky garni

We be tired. Editing is harder work than we imagine. We want to sit in that sun chair over there and talk pretty to the cat. We haven't named i'm yet. We guess we gots the blues. So we won't be saying those sweet nothings in the ear of your cool quiet things called pomes. Pomes by the way sounds a bit like pms, which we don't got, but we we think we gots the blues which isn't the same thing really and when we gots the blues we like to sing this old good old tune. AAAAAAAAAAHHHHoooooo. You can sing too.

You better come on in my kitchen

It's goin' to be rainin' outdoors

When a woman gets in trouble

Everybody throws her down

Lookin' for your good friend

None can be found

You better come on in my kitchen

It's goin' to be rainin' outdoors

The woman I love, took from my best friend

Some joker got lucky, stole her back again

She better come on in my kitchen

Baby, it's goin' to be rainin' outdoors

Mama, can't you hear that wind howl?

Oh how the wind do howl

[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/r/robert_johnson/come_on_in_my_kitchen.html ]

You better come on in my kitchen

Baby, it's goin' to be rainin' outdoors

The woman that I love, I crave to see

She's up the country, won't write to me

Then, you better come on in my kitchen

Goin' to be rainin' outdoors

I went to the mountain, far as my eyes could see

Some other man got my woman,

Lonesome blues got me

But she better come on in my kitchen

'Cause it's goin' to be rainin' outdoors

My Mama dead, Papa well's to be

Ain't got nobody to love and care for me

She better come on in this kitchen

'Cause it's goin' to be rainin' outdoors

(Robert Johnson)

Next issue will be anonymous. We think it will be the bestest issue ever.

Go on, get out of here.

6.6. Ricky Garni: 3 poems

2011-09-17T21:42:00.001-04:00

IT’S GOOD FOR YOU

I was sure that malted milk was good for you.

I am almost certain it isn’t, but I could be wrong.

In any event, one of us is wrong. Malted milk could

be good for you and I would be right, malted milk

could be bad for you and I would be wrong. Also:

malted milk might not exist, it might be one of those

things that you make up in a dream, like a girl that

comes across the room and says “A cherry danish

is what you need right now” as though she doesn’t

have a doubt in the world and the funny thing is -

you don’t either, nor does the aforementioned

cherry danish. So it could be just like that, only

where she said “danish”, just substitute “malted

milk” and add “it’s good for you” and then add

“I am your mother, I should know” and then respond

“No thank you, I thought you were someone else”

and then conclude with “he walked away quickly

without turning back, hungry and thirsty” just

the sort of thing that makes you long for more.

HHHHUUWWWW

I like the old man who doesn’t pretend it is harder to jump on his bicycle

than it was thirty years ago and instead just grunts really loud like this

HHHHUUWWWW and then goes really fast on his bicycle as though

all of it was part of the plan, which it was. Is. Getting old is a plan.

It’s super secret and fun. There’s a cool clubhouse. And a password.

No kids allowed. I have a gun.

LOST

I love to look at the picture of you in front of the watch repair store in 1951

and forgive you for not calling me in sixty years. I know it’s not your fault.

You just lost track of the time.

About:

Ricky Garni writes and draws in Carrboro, North Carolina. Over the last twenty years, he has produced thirty books of poetry, ranging from the one page A PERFECT DAY to MAYBE WAVY and OK YOU CAN STOP NOW, both of which are over 500 pages long. On the back of OK you can find the following blurb from writer Emily Cooper: “You idiot! All your poems are stupid and about nothing in particular! “

6.5. Stephen Moran: 3 poems

2011-09-13T11:34:00.006-04:00

Breda Rainey you would

hammock in the rainy box

chaps sodden from the nightdew.

Breda Rainey you wear

tiny leaves of the hedgerow

in your hair.

Breda Rainey you are,

though you heave a pushchair,

forever garlanded in box.

St Paul said it all

snail mail.

St Peter is not a tweeter

but St Mary is always online.

The father has no email,

no one can reach him

except through the son.

The spirit translates pages into any language

with comical results.

Through the open French doors,

between the woods and the lane,

a stave of power lines

with birds for notes.

I lift the lid on the piano

and start to play them.

"She is far from the land"

About:

Steve Moran is from Dublin but has lived in London for longer now. He is married with one grown-up son of his own. His day job is in software development. He has had a small number of stories and a couple of poems published. He also runs the Willesden Herald short story competiton. http://www.stephenmoran.net/

6.4. Theresa Williams: art, poem

2011-09-05T10:45:00.006-04:00

olympia, dear jim

a lazy hot summer day making mailart with my old

olympia, broken shift key, me stamping skeletons

on everything when suddenly i get the urge to tell you

i remember kansas, a dead old place called beto

junction, a bird dog, a bull bellowing atop a tall dung heap,

sputnik, my friend steve from art school who gave me my first

brautigan, how it moved me; i had no idea how it was done.

steve, diabetes, nearly blind now, I hear, and richard, gone,

gone, gone, jim. write.

About:

Theresa Williams have poems published or forthcoming in a number of magazines, including Gargoyle, Barnwood, PLR, Seems, The Prose Poem Project, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Contemporary Haibun 12, and many others.

6.3. David Yost, 3 prose poems

2011-08-27T15:53:00.004-04:00

Stovepipe

He looks like Lincoln, but not the smiling one. He leaves his hat on the bar, drinks Kentucky whiskey, and raves about John C. Breckenridge. We try to admire him, but it's hard. He makes jokes about Koreans and buys ten dollars of hair metal from the jukebox. He pinches the waitresses.

Tell us something for the kids, someone calls.

A proverb of my youth, he says: a woman who is not beaten is like a house that is not cleaned.

The Fall of Richard I

After a thousand years of feudalism, even Nixon seemed a good choice. He moved into the manor on the hill, and, for a time, everything was fatcakes and goose liver. We danced the summer solstice and twirled our wives like queens.

But soon we caught Kissinger and Haldeman nosing around the livestock, changing brands. A herald announced the reinstatement of droit de seigneur and our daughters returned to us disheveled and sullen, with stubble burns scoring their cheeks. We took up pitchforks and muskets and stormed the gate, but he escaped by helicopter and we had only Pat and the kids to half-heartedly string up in the town square.

Now we're looking into anarcho-syndicalism, and our wives hang cross-stitches that say The Only Church We Worship is the Church that Burns. But even as we cull the ringwormed goats from our herds or dibble holes for our onions and leeks, sometimes still we watch the sky and wonder how long he can ever, truly be gone.

A Real Story: Couplets

1. When World War I ace Georges Guynemer was finally shot down over enemy lines, French schoolchildren were told he had flown so high that he could never return. As I burn the letters you still write to our daughter, this is what I think of.

2. Thieves, you are being photographed, the sign says, but she smashes the glass and slips into the garage all the same. A flowerpot, his baseball glove, a broken rake.

3. The day after the Janjaweed drag her husband to death behind a horse, the workers of the IDP camp give Fatima a double portion of millet. She boils it with onions and kudra, divides it among her children, and decides that she will live.

4. The Reds don't expect much from Admiral Schlei, even with two outs and the sacks jammed, but all the same he bings a Stoney McGlynn spitball past Champ Osteen and into left field. That night he sneaks his lover Fred up the back stairs of the Hyatt Regency and falls asleep in his arms, thinking, so that's one more day before I'm old.

5. The first recorded use of the word “boredom” was in Charles Dickens' Bleak House, an early example of a work teaching its readers how to read it. The first recorded use of the word “collago-coupletism,” on the other hand, was just now.

6. Hector plows a young dental hygienist on the dinette, but his heart's not in it. After, he walks naked through her apartment, peeling a tangelo and thinking of Greenland.

7. When a male anglerfish locates a female of his kind, he latches on with his fangs, leeching blood and nutrient, until he atrophies to teeth and testicles alone. Still, the bathypelagic zone sees few divorces--they make it work.

8. Finally Kiara can no longer stand the blare of Keith Olbermann raving about Sudan and the pastel tension of the waiting room, and she sneaks out to the dumpsters for a cigarette. The thing you have to remember about Marcus Aurelius, she hears one custodian say to the other.

9. I wish you'd write a real story, my wife says. But where else can I tell you the way that, when I lie down at night, she snorts and rolls and, even in her sleep, presses her bedwarm body to my side?

About:

A former Peace Corps Volunteer, David Yost has served on development projects in the United States, Mali, and Thailand. His stories and poems have appeared in more than twenty publications, including The Southern Review, Witness, Pleiades, Asia Literary Review, and The Sun.

6.2. Victor Crivilare: 4 poems

2011-08-22T09:09:00.004-04:00

the blues go like this

notes drop through
the ceiling of
your heart
threatening floor boards
fear flooding
the gut, raw emotion.
this shack, washed away
to be rebuilt, if only
you regain composure.

like a postcard

ive seen the
golden gate bridge
on a day when
the mist refused
to burn away

been through china town
almost desolate,
night travelers
such as myself
tinkling down stockton,
so many wind chimes.

autumn leaves

autumn leaves falling
it seems to me,
are refugees
on a death march
prodded along by
a bayonet wind.
torn from boughs
of safety
where they
were once green
and herded
into ditches
to be burned
unceremoniously.

malpelo*

if your father came,
a torn apparition,
like hamlet's, asking
for retribution
your italian sensibilities
would not allow
a princes dalliance.
he does haunt you, malpelo
in the mattock you swing,
in the clothes you wear,
his clothes,
and the oversized shoes
hanging on a nail,
his monument.
you take dangers
with the ease
of the abandoned,
railing against
the sand pit
till it takes you
and the owl looks
not only for your father
but also for you.

*based on the novella Rosso Malpelo by Giovanni Verga

About:

name age professional railroader, frittered away my college years, mistaken for big foot a few times. yadda yadda.

6.1. Beau Johnson, story

2011-08-18T09:39:00.004-04:00

Retribution Due

She says: “We aren’t the same anymore, none of us.”

I can’t say if I believe her or not. The images I retain as jumbled now as they were when I awoke---memories I see through a fog or cloud that has set up residence inside my mind. I can remember most things, but in regards to what Ginny is saying, I haven’t a clue. I still feel the same, perhaps a little colder, but nothing other than that.

Ginny---not Virginia---was the first person I met here. Aimless and alone, she found me by the docks. Until then I hadn’t realized I was aimless and alone---not until she appeared and took my hand. “More will be coming.” She says. Then, whispering: “Burnt offerings.” The breeze responds to this, lifting her hair back and behind us, motion in the wind.

I did not know what to make of her statement. Not then, and certainly not now. I am coming closer though; each day the fog a little less thick. She stays with me, Ginny, and we walk the circle, listening to mostly the same observations the others inquire about. Where is my mother, they say. Where is my father? My husband? My son? My wife?

They comment on their daughters too, but they, I must admit, are far from here as well.

We walk some more, upon long roads which always take us back to where we begin, but sometimes there is change and we gather inside arenas. Not modern day versions, but the structures they built in Roman times, when gladiators would fight and die with honour, their blood a treasured prize.

We fill the seats, three thousand of us, and they continue to ask their questions as I secretly ask my own. “When another comes, I’m going to volunteer,” she tells me. I nod my response to her, knowing she will not be deterred. Here, Ginny is strong and more direct than I remember her being, which causes me to wonder if there is a history we have shared. I never ask her if she knows me, and she never tells me either way. Instead we sit and we watch, listening as we do.

In the seats below us, a boy cries out in search of his mother. He is small, this boy, wearing jeans and a smile which no longer works. “What kind of father would do that?” Ginny asks. “How would one even come to think of that place for a child?” Then she turns away from me. For a long time we are silent, and only once do I really hear what she is trying to hide.

“Do you remember the last one?” I finally ask. She says that she does and that this is the reason she’s come to volunteer. Retribution, she says, and for the first time I witness the anger which is through her. It is rage, really, and it contorts her face into a mask I for a second cannot fully recognize. In response, one of her eyes falls loose. Dangling, it comes to rest low upon her cheek. Her anger is gone by the time this happens, replaced by the woman I have come to know. “I believe it is just,” she says. “Each of them deserving what they have coming in the bargain.” And then I move to help her with her eye. “Whoever is allowing this to take place,” she continues. “They understand the truth for what it means; that in the aftermath, closure must always become the price that equals.” I tell her okay, that I can see some of what she is saying, but that I am still having a hard time of it myself; that my head remains unclear and sometimes I feel as though my body is a piece of meat on fire. She says it will come to me in time and that I shouldn’t try to rush it; that perhaps I am just not ready. I agree with her, and as we get up from the stands we are in a train station, all of us, the ones who died that day.

“Have we been here before?” I ask. Ginny says she doesn’t know, not for sure, and so we begin to walk along the platform. The others follow, and the questions they continue to ask echo above us and around. Searching, the boy in jeans still cries, his shell in need of succour. Ginny can stand no more---when she breaks from me and goes. On one knee she holds the boy and strokes his melted head. “If you will have me,” she says. “I will be your mother.” The child agrees and they stand. Holding hands, they join me and we continue to walk our way.

The boy asks: “Do you think they will be caught?” Who, I respond, when I see that Ginny will not. He is referring to the people, he says, the ones who got away. What people, I think, but realize the answer to this question lay trapped in the fog of my mind. And do I want to know? That is perhaps the better question. Inwardly, I ask myself if it is possible for a ghost to be afraid. “They will catch them, dear.” Ginny declares. “And after they are caught they will be tried, convicted, and then jailed. Not that it will matter, not once they find their way here.” I attempt to ask her why, but Ginny only looks at me, her blue eyes shrunken and leaking but calm, always calm.

“When I get older I want to use the machine,” he tells us. I do not have to ask what the child is talking about; the machine being the very one Ginny has told me she will volunteer for. It is the Righteous Machine, so named and made of wood. Housed in each arena we come to, it sits in the middle, asleep but on demand. Five sides, it has been made to hold all four limbs and the head which sits atop. Slowly, we wind until it can no longer be wound. The sound that comes being justice made whole.

This is the way it is done here, for us and him and them.

I am wondering about my wife when I come to realize that Ginny is not her. Rebecca is my wife’s name, a woman of forty-two. I think of her without me, and then of me apart from her. I have a child as well, a boy, and Alexander then comes to mind. The fog is lifting, I say, and to no one but myself.

“Do you remember dying?” The boy asks as he slips his hand into mine. The question shocks me, rocking me to the centre of what I have become. Dying, I say, and the boy only nods, looking out and past the docks. I look up at Ginny, her eyes now proud and wet and new. She nods her own head and suddenly I am back in Tower One, trapped between the rubble and the fire, between the metal and the glass. There is screaming, a lot, and I am not the only one. I think this is what unites us, all of us who worked that day.

And then the Tower bends, groaning---but it is not bending, only collapsing under the stress of its own incredible weight. The noise it brings drawing noise from the ones unlucky enough to survive the impact of the plane. It will be ending soon, those screams say, that and nothing more. Hurriedly, I scribble a note to my wife and son and place my love inside a wallet I hope they someday see.

I do this all as I approach the ledge, telling myself I have been given no other choice. Up, I seem to realize what I am about to do, but deep down some part of me fights to carry on. Am I robbing Peter to pay Paul runs through my mind, and I start to laugh because of it, there amongst the wreckage and flame, a man run out of time. Torn, I teeter at the brink, but continue in my denial. Slowly, meaning locks into place and a dark compartment opens inside my mind, laying waste to all I would ever hold dear. My decision made, I weep, and then lift my head as across from me I hear the South Tower buckle and then buckle again. The sound that comes is monstrous, but is nothing compared to what I witness next. Stunned, I watch in horror as the building begins to bleed women and men alike. Like me, they are me, the ones who were barely hanging on. They look like me, I notice, as much as I resemble them. They are scared, frantic, and for the smallest of moments I see it from another’s perspective; I see the Towers as they stand, wounded and dark. The smoke is dense, like death made thick. I am lost within it, breathless, and then…my path…is clear.

“Oh my God,” I say and step in front of Ginny. “I jumped.”

“Brad,” she says and places her hand upon my face. She says that maybe I wasn’t ready to see, that’s all, and I wonder if this is true. “The means by which you arrived here…somewhat more traumatic than the rest.” I thank her for the gesture, and then take her hand in mine. I tell her that I love her, but not as I loved my wife. She pulled me from the darkness I say, from the day that I awoke. She is Ginny-not-Virginia from four floors above, where she sat behind a desk in an office like my own.

“You would volunteer then?” She asks, and I tell her that I will. But I also tell her this: that I wish to wait my turn. I do not know his name, I say; only that he would have been in charge. It is him I want, I say; that only he will do.

“Lovely.” She says. “Now we are the same; all of us alike.”

About: Beau Johnson lives in Canada with his wife. She is very understanding and allows him to write even though they have three small monsters who do their very best at keeping them on the go.

other-kitchenly news

2011-08-16T08:25:00.009-04:00

Before we resume our regularly scheduled activity, a couple of other-kitchenly notices.

Congratulations to Ailbhe Darcy for her new poetry collection, "Imaginary Menagerie", published by BloodAxe Books. From what we've read and heard, this should be a most vibrant collection. What the Scottish Poetry Review calls "a new horizon for British poetry." So go ahead and support that. See information on how at BloodAxe Books.

Also if you're writer of meager fictions, start scribbling away on an entry for the seventh annual Willesden Herald Short Story Competition which opens it's virtual doors on September 1. The contest is open to all, as long as one of your languages is English. Following in a distinguished line of judges, this year's contest will be adjudicated by none other than the veritable bad-boy of yarn himself, Mr. Roddy Doyle. Visit The Willesden Herald for more information.

Who is Sean Brijbasi? The American virtuoso escape-artist of the short form who already has three tidy collections under his belt ("one note symphonies", "still life in motion" and "the unknowed things") returns with a free-for-all labyrinthine of textures and smells that is not a book with pages in the traditional sense but rather a slowly expanding universe. The maze begins at any moment everywhere and nowhere, for those who are human, at www.darkbloom.net.

Support the arts, what makes people human.

Etc.

The Lost Dog Project by S.J. Anderson

2011-08-12T10:23:00.008-04:00

"Lost Dogs in my community, their portraits made using posters announcing them lost."

Revisit all lost dogs in our July and August 2011 archives. For an overview of all 42 photographs, visit here.

There is also a 3-minute video on the making of the series at Vimeo, here.

Why the lost dogs? We don't know. There is something, perhaps, gnawing, in the dogs' very real lostness stripped of place and ownership. If you see these dogs, there is nowhere to call. There is something, perhaps, about what information-overload does to our sense of empathy. We like the gnawing and the lostness and the photography, twice-removed from its subject, somehow more intimate than the original. Hopeful, somehow, we like to think, in that the artist at his best can render the world particular and new again, for us to look and visit the perspectives of other eyes than our own, and not allow our emotions to stagnate and grow cold.

About:

S.J. Anderson lives in Austin, Texas. A photographer and writer, he made a cameo appearance in the 2009 film Beeswax. In this age of delusion en masse, S.J. embraces the creative act as one of the few remaining fleurettes of meaningful transcendence. Contact him at sjanderson.net or sjo.anderson@gmail.com.

Lost Dog #42

2011-08-11T14:00:00.000-04:00

Lost Dog #41

2011-08-10T17:18:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #40

2011-08-09T17:43:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #39

2011-08-08T22:03:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #38

2011-08-07T22:21:00.000-04:00

Lost Dog #37

2011-08-06T23:08:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #36

2011-08-05T20:35:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #35

2011-08-04T17:39:00.000-04:00

Lost Dog #34

2011-08-04T00:57:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #33

2011-08-02T20:23:00.000-04:00

Lost Dog #32

2011-08-01T22:26:00.000-04:00

Lost Dog #31

2011-07-31T20:58:00.000-04:00

Lost Dog #30

2011-07-30T18:50:00.000-04:00

Lost Dog #29

2011-07-30T04:02:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #28

2011-07-28T13:37:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #27

2011-07-27T12:39:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #26

2011-07-26T16:05:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #25

2011-07-25T12:21:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #24

2011-07-24T15:52:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #23

2011-07-23T15:15:00.000-04:00

Lost Dog #22

2011-07-22T13:52:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #21

2011-07-21T13:09:00.001-04:00

Lost Dog #20

2011-07-20T12:52:00.001-04:00