Free

The Gold County Paper Mill Presents:
www.catch-up.us
CONTENTS
Derik Badman...6
Gabriel Corbera
Monday Suicide: The Eye...8
Brendan Kiefer
The Critic...9
Lauren Levin
from Not Time...13
from Where a Prisoner...14
Douglas Kearney
The Labor of Stagger Lee: Hydra...16
The Labor of Stagger Lee: Mares...17
Ashley Colley
Runt...18
How Many Sunning Snakes...19
Brandon Downing
Jobs Sonnet...20
Sonnet 34...21
Ara Shirinyan
From Bouts With Aboutness...22
Eléna Rivera
Aug. 21st...27
Aug. 22nd...28
Karena Youtz
The Desert...29
No Need...30
Emily Critchley
To Jonty – For That Poem You Sent To Ward Off Demon Beasties...31
‘Through An Internal Externalized / Spill / It Bumps Around The World / Tries Not To Be Stupid’...33
Lewis Freedman
from non-symbolic non-symbolic non-symbolic...34
Evan Eisel
Spider Spliff...36
Kyle Martin
Cecil in: Living Alone...37
Tara Helfer...40
Leigh Anne Couch
Loneliness for Animals...44
Laura Eve Engel
Why Don’t We Go Down To The ...45
Lake Tonight, It’s Nice Out...45
Zaccaria Fulton
Visitor’s Pass...46
John Gallaher
Everything Is Identical with Itself...47
Love Love Love...48
The Mysterious Unification of Saturdays...50
Aaron Gerber
An Exciting Offer...51
Milk and Water...53
Rebecca Hazelton
Film In Which I Am A Governess In Your House...55
When He Is A Woman...57
S. Whitney Holmes
Obviator (3)...59
T. R. Hummer
Agnosticism...60
Patrick Johnson
Forensic...61
Gabriel Corbera
Monday Suicide: Panel Off...71
Jason Poland
Knife Show...72
Sam Spina
Chart Bontey: What’s up Doc?!...76
Daniel T Stiner
Perception...77
Dean Gorman
Ode To Virginia Woolf...82
Dorothea Lasky
Getting Older...83
I Feel The Most Gentle Breezes...84
Eric Ekstrand
The Nemesis of Weekends...85
The Nemesis That Causes the Evening to Smudge...88
Eugene Ostashevsky
The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi...90
Joe Hall
Recovery Night...91
Judith Taylor
Clinically Proven to Reduce...92
Liz Hildreth
Fake Interview...93
You Say Tornado I Say Tornado...94
A Snowstorm In Very First Person...98
Paul Killebrew
Middle Name...99
Really Isn’t...100
Det Roc Boi
Hypermagick MTN...102
Nate McDonough
I Remember...106
Michael Olivo...108
Andrew Rahal
Cartesian Distance ...113
Brian Russell
The Year of What Now...114
Jan Beatty
Stein: Letter to a Young Rilke...115
Switching...116
Jane Mead
A Song For Alice In The Rainy Season...117
Leah Kaminski
There’s A Rushing Out And Tightening In: As In...118
Mixed States...119
Nicholas Wright
In the Therapist’s Waiting Room...121
Randall Mann
But Enough About Me...122
Shane McCrae
Preparing For The World...123
TJ DiFrancesco
The Stuntman Writes His Elegy...124
Ungelbah Dávila
The Boys of Burque...125
Leah Umansky
Trois Petite Fours...126
M Young...128
Derik Badman
Brendan Kiefer
Catherine
1 Wagner
Edited By:
12
Lauren Levin
from Not Time
The design decision that drew awareness
lens focus square, pointer cursor
making aware, me on the train, I can do it
I know, basically, where in time it is outside that:
this symmetric morning.
The homage of remembering assigns to return
I is a burrower and a latherer, that.
Fix a point, time moves on it like kelp.
Ian, the name, came to Lydia in a dream,
then Oliver said “Yes, that’s the one.”
I am peeling a spot for my hand.
I had a goldfish in my hand, round like a ball.
I sneezed and propelled an object from my hand
I know how my things look when they think they are working
Wholly inadvertently, this turned from red
to black. I have been working
but peeled off quickly by thereafter.
Onto it. Each piece tossed up with a liking
for focal dismemberment, I didn’t record it.
Back to my keys, with a liking for playing on the black keys
til the thing seen imposes itself
when time demands a bargain
in a frenzy, when names I bestow will spell like they sound,
on the one train can do it for me, this box
of stale cereal, wholly when you hit.
Because you hit when my preference was the opposite when,
with the idea that this is reward. You’ll find
time’s rim, reading time-killing dogs,
with the cap & the pen separate.
13
Lauren Levin
from Where a Prisoner
Likelihood is a prison
In which liveliness is a prison
Where value leaps in and out
Someone profits
On the thoughts and wishes that escape
The prison as collect calls –
I learn something more severe as an adult
The flecks of husk are in with the seed
Maybe I am still a person
Though I say that others aren’t people
Or maybe I’m more like a plus or a minus
Where profit margins are consulted
Where profits are counted
Where someone is a telephone company
Where a phone company and a person
Where sentences were crafted is the jailhouse
Where sentences were conscripted or recruited is public opinion
A shiny object
A very bright day
Like a floated sea-star
Floated on the waves
Fortifications enameled
I work between choice and prison choice
What does it mean for someone to be like this
Return again when I want to return to what I wrote again
If I was there I need to be there again
I had a string around my head
I wasn’t there and would never be there
His face was distorted by pain and not recognizable
But also I wasn’t there
14
It’s devoted to repeating its internal structure
Not your external prison
Prison as an object is going to be hardened
If it must be carried for use
March on the prison while the eyes contend with it
Poison, as sometimes retching
I am still at your narrow core – while –
a strategy of trimming back
The relief of setting down my eye’s arrow
But not to set down the eye’s arrow
I work all the time
I don’t want to stop working
I don’t want to repeat anything
15
Douglas Kearney
The Labor of Stagger Lee: Hydra
know he loved it, Stagger, from jump. bust-off one head
come two to lay down.
again and over.
each damp stub jut to cherry vipers
stiff then limp, slip and twist of muscle to twitch throat-deep
and BANG lips open. Stagger, braggart lover,
can dagger for hours, ‘til cock-hollered
dawn. loved all that cut-up,
two new holes to tell it: Stagger!
Stagger! figure Lee chop
‘til Monday, week after? knock the same thing
again and over,
too quick the body drop, eager lover.
can Stagger stay up ‘til summer,
winter? POW and two new mouths
to fill with the red tune. each hot new hole gape then pucker
then blossom unpopped mambas: Stagger!
Stagger! POW off his senseless hips
again and over.
BANG BANG summer after next ‘til ever
and Stagger! the hard darkness pounding new skull
is the song this wound turned mouth—Stagger,
Stagger—won’t know to stop.
16
Douglas Kearney
The Labor of Stagger Lee: Mares
bad men ate by what’s between their legs. so a mare cranes her veiny neck
to that whoa-ing passel of sugar cubes. redding prairie.
gun a stunt cock for rough stuff. Stagger go down into his junk,
skeeted into Lyons. slung slug some slag-cum-spunk.
Billy bellow a birthing yelp
and stagger, Lee sprung out the cunt he bust in him.
smoking revolver a father.
muzzle flash the umbilical.
because Stagger dick don’t take whoa no more and so
“Stagger” “Stack-o-” “Stago-”
give your hard-on a mouth.
ragging piano a midwife.
Stetson crown a bassinet.
mare and red prairie, horseflies
on the bloody muzzle and bit.
saddle and bridle fall like belts, flies.
and so the broken break whoa
then go on to break. so
blood on the broken wheat stalk.
blood on the broken Stetson.
blood on the slave’s cutlet lips when a dick eats its mister.
17
Ashley Colley
Runt
A skirt the red of a bird throat squirms,
then wide open turns
The runt underneath, fake-sleeping,
feels everything twice as weak,
cannot be trusted with altricial young
One unstitches its nest for fun,
slips out with the morning sun
and is never allowed here again
Blood or no blood, don’t you ever
come under here again
18
Ashley Colley
How Many Sunning Snakes
How many sunning snakes! Warm bodies
just for you, seeming in your suit
Shiver-sensitive against them, you are cold
A whole bird in your belly, a chunk of pulsing down there
thinks how many ways to move you
Shift prettily in your suit, shift
prettily in your garden where many sunning snakes
leave beaks and feathers in their wakes
and pinkly cast their lengths across your shoes
What kind of eggshell-crusted animal,
bulges below and hardly a pulse, are you?
If a snake, how many in your suit
19
Brandon Downing
Jobs Sonnet
It’s 64º F when I walk the Night Stalker to the gas chamber. Sigh…
I’ve had a number – a lot – of really excellent grapes, but I never think about grapes.
My questioning is more petit, I like to go light.
Budget issues breathe upon me like Bathsheba.
I have two pieces that prominently feature white teeth being lynched,
Aside massive craters lined with newish shelving. Basic stuff.
Aggravatingly, nearby there are also a bunch of deer craters in the grass.
Adjectival lording – what’s it like, after ya frat Candlemas party?
I’ll drink ya! Outta the bottom of a rotten fruit bag, Barack Obama.
While the whale population heads…to Sandals,
Where companions fly free to the 65% whales.
But I honestly think I could fuck a whale up on land,
To the point where it would sing frantically for its sparing,
Right outside the cute little spot where the Osmonds got big.
20
Brandon Downing
Sonnet 34
S’not hideous any? It’s Nathaniel’s artery.
The Epox-E. of hyprous kids, ever
Getting money back, often need drug shit
Fr. doctor’s office.
Man’s got tighten all over him,
Persecuted jus. Same sun, same water.
You eat only plants for six straight weeks in two identical one star hotels,
I purchase $60 icons and quiet punk routes through aethers.
I live on Rim Marsh Drive and I like wearing nice shoes
Going out to the phone booth speaking weak Spanish.
Coming onto me in expansive closets right? You girls.
I loved the thing you showed us you whupped.
Based on academy whatever, that it took altogether
To get you to us (butt naked stress room)
Laps: oh, no. In laps my works welterweigh,
21
Ara Shirinyan
From Bouts With Aboutness
Independence in a Corner Store
my story is an
armchair
caveman
in a coffin
my story is about
levity
in a
landfill
site
main character
main story
main object sheppard in a
birth
certificate
my story is a
perfume
bottle in a
resort
my story is about
danger
dionysus in an
answering
machine
22
main protagonist
main female
main archetype
in a
laundry
mat
main window
main symbol
main tooth ugly duckling in a
map
my story is a
hose
in Belgium
my story is about
obligation
frog prince in a
compost
pile
main pettiness
main male
main story in a
subway
station
my story is a
fig
tree
guardian in a
box of
23
raisons
my story is about
independence
in a
corner store
Princess in a Pancake
centaur in a
crayon
my story is about
sacrifice
in a
pawn shop
main doubt
main murder
main ring temptress in a
poem
my story is a
grandfather
clock in a carnival
main police
main pancake
main sculptor soldier in a will
24
my story is about
poverty
in the
french
revolution
main rejection
main butter
main lipstick princess in a
pancake
my story is a
sunset
in the
great
depression
main zoo
main box
main madness poet in a
bible
my story is about
desperation
in a
birthday
party
main bigotry
main dance
main club trickster in a
25
spider’s
web
my story is a
napkin
in a
high rise
apartment
main advertisement
main time
main machine
26
Eléna Rivera
Aug. 21st
I penetrated the narrative, had to
engage the pigment of the perpetrator
No quick confession here just the taking on
of various elements, showing the world steps
Because I can’t separate myself from them
“because we are here,” now, my siblings, my self
How a “tale” is perceived by a child of nine,
how brute force is perceived by an audience
Revenge never an option because we love,
pierce that world and pleasure escapes, totally
Clearly the idea of fairness was a sham
The failure of not being able to see
and most blindness turns to imitation not
being, the real fiction needs an audience
27
Eléna Rivera
Aug. 22nd
Absent again from all that really matters
The pendulum swings back and forth from a branch
—memory of being proud of the father
swinging from a rope the child admiring him
Depend on the clock to keep you hanging there
On the bus a few were left behind tick tock
Sit cross-legged, try to breath, that was the talk
that introduced the teenager to the way,
the deserted path up and down from the beach
The instruction was to just “do it” as if
a piece of meat sitting there at the table
Annoyed by everything, wore black, erupted,
painted the self in shades of vermillion
from lava to shade the answer is tick tock
28
Karena Youtz
The Desert
To enter the unwanting desert, a land’s bare thin
diaphanous sun
disperse through a hole in light
one cannot seek him He comes from
noplace which seeks him Earlier, between us,
there had been an argument: He asked,
“What did you do with the medallions I gave you?”
I shook my head, “They’re gone.”
I wish I remembered if I did
place some in people’s hands. He stops protecting me
from shame.
“The coins?”
Gone.
“The field?”
“The tree?”
“Your dress?”
gone gone gone
“Go alone”
29
Karena Youtz
No Need
No need to redeem or consist with
the powers of this world. By its heart-void
the tree is broken through. If the body
wears no semblance though chopped apart
it cannot be attacked
Hollow trunk upon the grass field
Broken tree where lightning struck
Isosceles triangle above its root
The anomaly roils through
Will the field, tree and I be taken inside?
The researcher robed me in ivory
Before an interstellar quorum the garments drop
I do not wish to be naked flesh and am given
the navy dress, a spacesuit wove in the
groundless color
A deciduous forest burns
From the ash spring saplings No occurrence or
appearance, nothing has ever been canceled Since the slashed forest grew
it registered
With smudges of light a creature brushes ash off itself
uproots plants and twirls them in cones
like the universe Hawking thought of All the shapes
are (in) motion The world is not
what to reconcile with. The world salts the ashes
30
Emily Critchley
To Jonty – For That Poem You Sent To Ward Off
Demon Beasties
Yes he sit on my shoulder he drag
on me, fuck like anything, to another,
he miss me. Like in the gap where others
drive crazy, would he make pale
plant sunlight on those crispies
& I need that. Like that poem you send.
Nothing left, he take out the left,
he laugh. Swear right off love,
call me demon shape, he suck
til dry animal whelp / crackle
me crack then crack up then down
crack, cracking split spit up.
If only my bear. But it miss me, it
make crazy – like in a zigzag,
not straight to there.
Once he was my pet. Now he not
my pet. He pull & pull to take lead.
He sick in the head. I take him to
be seen but he whine & squirm & run off.
He get in the car & drive. I never see
where he go without me. Just off
edge of sky rim, gold cloud edge.
Puddle skip, missing his kitty, no
him again. Once when he drove kitty
on her back, it went mad like la
31
la daisy sleep, slinky like joy-pain.
But now he miss the gap. He do
touchy, not like when it feel nice,
but sour puss. Pooch howling, poor,
left out in rain
like a thing. A thing cussing
cos its luck ran away. Fuck you luck
& pooch & rain & ride out into the thing.
Where I can’t see you. Cos I don’t want
to. No not now I
had my crack split, had my drag
-ed all up. Got blood-paws, got woofy,
got warp & went mad like fa
la la fandango, blue under a skyrim.
The meter run, the fuck later. I
sing & sing & it all crackly. It far
& it bent & tune but it
never go over
32
Emily Critchley
‘Through An Internal Externalized / Spill / It
Bumps Around The World / Tries Not To Be Stupid’
I’m learning about people & how to be political not emotional.
I’m learning nothing really loving – I see that – everything abstract.
I’m learning hold hold! onto the people, while older people who cannot move, now
the younger people move, everyone is frightened.
Something a little closed – we see that – out of the flayed
surface the TV news comes dragging emotions behind like fear; it just had
to shut up. & I’m glad.
To prevent further action.
& everybody is not me not me until they want to be heard; SPACE not rights.
Nothing shared together in a human mode, only the hate hate! future
– which angle couldn’t be held. Because
too much pressure when everyone who wants at once.
& where I can only be sure
of a wingspan to match my own (no
jealous squeezing of funds / resources).
Tho emotion is narrow & private
& can’t be expanded. We’ve squandered
more air before now
in the hope
of blowing it up.
& apostasy’s ripping the feathers
frm underneath
/ staking us out like stone.
While chip chip / you like this,
but chirp chirp, the day’s wasting
– we’re bound
to get on with it.
33
34
rrival
with the a
the surgeon is
ation
of its explan
the result
question in
a
s
a
d
n
later, a
n settles
atic collisio
m
m
becoming
ra
g
ro
a p
osed
is supp
t
n
e
m
o
ny m
ficial a
i
t
r
a
n
a
ch the
curiosity
in whi
e in a
id
ll
o
c
se it
s it.
to sen
that allow
y
r
o
t
is
ah
opening
for
to the power of receiving.
ed
k
at once lin
that place friend, is what we are invariably responsible for
. We are truly no
t responsible
anything not in comparison.
I take a toll by polling myself and I know it, will never end as such, to speak about, is no more
absurd then stupid then wise. Son, I’ve been meaning to mean in the place that matters, and
Lewis Freedman
from non-symbolic non-symbolic non-symbolic
art
what if
thif
ge
ro
us
pe
m
ap
d
how can we do this this the machine again for this the thought of this thoug
h we do not
think we are thinking it thought therefore not enough to
repeat the thought thinking this.
k
wounds
explicating the end :
no
accumulated
Rn
or a raydon
f
of
an essay the word
the
an
.
ns
io
os
pl
ex
in
the
ed
ry
th
g
eo
m
et
Malabou wanted to lose her very catherine and
connect with the live there inside those bodies
and those thoughts language produced. Again and
then again, to be silent in the strange fish of a
bar’s outside, air breathing into it out a cigarette
and the question is drinking on the mind in any
important way. What is damaged as usual, so
you might believe it, you might believe a biological
body before amidst these symbols. It’s not this,
it’s not that. It can’t be, but it is.
th e a n
ribe
nihila
c
s
e
tion o
d
to
f
35
Evan Eisel
Kyle Martin
Tara Helfer
Sean
2
Edited By:
Bishop
43
Leigh Anne Couch
Loneliness for Animals
Staring at the sloe-eyed cow, with dung on her backside, staring at me,
I think, what are you thinking?
She thinks, what are you looking at?
One of these is speculation. From my side of the fence
I tear up a hunk of grass—the pleasing sound cows make with their teeth—
and think, you’ll come to me for this,
and the sloe-eyed cow hangs her head lower
and thinks, why else would I?
Their ineffable world within and without this one
is so near we can see the gray tail-hairs thinning
on the old squirrel, the ear twitch of the scentless fawn
waiting in the high grass, can hear the bodies of bees
knocking the glass below the eaves they’re boring
into night and day; is so near we could touch it
but for them to touch us is what we long for,
to wander curious and shy onto our patios:
the young buck in the sandbox
sniffing the two-year old’s cornsilk hair;
the mother says, it keeps coming back, its fur smells like sawdust;
We know this won’t end well.
It was not kindness necessarily
that made the man scoop up the mewling bundle
and keep the hairless squirrel hidden in his jacket pocket
while he fed it formula for weeks from a dropper at work.
It cried every time he left the room, and, full grown in a month,
it sat on the man’s shoulders while he shaved.
He had been lonely for just this
kind of belonging. The lakelike gaze of an animal
reassures—like the self we suspect inside the self.
But theirs is not a world within ours.
They are without us and the wild thing will never want us long enough.
44
Laura Eve Engel
Why Don’t We Go Down To The
Lake Tonight, It’s Nice Out
and somebody somewhere is drinking like
there’s a new way to get drunk no one’s discovered yet.
I’ve made about a million to-do lists
but get stuck at the item
that needs me to buy curtains.
My needs run out ahead of me, and good riddance.
In August I placed my couch in a good spot
for a couch instead of saying I love you.
I don’t have a good explanation for this.
When did it get so serious all of a sudden?
Do you like the view of the room from here?
Night after night the water explores its same shore
like there’s a lake
beyond the lake it hasn’t found.
Like these wide windows
wanting dressing makes me any more visible.
45
Zaccaria Fulton
Visitor’s Pass
Less a museum than
an oversized playground.
Less an oversized playground
than a miniature landscape.
We are giants here, we are Alice
in Wonderland, we have put on
our most elegant equations
and called in the algorithms to babysit;
now is the time to position buildings
and trees in a way that best fits
the complex needs of our ever
expanding opulence.
Fuck the deficit, put the round
block through the star-shaped opening,
it still fits, because this is America,
this is Wisconsin in the form
of a giant plush mobile. Look,
it goes up and down,
it breathes, it photographs.
The fake fire warms us
and the cool water gives off steam.
Don’t disturb the children,
they’re the future. They have
their lab coats on.
46
John Gallaher
Everything Is Identical with Itself
Logic puzzle: the son shall turn against the father
and the father shall turn against the son. Everyone
has had cause to understand the basic concept
of “one day at a time.” I’m taking it
one day at a time. But still, we’ll make vacation
plans. For Thanksgiving, we’ll go to Chicago. Another
aspect of your take-home multiple choice
exam. We climb these trees so that we can
climb back down and then climb these trees. The set
is a group of numbers that divides. If p and q
are both true, then “p & q” will be true,
and the father will turn against the son. One places
his son on the mantle above the fireplace. Tall letters
touch the sky, one says. We will need plates. And we
are going to need to choose which characters
we will be. Is this a tall letter or a short letter? The point
is what we say one day at a time. And some
are haunted by the rooms and some are haunted
by the halls. One places his father beneath some curtains.
One places his father on a door. So I can carry you.
So I can do fewer things, I’ll do fewer things. I work best
this way, placing my son on this table, placing my father
in the yard as components of a composition. One
hides another. This is a logical representation
of my father. I meant to say son, that this is a logical
representation of my son. That’s why it’s
broken lines, and the picture is painted on the frame. The moon
in prose. The man running down the street. When I die
I want music playing. I want it to seem I’m just
wandering off. The United States (that’s where we live)
folds over us and a man is a man running. When
you write your name you are going to be
remembering all these things. You will watch them
turn. You’ll call it “runner’s high” perhaps.
47
John Gallaher
Love Love Love
They say it saves you and that it’s the only thing
that can break your heart. I’m listening to a song right now
that says it’s just a song. Look, the lovers
are on fire running down the street! Don’t look,
the ocean in your head doesn’t show
in the mirror. No, wait, it does, it’s written all
over your face, your eyes. You can’t hide. You
can hide as long as you want. Love love love. In poems
they always say such things in threes
and in songs it gets exponential. We’re getting oracular
these days, when we’re trying to say something
to each other. No one’s looking, we worry. And then
we’re not saying it right. Everyone’s watching,
we worry. How many times can I drive past your house
in one night? It’s a math problem. A timed test,
where you must clean your body that isn’t in need
of cleaning. It just gives you something to do
with your hands. Trending, they call it. And the lame
walk. And the blind see. As some sounds don’t mean
anything, love is on our side. Space, the empty
house loves you. These books on the shelves
love you. And at some point we have to believe
reinforcements are on their way, because maybe
reinforcements are on their way. I’ll walk along the top
of a wall without falling. I’ll walk for hours
waiting for you to see, a sort of love affair with
not falling. The loudest sound you’ve ever heard
is our song arguing us into love. It says you can’t argue
one into love but we know it’s wrong. It’s our
revolution. I’ll be capable of violence. You’re in
a wood and you hear footsteps in the leaves. A twig
snaps. That’s how we like to say it. A twig snaps. A
person emerges from the brush. A perfect person. This time
perhaps the perfect person is you and it’s someone
48
else’s fantasy. Hi. You’re a little shy in your beauty. It
makes you more beautiful, as desire is perpetual
motion. It’s the winder-upper, clean, and what more
can I do? How much more absurd does it need
to get? How much larger, as the lake rises behind you,
blurring your sight? There’s governance to light
and distance. There’s an explanation for everything.
49
John Gallaher
The Mysterious Unification of Saturdays
Anywhere we imagine ourselves, say this
is a gift. A little box of dead bees, maybe. Saturday
arrives all afternoon. Saturday upon Saturday
waiting in line for the next 50 years. Welcome to
Saturday. I come from a faraway place
called the 20th Century. Saturday loves you. Saturday
wears a spacesuit and carries tiki torches. Hundreds
of them. They’re wearing bathing suits. I’m
starting to feel Saturday rising up through
the house. I’ll call you X, Saturday says. In fact,
I’ll call everyone X. Saturday is into
keeping it simple. The football coach died
on Saturday while mowing his lawn, in June,
and the next week someone had to finish
it. Saturday knows time is not the answer
or question. I have a world of promise
ahead of me. I have years of what I believe in. What
we held in high esteem. They’re honoring
him at the game today. Saturday, late September,
the team wins. And then I get it wrong. He died
on Sunday. There’s no such thing as unification. Would you
trust me with the secret? The West Bank? The
shroud of Our Saturday of Perpetual Motion? There’s
nothing to learn from here. It’s exquisite,
in that way. Completely blank. All that can happen
happens. It all depends on what you assume
about the physics of the inflationary field, how presidents
will try to do things on weekends that they don’t want
people to see through the little puffs
of honeysuckle. It’s a consistency test, not a proof. It’s
Sunday. I’m listening to a new roof going on
the neighbor’s house, the one who tried to
trap my wife in the basement once. There’s a rhythm
to the hammering, leaving me with nothing
but local time. The birds fight the squirrels.
I’m going to drive to Lawrence in a couple hours.
50
Aaron Gerber
An Exciting Offer
I’m Lance
it means knight’s spear
it’s nice here
here’s what I do
I pace the living room until
they yell I’m blocking the TV
I swallow salt packets in my bed
when the mail comes
afternoons they sort it
for us in their office
then they give it to us
they read mine for me
because I can’t really see
Dear Lance you’ve been preapproved
for an exclusive platinum membership
I’m not surprised
I make a mental note to
lead their armies
then I have a slice
of chocolate pie it’s good
we only get one piece
I went back up to
the counter with my plate
they didn’t say anything to me
that’s how I knew we only got one piece
a game buzzed on a radio
baseball maybe basketball
maybe a Blazer’s game
I used to own the team I thought
of all my wives
I thought of Taco
Tuesday and hoped
for Shake-N-Bake and for
my Depakote not to change
51
the darkness in my kingdom
I go downstairs and steal
some salt extra careful
to keep my platinum armor
from squeaking
Carol in the office
on the phone with her aunt
eating something
wonderful smelling I want
talking about the
fourth of July
all these fireworks for me
they don’t even know
dumb them
52
Aaron Gerber
Milk and Water
I lived with my mother on only milk and water.
I let her protect me and I protected her back.
It was my duty to be the great replenisher of myself,
to curl around her on the soiled rug, to hear
inside the buzz of the bathroom fan we never turned off,
the fake church bells of my cell phone ring, little
musical Jesuses trapped in a thundercloud I wasn’t allowed to answer.
She told me there were hundreds of ways to be poisoned,
so you needed to live just on pure things,
like Portland city water and opaque jugs of milk.
The cows must be baptized of course, and the faucet
must run for ten minutes to get the ghosts out.
At the intake, the name-tagged workers kept my mother
in one beige room, and in another they asked me the date,
what year, who’s president. They typed green blinking
facts across a screen. They concluded my mind stopped at five,
while my body kept at it twenty more years.
My hips had shriveled to match my little mind,
the way a good kid slows his steps to walk to school
beside his limping friend. On that special diet of darkness, I had
learned to be the curtains swelling their bellies over us, to be
the small naked statue peeing into the stone pool that drains
somehow up again inside his body and keeps going like that forever.
But I’m not marble. I’m touchable, soft. I get sad when I’m alone.
I love the beach in Manzanita because the beach is made
of all these bits of stuff I don’t really know, crushed down
into something I can walk on barefoot.
I don’t play the game anymore where you shiver in the back of the shower
and dodge all the drops of pretend acid. Julie don’t touch the acid,
she’d say, your skin must stay white and tiny! I don’t play the grocery store
game, where it’s great fun to load the cart with eggs and
creamed corn and beautiful green bottles of Sprite.
And then put everything back.
53
God tells me to eat turkey sandwiches, but I worry how
I left her strapped in sterile sheets, her face all crumbled teeth, feathery skin,
a goldfish breathing on a kitchen counter. I’m made of my mother and
a county of case managers, all eager to help with chocolate protein.
Today I hope to see some sea lions flicker in the waves, maybe
an osprey overhead, and all the imagined people not dying in our house,
their big ghosts will grind to powder and
pile nice and healthy in the sun, pushed there
by the deadly undrinkable Pacific Ocean I love.
54
Rebecca Hazelton
Film In Which I Am A Governess In Your
House
By act three, we are a threesome,
you, myself, and the awkward
space between us,
that sometimes looks like our arms, seconded
and ghostly, linked,
though sometimes your ghost arm
has a small blade
and is trying to saw
your other ghost arm
loose from mine.
These things aren’t real,
I tell the children,
do not be alarmed.
It’s unclear if we are
in a gothic tale
in which there is a supernatural element
or if it’s just
that the house is poorly lit and there are secret
passageways and disguises and maybe their mother is alive—
I don’t know—but it’s a rational universe
and the house is the same size inside
as it is out. What, then,
is to be the color
of our communications? Is every kiss
we haven’t yet shared
to be negotiated
through correspondence passed
from housekeeper to chambermaid to the chambermaid’s
lover who mucks out the stables and places
your soiled note in the pommel
of the saddled horse you’ve loaned me,
55
because every woman should feel
something powerful between her legs—you said that—
I wonder sometimes
if you are the gentleman
I took you for,
if in answering your advertisement
for a good woman
to work for a good master
we both falsified our character.
56
Rebecca Hazelton
When He Is A Woman
When he is a woman I set his hair,
the brown strands
exit the comb’s teeth
gold, lengthening
down his shoulders, and that broad spread
narrows into delicacy, tapers
to a slender waist I put my hands around
when I want him to feel small.
When he is a woman I am a man
and as a man I am aware
of how to make his breath catch as I touch
one freckled breast
as I unbuckle
my buckle with a definitive air.
When he is a woman
I feel optimistic,
when he is in a dress that suits
his small frame, when the heels
he walks in put his round hips to sway,
all these things make the smoke hover
above my scotch
on the rocks. In this, as in all things, I am traditional.
When he is a woman the love feels more
real his eyelashes more real his mouth
like an unkissed girl’s more real
and I hold to the fiction
he’s never known another’s hand
sliding up his thigh, not this way,
or another mouth
speaking these words that glide up his thoughts
the way I man up,
57
the way a man declares
a land claimed, and then there’s a flag,
the way a hand grasps that flag’s shaft
and sinks it into the earth,
which is receptive to that thrust,
as if always waiting to know it.
58
S. Whitney Holmes
Obviator (3)
You sat in the grass swigging
red wine from the bottle
and you know the rest.
Before, when I said I was glad, I wasn’t
~
being sarcastic. Or rather,
I was, but I’ve stopped.
I have watched you for months.
I have watched you plant
the bulb inside yourself
~
so I won’t have to grow.
I have often tied myself,
each foot, each red hand,
to a horse. I have spooked and ridden
paradox, lover I meet when
~
you leave me pregnant with defeat.
My love, my hero, you have gone
~
ahead of me, cut a path through the thicket.
And I am just about to join you.
I am almost on my way.
59
T. R. Hummer
Agnosticism
Because nobody knows, he stands at the trailhead watching
a hawk torture a pigeon against the empty sky.
The pigeon is a dumb, lumbering thing. The hawk will kill it
with an exquisite slowness that is the luxury of power.
It is not possible to hope the pigeon will win: it cannot win,
but he cannot even want it to, such a rat with wings:
And there is the first failure of empathy. It is not enough
to say the hawk prevails because it is beautiful.
It prevails because it is swift and merciless, and nature has made
certain we regard the swift and merciless as beautiful.
But already the sky has emptied. Thought is so slow, so torturous
that the stain it makes in desert sunlight lingers
After the talon strikes and the aura vanishes.
60
Patrick Johnson
Forensic
All colors will agree in the dark.
—Francis Bacon
Below a kitchen window at the corner
Of the house last fall was a bush,
the ribcage
In its branches
quiet, divine,
Milky. To have been left out. A phone call
To a family member brief,
to the point.
Crows, hawks, a bald eagle resigning from the sky
To take part in its undoing without shame.
A rope
Held taut to ensure it will hold.
Its leaves turning red,
The parts of the plant that are toxic to humans.
ii.
What lie here, & for how long,
Their rough outlines powdered with chalk,
Appearing on rolls of film, photographed
& photographed
until something emerges,
A testimony, a trace, the pigment at the scene rust-colored?
Because I cannot physically unearth the inside
Legally: they found 114 corpses
or skeletons
Across Colombia between 1992 & 1999.
Parents
Would send their boys to school never to return
Until Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos
“La Bestia”
Was arrested with the identification card
Of a politician
because he matched the description
61
A boy gave earlier that day of a man in the market,
Carrying with him little things: drugs, money,
2 plastic dogs
standing on magnets,
One black,
the other white,
to pass
Across a hymnal. When the priest reveals his chalice
The boys at the altar ring their quiet siren.
They were street children without jobs
anyway.
In a video interview, the police confirm
on camera
To a family that their son was one of Garavito’s
& I resist the word “victim,”
this re-telling
Massing together as a legal unit the hundreds of boys
Between ages 8 & 16 whom he walked
by his side
With their individual trust to a hillside out of view,
Sometimes the same hill for days, to rape them,
Torture them, & cut their throats, dismember their bodies.
When I was 8,
my mother drove me to a public library
For the first time to research Scarlet Macaws,
birds
Native to Colombia,
their tail feathers a red
Long & golden, a kind of stem lowered into a book,
Arranging the leaves & tucking them inside.
They are thin, pressed, touched with small fingers.
When I look at the pictures of the hillsides
Where Garavito left his boys, or the pictures
Of their bodies in the lab,
I want to see
Their occipital bones,
in the back of their heads,
Dirt-covered, ready for their places in the earth,
& cracked completely, the evidence undeniable.
62
iii.
At the library, the microfilm reel of Mein Kampf
Catches at the tenth chapter.
In its glow
I squint when Hitler says, “Anyone who destroys
His work
is declaring war on the Lord’s
Creation, the divine will.”
I pause here
Because Garavito is also a Christian,
even
Though he was raped
as a boy
by a catholic priest.
In Sunday school, I was taught to see the Holy Spirit
In a cup of white powder, the adult pouring it
Into a glass pitcher & stirring the water inside
Until it turned a sharp red,
dividing it in plastic cups.
I went home to climb on the countertop, stir sugar
With some tap water, & finish the glass nauseated.
Hanging from an open mouth was the boy’s own
Severed penis, a sculpture that needs no explanation
Because
it has none,
not pedophilia
& not homosexuality, even though
in an interview
Garavito said he discovered his “tendencia homosexual”
Like completing a puzzle, putting the pieces
Together, even though
he says he didn’t rape them,
While admitting to more murders
& while taking
The boys apart. Years ago he
in front of a mirror
Cut his hair & “sold his soul to the devil,”
a fruit
Brought home
from the store & placed in a bowl,
Checked daily & then too soon sliced open,
its waxy
Pit inside
the eye of a fish looking back igneous.
The police couldn’t identify many of the boys
Because they never had x-rays, or their x-rays
Were buried after an earthquake,
even though the boys
63
Never were.
Colombians couldn’t believe it. They thought
The boys’ murders may have happened in part
Because of violent conditions in Colombia: satanic cults
& the organ trade. Their surgery a clean crescent moon,
Ingesting their diet of mostly nuts, seeds, & flowers,
The flock of macaws that lands
to lick at the clay
By the riverbank to neutralize the toxins inside them.
iv.
In a TED talk Quyen Nguyen speaks
On video in a well-attended lecture hall:
“When I make an incision inside
A patient’s body, it’s dark. We need
To shine light
to see what we’re doing.”
She explains how before electricity,
surgeons
Worked by sunlight & windows in the operating room
On the top of a church. When she says this,
I think, how convenient.
The glass of the windows
An open carnivorous plant, gleaming in the sun,
Its pointed hairs against the body careless,
& then it closes, a wound healing.
I also think about
The West Nickel Mines School,
an Amish
One-room schoolhouse where on October 2nd
7 years after Garavito was arrested
Milk truck driver Charles Carl Roberts IV
Shot 10 girls
ages 6 to 13
killing 5.
I have seen how they operate an entire woodshop
Using a gas-powered engine,
the bishop
Pointing to the floor under our feet where the belt spun.
64
He had entered the room with a handgun,
A shotgun, a rifle, 600 rounds, black powder,
A stun gun, two knives, a change of clothes,
& a box of other tools used to board up
The schoolhouse after releasing the 15 males inside.
How a person accumulates
this agenda
& arsenal
without first leaving a legal trace
I don’t know. In 2004 Roberts’ father began providing
Transportation for the Amish. At first
I didn’t understand how much they love to travel.
They simply won’t drive an automobile themselves.
I heard from a neighbor how a horse-drawn buggy
Ran over a baby in a pram,
a small pearl
Blistering in its crushed shell. While still in the schoolhouse,
Likely in front of the girls, Roberts called his wife
To say that he had molested two young girls
20 years ago
& that he dreamed of doing it
Again, bringing with him
a bottle of lubricant
That the Amish girls would not have understood.
Not that anyone would have understood
The guns that morning either.
They say
After declaring the war lost, SS Dr. Werner Haase
Recommended a reliable method of cyanide
& gunshot through the mouth, Hitler’s burnt remains
Decades later unburied,
ashes then scattered.
After killing himself,
still in the schoolhouse,
One of the girls’ grandfathers said,
“We must not
Think evil
of this man,” the strings of their bonnets
Tied
or untied, in the greenhouse nursing seedlings,
Honeybees newly born,
their cells hexagonal
65
As they emerge from their hive in song. The Amish
Will shun their own family
if they betray
The life intended
by their god. They will also
Generously appear uninvited,
forgiving,
At a funeral, many of them attending Charles Roberts’
By the dozens to stand by his unmarked grave,
Even though his suicide note stated that
He was vengeful toward God
for the death
Of his own infant months before.
That morning
His milk delivery was delayed, its steel chamber still chilled.
v.
Today the prison holds Garavito separately
Because he fears
that one of the prisoners
Will kill him. He accepts drinks only from certain prison
Employees,
the smell of Colombian almond trees
Rising with fear. His signature was the creation of
“Mass” graves, the places where he led boys
To leave them decomposing, sometimes decapitated
Next to other boys whom he had killed the day before.
Because he never buried those he killed,
The police sometimes found one body without finding
Another
meters away, though they would find
His cheap schnapps bottle
left empty
At the spot on the hillside.
At least once,
He put a boy’s parts in bags & let them sink.
Licking flesh off bone in under a minute.
He allegedly remembers every hillside
Where he left his boys,
& he draws maps
66
Fish
In prison with the locations of their bodies,
Pointing to one patch of grass after another, the police
Allowing him again the thrill of these stories,
Leading investigations of his own crimes.
Quyen Nguyen describes how in anatomy books
Everything’s color-coded:
yellow the nerves,
Blue the veins,
arteries the red tail feathers
Of a Scarlet Macaw. However, in surgery
Colors aren’t so distinct. “To bring in other types of light,
Lights that can allow us
to see what we currently
Don’t see. The magic of florescence” when they stain
The tissue with molecules,
the cancerous parts
A glowing algae shining at the ocean’s surface
On the operating room table,
the surgeons
In their boats
swaying to its light source,
A modified night, the glow of the moon obsolete.
How this neon advertises the patient’s path to recovery,
The end of their valiant fight
against death.
I don’t know what this means for me: two years ago
I felt the tumors in my dog’s back,
walnut shells
That my grandmother kept in a bowl on the side table,
Even though her dying was less sad.
Today they believe Garavito killed more than 300
In 5 years. That’s more than 1 person
per week,
But who’s keeping score.
vi.
When I look at the detailed maps Garavito drew
In prison to show the police where he killed,
67
I think of the curved drawings
of burial mounds
In Wisconsin, their wings eternally spread,
Their slow stampede across the landscape.
Or
The day I was walking by my house & saw a mound,
Its humble outline chalked. The people native
To this place created more than 20,000 in 2000 years.
That’s 10 mounds per year for 2 millennia.
In Moundsville, WV 60,000 tons of earth became
The Grave Creek Mound after a century, the heavy bed
Of years of dirt a kind of quilt
passed
As an heirloom,
picked up before the estate sale.
In the 1800s, amateurs dug into the mound,
A sacred place, its layers of pigment still warm,
Finding burial vaults & its artifacts. In effigy
Or burial mounds
are bundles of bones,
Cremations, or bodies in the flesh.
Sometimes
They placed them in elongated poses, arms reaching.
Another mound contained 7 men & a child,
Their skeletons left without order
because
They died in a single event.
At times police found
The boys in hapless positions, their arms tied
In torture.
Out of court, Garavito was first
Sentenced to 2600 years in prison, then 1853 years
& 9 days, approximately the length of time
Burial mounds in Wisconsin have existed,
though
Thousands have been destroyed.
One summer
I piled rocks from the dunes across the creek
To keep the path the stream had taken my whole life
Intact, the wall of rocks rising in shadows, adapting
To whispers in the current.
Weeks later men saying
68
The Department of Natural Resources won’t allow it,
Scattering the rocks, the crayfish inside. A Colombian law
In 2000 said that a person cannot be sentenced to death
Or imprisoned for more than 40 years in total.
10 years ago,
I went fishing with my brothers
& we caught a single pan fish,
trailing it behind the boat
In a collapsible wire net,
the last waving
Of a ragged flag.
I watch a woman named Sarah
Who, with a camcorder, shot through the white bars
Of a cage
a video of her bird.
Listening
On speakerphone, the bird’s Aunt Carole says hi.
Sarah laughs with purpose,
waiting for the bird
To echo her guffaw, before pointing
a hairdryer
At its feathers.
When the bird responds, its laugh
Sounds forced, like hers.
All three of them laugh,
Aunt Carole through the phone.
He could get out
In the next decade. Even though
citizens had the law
Changed again,
this decision won’t affect Garavito
Because the law isn’t retroactive & because he was considered
Sane
in the sense that he knew he was responsible,
He can’t be sent to a psychiatric institution for life.
She laughs, the bird responds. She calls the macaw silly.
vi.
Meanwhile child abuse is widespread in the area
Where Garavito massacred
because the children
Are poor,
unaccounted for,
& addicted
But as if this is their fault,
In the United States,
or Colombia’s for that matter.
Quyen Nguyen says,
69
“What a pressing need it is to not have one person
Die every minute” of cancer? “That’s the beauty
Of having a tumor
that’s labeled
With the florescence molecule.” I’m not sure
About my concern here: Garavito wants to reach out
To the boys’ families
& give them facts.
When he leaves prison,
he wants to start
A political campaign to help abused children, people
Like him
but also people like the boys he abused.
They have experienced abuse & continue abusing.
When Quyen Nguyen performs surgery on a patient,
She says it’s important
to know
What to cut out
but equally important
To preserve things that are important
70
for function.
Daniel T Stiner
3
Edited By:
Hannah
Gamble
81
Dean Gorman
Ode To Virginia Woolf
One makes up the better part of life:
the butcher, the baker.
What a soft habit.
Love is a habit, drifting in & around
great paintings a lot, swearing alone
a lot—being warm.
Opera comes through the window
now. Moonshine does.
The strong walls with Soviet fractures.
Losing my youth has been
like anything else—inadequately observed.
The streets are still hammered
down by smoking masons.
On Wenceslas Square, Nigerians puff their chests
until dawn
when the huddle breaks
& over there all her soul
rusted with a grievance sticking in it—
black pants, perfect teeth,
this moment in traffic
staring into me.
Virginia, growing old,
consider the innocence
blown to nothing with the rest.
She moves in the sunshine, stalking
nothing, singing,
& pianos still come through, those little
hammers, like men with problems
but nice clothes.
82
Dorothea Lasky
Getting Older
Time got away from me
Before I came to you
I got very old
In my house
I read a poem called Dandelions
By a mediocre poet, over a dinner with friends
All the good ones are taken
But the young ones still persist
Like water we can drink
In the meadow
The blank stare of you
Who could blame me for
And if there is life after this one
Well then what would be the difference
My heart crashes
Only in that it went before
It was so tragic
In the large striped room
When I felt your tongue upon my cheek
Instead of a man, you were a cat
Rough rough baby tongue
Upon my cheek
The large striped room
Who could blame me for what I did
83
Dorothea Lasky
I Feel The Most Gentle Breezes
I go, I rise
I feel the most gentle breezes
People say I should be thankful
To feel anything at all
And to have a voice is to say something
It’s true that I go to the supermarket
And buy a dozen eggs with my good looks
I go out and put on my best dress
And curl my hair
Twirl around in the open rain
What if the animal is all we have
What if the animal is all we are
And that when we go it is a gentle sleep
I felt this knocking on my door at night
I felt the green eye overtake me
But instead of fighting this one truth all I ever do is sing
I sing and sing and the lack of song
Represents my feelings
Which are old and wise, but mean nothing
And when I said I had a voice
I really meant you do
And that my song died long ago
When there was a dream of the ever after
When the water cascaded down the mountain
And I and my horse went to take a drink
84
Eric Ekstrand
The Nemesis of Weekends
Monday through Friday
In lighterage reports
Or the garlic presses
Of kitchen sink
Dramas or the finchy
Women at the desks
Or the linsey-woolsey
Problem in the bed,
A discontent
Back-and-forth
Is the Nemesis of Unlinked
Home and Work. But we will
Look at the Nemesis
Of Weekends. Lissome,
The mother and the sheets
Are indistinct in their line
Of retreat into the day.
Gregory, this nemesis, has braceleted
The mother and father
Together in the Saturday
That lapses to Monday
And is a kind of mezzanine
85
Or midfield. Philter
Of lunch on the porch,
Peppered tomatoes.
The father’s microgravity
Of beer and sexual longing
Lead him, incomplete, in circles
Around the Saturday
As a cloud-appearance, not really
Furthered at all. There is
Endless permission
And no supporting structure.
It is not a house
So much as a marina
Of Mars-orange light where
Every person is an almost-entity
Or the mention of a person.
For a minute, something
Comes into focus:
The open texture
Of a glass vase
And the polyrhythm of blue
And white tile among which the mother
Intended to make a joke, that’s all.
There is fruit
And wood around
The remediless joke and a little
86
Offshoot of silence
In the backyard
And a melon-colored bird.
Newfangled means “worded”
As in “of the fang.” New, here,
Means “unfamiliar”—it was
Hard to recognize
The mother in the words,
Which were the publication
Of some old pre-thought.
The riverscape Saturday
Or the airy church architecture
Saturday or the father’s
Brown study Saturday
Were not in sequence
With the other days but
Were stop-gaps with
No sense of what was previous
Or will be next.
87
Eric Ekstrand
The Nemesis That Causes the Evening to
Smudge
Is named Nicholas
Very clearly. Nicholas
Takes many liberties
All of which are seen
When there is no polarity
In the sky.
Nick is great at parties.
You could think of Nick
As a virgule as well
As you could the sky
An interpenetration. The way
Evenings are described
As “secretory” or “lavender”
Or “chemesized” all refer to
Techniques established
By Nick, by which he means
For the audience to ask,
What is being lost and what
Gained—or else, what is surviving?
This is just one
Of the challenges Nick
Presents. When he imitates
The derangements
Outsiders have
88
By way of his evenings, is he taking
Advantage of them?
Sun, the elder strawberry mark,
Is heraldic, down
And roughened. Rubefacient
Is it hewn making
All the world a rubberneck
Passing. Nick is accidental
When he yells at his mother.
He is always trying to be tragic
And the ascension/descension
Of every visiting thought
He calls a game of snakes
And ladders. In his work,
There is very little thrift or peace.
It is entirely cosmetic,
Which is another way of saying,
It is a mirror of a life lived
Among people. That he is an agent
Of sexual dexterity, is a fact
Proven through his skies’
Fanlike and nonmaterial shrines
To pinks and the desirous
Thistles of women.
When you ask him,
Women’s thistles? He says,
Only because there aren’t many
Things that have more “vivre.”
Every night, his work makes
Its own retort like a lid.
89
Eugene Ostashevsky
The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi
My ambition is to get a lot of money
so that I can lead a better life.
Now I have two lorries, a luxury car
and have started my own business in my town.
I only want one more chance in piracy to increase my cash assets,
then I will get married and give up.
Piracy is not just easy money—
it has many risks and difficulties.
Sometimes you spend months in the sea to hunt a ship
and miss.
Sometimes when we are going to hijack a ship we face rough winds,
and some of us get sick, and some die.
Sometimes you fail in capturing, and sometimes you come under threat by foreign navies,
but all we do is venture.
Our work is seen by many in the coastal villages as an act of resistance,
and we are viewed as heroes.
A lot of people in coastal villages
aspire to be us.
90
Joe Hall
Recovery Night
The mountain doesn’t have the eye that is the red I know
In basements of burning gas, below tabernacles of coal
The more churches and social clubs there are, the less economic growth
The fewer support groups, the more patents produced
More discussion groups equals neighbors mutilated in war!
So I hope and pray and hide thumbtacks in my knees on Recovery Night
Recovery Night is when we beat each other with chairs
Sometimes we hide our genitals, sometimes they shine
Sleeping in a mineshaft in a pharmaceutical mist
Looking down on Center St at night from my bedroom
In what used to be a grand house but now it’s
Nothing I can’t even tell you how it feels
Algorithms say this place will disappear, the map shows
Pink to pink between county lines, but when I am on
My hands and knees, looking into the eyes and wet jaws of
The beast, or eating donuts after confession or
Just being engulfed in fire, I know we will persist
They say Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco forgot us
I know the day will come
When we’ll enter the mountain
A city will be there
91
Judith Taylor
Clinically Proven to Reduce
Was it my knees or wits that gave out climbing Mt.Whatever?
The adamentine of damage, raining pure gold, deluxe.
Uneven, undone, unhinged: dream’s hahaha to the nerves.
You concoct a fanged mask but your neck’s not intact.
A painted doll protected what was fine in me, cracking.
92
Liz Hildreth
Fake Interview
I am a Midwestern and as such have always been afraid of seas and eating the darting deep beneath the translucent diaphanous swimming under a wire
when it’s frightening out. I do so few things.
I do them or I feel bad.
The morning illuminated grass
of my heart, I wake up and say
I am going to be exactly opposite today, exactly happy with that;
this time I’m keeping to all that fits, container to container, fresh and lovely, the stabbing, too. Look out that window,
over the hedge of exacting dreams.
We’re safe inside the microphone,
safe from elaborate visions, hunkering in with our old uniques,
original regionals, wresting
that which we know can’t be,
or if so can’t be seen and so is
all over us every minute.
A misfiring happens. It happens again. People live, one minute,
I’ll help you understand, how it is people live.
93
Liz Hildreth
You Say Tornado I Say Tornado
I can’t remember the word recognize or mean
But the feeling of regret I know and leaving
Everything I love forever is stronger than ever
Something about the future or rendering the life of a tornado
One way to do it in the sky with a vial of silver-hot mercury
It’s best to die with your illicitness sitting next to you
As long as you’re going to America
Let us fall to the earth and scream
I am not finished
I’m never finished
People need people
And sometimes
They’re brave enough to go get them
And sometimes
They’re brave enough to leave them in the road
What makes a thing so memorable
All signs point to perishing
94
Fire through the oval
I’ll just say it
I always wanted to be an angel of life
I recognize an embarrassing icon when I see it
I recognize it’s embarrassing to want to be embarrassing
To be so high above yourself
To want to be everything openly and understood
And loveable and adorable all ways in the road
Like seared sea scallops and rosemary potatoes
I want my title shined up clean and normal
See a tornado is like a punch in your kiss
It’s problematic like I was looking for my key
And I fell off my balcony into the fish market
I don’t want to be the things I like
I want to be the things that shouldn’t matter but do
I want it documented on paper
“An angel was mistaken for a tornado”
Lift up the house and you’ll see the glitter
You’ll see a transparent flutter in the hyacinths
What is it about the angel loop
95
It’s like you can’t stop smelling the honeysuckle
You tried to grow and grew instead
A garden of many colorful fucked up people and ideas
Nobody ever tells you how it long it takes
for an imaginary plane to fall out of an imaginary sky
But know this paper is true and immediate
Like PA-PER
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take it
A very brief yet sincere digital retraction
“A natural disaster sat on my metaphor”
Everybody knows digital is real
Like paying your bills is real
And the moon is real
It’s really true all that yellow light
And tonight the moon is bigger
Than it will be for the next 30 years
Look at the sky
Now look at 30 more years
That’s how real it is
I want to keep drinking this
96
But thanks for asking
I trust you
I trust the moon
Will be no more or less moon without me
I’m happy right here the way I’m being
I am perfectly happy with hearsay
97
Liz Hildreth
A Snowstorm In Very First Person
I don’t know about universal terror,
this invisible flock of birds we’re running from—
the digital ones with the silver saturated middles. This note to you equals one year of description—
all I’ve ever wanted—and significant coloration.
I wonder about fear specifically as it relates to the days
we know we’ll live well beyond forever—
the day snow becomes the same as collecting data
and selling it before it’s obsolete.
I do know something about constructing a schematic
diagram of a living thing. You don’t even have to die
from process or existing as a fixed form immediately after.
10,000 feet in the air some ideas feel so lonely,
so barely represented by their own bones.
I don’t own a plane so I just burn up the bonfire
and then the snow grows into a mountain.
I’ve never known about nature and all that’s supposed to work—
trees specifically, but I can recognize and see them.
They populate every surface of the earth.
98
Paul Killebrew
Middle Name
I’m an old woman.
I wore a yellow dress to the airport so they’d see me.
I got kids, but they’re grown.
I had a sensation to the side of my leg, but not the side where I already had a leg, the other side.
I stepped onto the escalator.
I drew up plans for it in my mind, where on this side it was going to be all glass, so that you could see straight out into the trees and weather.
I sit here sometimes and try to remember what the phone sounds like, and then the thermostat
will click or there’ll be a creak or something, and I just about die.
I had worse jobs.
When I was still practicing law I remember this guy asked me if he cut a hole in his roof if he could sue the city.
I said for what?
He said I don’t know you’re the lawyer.
I can’t say it’s much to look at.
I just wanted a few.
If something happens I want you to let me know.
99
Paul Killebrew
Really Isn’t
It is such
a beautiful world,
and yet
I treat
so many things
as emblematic,
as if each
teardrop on
the brim of
his lies
spoke for
a large and
shadowy theme,
like the mind
emulsifying
in sleep
with its
backdrop, black
wave-shaped
cut-outs in
cardboard bobbing
in asynchronous
ovals and
staggered to
the back of
the stage,
as if depth
were only a
matter of
layering planes.
You held
your jacket closed
and turned
to face me,
100
a little closer
than I was
used to.
I experienced
my body with
newfound specificity.
Will we ever
leave this
criminally demure
party and orient
ourselves back
to the least
possible of all
parking spaces?
How long
does it take
the obvious
to register
in this valley
of chatter among
mountains of awkwardness?
It isn’t
complicated, I mean
nothing is all
it takes, but
I’m still brought
to tears when I
get out of the car.
101
Nate McDonough
Michael Olivo
112
Andrew Rahal
Cartesian Distance
part of which was first measured on a porch
on 12th and Ordway, in East Nashville
and the points are not mine. Yes, I steal.
I have cheated the pizza man, his home,
the backroads. The point is to know
a cul-de-sac when you see one.
Sometimes it draws the circle around you
and if it rains, it clumps the dirt up around
your ankle-socks and covers your skin in wet lashes.
The way vowels get lost when they cross into Alabama,
fat and sweating into the alphabet of chaw
and deep sigh. It can push all of your heart away,
but most times, we filled the porch with the love
of our mouths, unstoppable and memorizing
the many words for night.
It felt like that, but bright and overhead on a hot,
chickened-up Saturday when a fortune cookie tickered to me:
a nice cake is waiting for you today.
When I walked into my house and brought to life
the sideways jug of almond milk, the half-empty
mustard bottle bleeding into the sugars of a long-tabled cake
everything in the kitchen was something with a child inside it.
The dogs’ tennis balls were still hiding under their couches,
but even they rolled out like anything that is a sun,
sleeping under leaves. Softly, like lullabies,
like under-greased French Fries—
they too need to sleep. I think they were us once,
and they do not scare the dark.
113
Brian Russell
The Year of What Now
I ask your doctor
Of infectious disease if she’s
Read Williams he cured
Sick babies I tell her and
Begin describing spring
And all she’s looking at the wall
Now the floor now your chart
Now the door never
Heard of him she says
But I can’t stop explaining
How important this is
I need to know your doctor
Believes in the tenacity of nature
To endure I’m past his heart
Attack his strokes and now as if
Etching the tombstone myself I find
I can’t remember the date
He died or even
The year of what now
Are we the pure products and what
Does that even mean pure isn’t it
Obvious we are each our own culture
Alive with the virus that’s waiting
To unmake us.
114
115
buttonhole it, terror the industry. the twat of it is missing, godspeed handywork, the dress needs
to open. Try drag, maybe, or scissors, the long cloth blue heart looks directly into the well.
Lengthen the frammis until sunlight covers the niche, the hole, maybe cut those sideburns of
mourning. Anterior to it all, scrap the goddamn precious. slat, harrier, cunt/then punt.
Less noun noun and more less.
or, put it another way:
My Dear Mr. Rilke: forgive me that I have been so long in writing to you. I am reading
your extended letters, as I sit for days with my back to the view of Paris. My dear Mr.
Rilke, really what I want to say is for god’s sake, stop all this laborious earnestness,
really, please, just be your own god but not in the top-hat, white-man way, (I know it’s
a stretch) but maybe try getting dirty sometime:
Stein: Letter to a Young Rilke
Jan Beatty
Jan Beatty
Switching She’s the designated hitter,
switched at birth:
she put christ’s nails in her hands,
she dropped the baby.
When there was no
birth father, she bought shoes
with steel toes and a big belt buckle.
She saved the baby and became
christ our savior,
she bought the gun.
She wore it like a man/
wore it like a woman,
she said suck my dick
and she sucked dick.
She held herself close/tangled
in her own wires and switches:
father of sky, dreams, and night,
she was a slave to it
until she called herself free,
became her own man.
In the steel wheels of her leaving,
she became her own father.
116
Jane Mead
A Song For Alice In The Rainy Season
You will not go to a watery grave,
You will not go to your grave with ticks—
But you will go to your grave today.
Little dog who would never behave,
Who heard us call and watched, transfixed—
You will not go to a watery grave.
To the sheep you were a blurred crime-wave,
(Puzzled by dogs who chased after sticks)
And spirited off to your grave today.
You led the other dogs astray
Woke the neighbors, killed their chicks—
But you will not go to a watery grave.
Before we make your nest of hay
We line the flooded pit with bricks
For you will go to your grave today.
We line the hay with twigs of bay.
I brush your tail. I check for ticks.
You will not go to a watery grave—
But you will go to your grave today.
117
Leah Kaminski
There’s A Rushing Out And Tightening In: As
In
a New England street pacing seamless
toward a church steeple in a pulse-blue sky:
street itching with new leaf and side-trees reared-back.
As in the slide-hit-slide of large drops
on a car’s metal roof in a lowering
morning and what their round hollows hold—what
slides in a curve whose bell starts and ends in
more-blooming rains from more cold-blooded trees.
As in the slump of wet straw grass over
a hulking compost heap (water-fleshed morning,
bridge bright gray), as in lichen leggy in neon.
Running toward the candling end of each
day, inside, I’m blinking, cataracted, clear.
118
Leah Kaminski
Mixed States
I walk at night on a cemented-pebble path
under the reach of eucalyptus,
look up, think
eucalyptus flattening between me and moon,
and the Murray River in northeast Victoria, a border between it and New South Wales.
I never got east but from the west, townland
puffing its dust into, spilling on into it. Townland stalking
with grapes and their curling tops crested with cockatoos, low roads swelling
between forties-bungalowed towns, a pontoon battening between wide shoals
near a ramshackle fire on a narrow bank, small from the other shore, and one
eucalyptus
flattening its hand and allowing me
to frame it, and moon, for me to look,
as I sat in leafy warm water, leaning back with my tobaccoed fingers in the silt, and
looked up; and I look up
now not only for looking, but for the thought.
When the path ends I am back in, inward, fallen in, raveling,
and a woman paints out of the chiaroscuro dark to my right
and notices me. She says excuse me, asks for an apartment number,
and now my boots start to hold my calves
and my skirt my legs,
and my thighs are pleasant and do not touch unless for pleasantries:
and I am almost at the air again, I am at the flat-faced housing
and the foliage that excuses it, I am at the tall
trees, recall them
(pardoning sky, unleashed sea, slow-toppling cliff ).
119
She has a Slavic accent,
the sound of the long, clipped vowels with their husky walls, the short stints
of consonant.
When I leave I have to go back to her because I didn’t pay proper attention.
And my mind drag-races and I stop in the path to stop my mind
and the wide sky pulls, makes me taller against my mind
while it titches, squalls, schooners out: says to curve
back at it, curve back its forward thrust and float, to take its muscles and taffy-turn them;
says slopes can be lengthened, folds ratcheted open, bridges bent back.
The sentence starts and starts, and doesn’t know its word,
wants to say remember, but it’s not past, wants to say observe,
but it’s not behind glass, reflect but it’s not a mirror, honor but it’s not a wife—
and yesterday I didn’t—not anything, not any of those things—and tomorrow
the sky will be scrawling with me, and the time will be a dirty wall that scrapes
my shoulders here,
and here, in the slump and chatter.
When I leave I have to go back to her, and the night pulls me out at it, says the trees
if you grasp them will bend you against your own curve.
Says I will know when to close my body’s
mouth,
notice how my vertebrae pile
and slink, notice heel and toe, and pebble
and silt, eye on air
and sky and tree, their grasp on me, know when
to shut my body’s mouth, sometimes when I remember I will remember to try to
wait at the river. Attend to her, speak.
120
Nicholas Wright
In the Therapist’s Waiting Room
you flip through last month’s issue of Psychology Today, reading an article that asks
“Why Are You So Paranoid?” stretched in Cambria bold letters standing there like
a monolith reminder of Cambridge and all the other colleges that rejected you.
the magazine like two thin lips with creased edges chomping away at your crotch
now limp as the dry memories of relationships that failed, and every page
gives you another symptom, or so you think, and that in itself is another symptom.
like paper cuts by sharp letters, pulled triggers and bullets grazing you.
next title “Are Your Friends Ruining Your Sex Life?”
next title “What Your Partner’s Really Thinking About in Bed”
next title “The American Nightmare”
yes, it’s awake squirming in the folds of your sheets and you think
maybe it’s good that I don’t have many friends.
maybe it’s good that I’m always alone.
maybe it’s good that I never vote.
turn to an advertisement for a ballpoint pen with a special fat grip at its head,
the pen is just a pen. the page is just a page. good intentions. contort the sentences.
your therapist calls you “observant,” is that a good a thing?
121
Randall Mann
But Enough About Me
The light is getting nearer.
I hope to find a lover.
I grab a hand mirror
and fluff my combover.
My shoes will hide the warts;
my hand, my grubby mouth.
My khakis smother farts,
allusion muffles truth.
My formalism blinds
the critics. Like a star.
(My bio note reminds
the groupies not to stare.)
I need to sneak a smoke
before I hit the gym,
before I stroke a bloke.
I like him lean and dumb.
I like that turning forty
wasn’t such a biggie.
I bought myself a party:
his name was Little Piggy.
I’ll win the Prix de Rome.
I’ll travel on the trains.
I’ll write my poem of Rome,
A Randy Life in Ruins.
But this is not a train.
A train is what I pull.
You drink to kill pain;
I’m pushing in your stool.
122
Shane McCrae
Preparing For The World
So much
we say it I
Love you so much especially / Whenever we
So much we as we say goodbye
/ So much
our daughter who
can’t speak
Our daughter who a few
months she ago
a few came home
From daycare knowing how to use a spoon
Like she had known
/ For weeks
Can’t make the words she makes
the sounds
/ She knows I love you
Is what you say when someone leaves you
123
TJ DiFrancesco
The Stuntman Writes His Eleg y
I was a contender for death from the start, lucky man
to know a little about this world. Composite of
cowboy dragged into spectral and solid sunset,
bartender pacing loud knife strokes between his fingers,
catching the first barstool to the back. I’ve exploded
in a Chevelle,
and a Corvette and a Camaro and a Trans-Am.
The guardian angels of so many beautiful men,
all become the same thing
made from the nearly destroyed
and borrowed names of heroes. Danger
is older than us, changes
when viewed. And if I, hard as a cat to kill,
always missing the dance, should do it again,
should the stars survive me, and they will,
remember my first swan dive
off a double wide through the plywood,
second-hand fireman’s suit under loose clothes.
The thumb-tacks made a little, Hollywood-style skyline
contained between the stacks of cinderblocks
aflame. Rubber cement works best for the fire:
fast to ignite,
hot and brilliant.
I set myself in the cooler awhile,
so as not to feel it at first. Take one good breath, and scream
124
as I jump, to get the air out of my lungs.
Ungelbah Dávila
The Boys of Burque
Cockgrease, Layrite, Morgans and Sweet Georgia Brown
boys, in broken down Fords,
in drive-through lines, and dirt lots
genuflecting beneath winged Cadillacs and Biscaynes,
nuclear green, Communist red, rattle-can black, back down,
top up, East past Rio Grande,
past motel row, past neon, past go,
toward broken bottled burro alleyways,
toward ephemeral dawns crashing through windshields
drunk on whiskey, Pabst, tequila sunrises,
singing Hank, singing Cline, singing
that blackbird lullaby, that love me tender
moment of a setting moon.
125
126
2.
It counts with other people understanding,
exploring. Taking an interest in your
environment. Be an extrovert – exoteric
not extraneous. I bring joy into the life;
legibly; un-generically; but mostly
palpably. My greatest pleasures are other
people: you and you, and oh, you. Did you
know your voice deepens when you talk to
someone your attracted to. Honey, you’re
gonna need a shovel to dig this out.
[ you hear me, now?]
The distant near is so very deep.
1.
You’re either a Jackie or a Marilyn. Either
you dress for the music or the occasion.
You are your own map in the light and the
dark. The noon and the night the beach or
the pool. Nevermind the archetype:
forever elemental, we are: distilled. Long
hair suits you or it don’t. Nevermind the
curl. Always getting what you want
through your charm and personality. You
think LIFE IS A LAUGH ‘cause it ain’t
just a chuckle. Blow out these candles for
me, honey. Now,shoo fly,
Shoo.
You’re botherin’ me.
Trois Petite Fours
Leah Umansky
127
Starbucks – 14th and 6th avenue. Manhattan. You met with a lawyer. Someone you called garrulous; someone I
called sweet. He complimented me. I complimented my words.
2
They who go skulking. They who resent the first-person and the eyes it brings.
3
Derived from observation you were only effective on occasion. The person being addressed is not the receiver[Hello, Mcfly?]
4
Can I add a little sic to this thing? YOU know what I mean.
5
See George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The pigs are horrified when they see the hanging hams.
1
This time last year: you wanted to serve
me: a fractured wonder1a retort to that
gilded lie: a device for the genteel-ed
we2.We tried to write narratives: to share
language
majestically;
but
love
empirically3; royally –oh what a figure of
fun! Variants have sprung: Rat. Frog. Pig.
[Sturgeon?]4 The nosiest route is hardly
alone. The abhorrence the pregnant
therefores of excuses. Let the gut of this
hang: “you” beside “me” inside-out. putrid
and bleeding…the horror.. oh, the
horror5…
3.
M Young
Bios
Aaron Gerber originally from Maine, completed his undergraduate work at
Hampshire College in 2005, then moved to Portland, Oregon as a founder of the
band A Weather, releasing two albums on Team Love Records. He is now an MFA
candidate at the University of New Hampshire, where he works for the literary
magazine Barnstorm.
Andrew Rahal currently teaches on the Quileute reservation in La Push, WA and
serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at Narrative Magazine. He studied creative
writing at Vanderbilt University and he was a founding editor for the Nashville
Review. His poetry has appeared in Danse Macabre, Silk Road Review, and
Nashville Arts Magazine, among other publications.
Ara Shirinyan, a Poet, publisher and musician, was born in 1977 in what was
then the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia. His writing experiments with
constraints, appropriation, and reframing have been published in Word Ways:
The Journal of Recreational Linguistics, Trepan, Greetings, Tuli & Savu, and The
Physical Poets Vol.2. His first book Syria Is in the World was published by Palm
Press in 2007, and Speech Genres 1-2, was published online by UBUWEB in 2007
as part of its Publishing the Unpublishable series. With the group Godzik Pink,
he released two CDs (Es Em, Ekel Em and Black Broccoli) on the label Kill Rock
Stars/5rc. Since 1987, he has lived in Los Angeles, where he edits Make Now Press,
co-curates the monthly reading series at The Smell, and teaches English at local
community colleges.
Ashley Colley has an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives
in Mount Vernon, Iowa with her partner and a rabbit.
Box Brown is an artist living in Philadelphia. He’s currently working on a
biography of Andre the Giant for First Second books. He also publishes comics
under the name Retrofit Comics boxbrown.com
Brandon Downing is a writer and visual artist whose books of poetry include
The Shirt Weapon, Mellow Actions, AT ME and Dark Brandon, as well as Lake
Antiquity, a monograph of literary collages from 1996-2008. He designs books, he
makes videos, he changes. His feature-length collection of collaged digital shorts,
Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics, dropped in 2007. A 2nd volume is forthcoming;
see clips at www.youtube.com/user/bdown68
Brendan Kiefer is an illustrator, cartoonist, and musician living in Austin, TX.
Feel free to e-mail him at [email protected] to commission work or to say
“hello.”
Brian Russell is the author of The Year of What Now, winner of the 2012 Bakeless
Prize for Poetry, forthcoming from Graywolf in 2013. He lives in Chicago with his
wife and two dogs.
Daniel Thing Stiner lives in Northern California with his wife and kids. His
freestyle rap anxiety comic Escape From Cubicleland! can be read online at
danielthingstiner.com
Dean Gorman lives in Portland, Oregon where he teaches English Composition
and performs in the bands The Tumblers and Sweet William’s Ghost. He is a
graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program and co-founder of Pilot
Books and Magazine. Dean’s poems, essays and reviews have appeared in Gulf
Coast, Indiana Review, Forklift Ohio, Sixth Finch, Octopus Magazine and The
Portland Mercury, among other places. Several of his poems are also forthcoming
in the Ooligan Press anthology The Pacific Poetry Project.
Derik A Badman is an artist, critic, and web developer who makes comics that
are of interest to about a dozen people. Many of his works are created under
constraint or through appropriation (in this case via Jesse Marsh and Gaston
Bachelard). See more of comics and writing about comics at MadInkBeard.com
Det Roc Boi is a freelance cartoonist/illustrator. I was born in 1985, in Genoa,
Italy. My oldest memories are about drawing pink elephants. I have been
drawing most of my life, Drawing is a vital action for me; it’s my favorite mean
of expression, the one that identifies me. My life, my influences, my inspirations
and my other interests all flow onto the sheet; maybe it’s a little hard to catch a
glimpse of them all, but there they are: psychedelia, magical realism, surrealism,
comics, nature, music, movies, cartoons and underground art.
Dorothea Lasky was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She earned a BA at
Washington University and an MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
She has published two collections of poetry, AWE (2007) and Black Life (2010), as
well as several chapbooks, including the polemical Poetry Is Not a Project (2010).
Her poems have appeared in a number of prominent publications, including The
New Yorker, Paris Review, and American Poetry Review.
Douglas Kearney first full-length collection of poems, Fear, Some, was published
in 2006 by Red Hen Press. His second manuscript, The Black Automaton, was
chosen by Catherine Wagner for the National Poetry Series and published by
Fence Books in 2009. It was also a finalist for the Pen Center USA Award in 2010.
His chapbook-as-broadsides-as-LP, Quantum Spit, was released by Corollary
Press in 2010 and his newest chapbook, Skinmag (Deadly Chaps), is now
available. He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger award and
fellowships at Idyllwild and Cave Canem. Kearney has performed his poetry at
the Public Theatre, the Orpheum, The World Stage and others. His poems have
appeared in journals such as Callaloo, jubilat, Ploughshares, nocturnes, Ninth
Letter, miPoesias, Southampton Review, Washington Square and Tidal Basin
Review. He has been commissioned to compose poetry in response to art by
the Weisman Museum in the Twin Cities, the Studio Museum in Harlem and
SFMOMA. Performances of Kearney’s libretti have been featured in Los Angeles,
San Francisco, New York and Europe. Born in Brooklyn, he lives with his family in
Altadena, CA. He teaches at CalArts and Antioch.
Elena Rivera’s most recent books are The Perforated Map (Shearsman Books,
2011) and Remembrance of Things Plastic (LRL e-Editions, 2010). She won the
2010 Robert Fagles prize in translation for her translation of The Rest of the
Voyage by Bernard Noël, published by Graywolf Press (2011).
Emily Critchley holds a PhD in contemporary American women’s poetry and
philosophy from the University of Cambridge. She is the author of several poetry
collections and a Selected Writing: Love / All That / & OK (Penned in the Margins,
2011). She teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich,
London.
Eric Ekstrand teaches writing at Wake Forest University. His poems have
appeared in Poetry, jubilat, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, Bat City
Review and elsewhere. He received his MFA in 2010 from the University of
Houston. He is a former poetry editor for Gulf Coast. He is the recipient of a
2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship awarded by The Poetry Foundation and his first fulllength collection, Lawn Games, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in
2011.
Eugene Ostashevsky is currently working on a book about the relationship
between a pirate and a parrot. The poem printed here derives from an interview
with a Somali pirate conducted by BBC.
Evan Eisel is a 21-year-old photo student probably asleep somewhere in
Columbus, OH. He’s recently been too distracted by zine-making and comic
culture’ to actually make any photographs, and instead spends most of his free
time getting “freaky” with the ballpoint pen he probably borrowed from you in
class and never gave back.
Gabriel Corbera is a Barcelona based cartoonist, designer and illustrator coming
to light in 1975 and falling into illustration in 2007. He won Gold Medal in 2008
by SPD Awards in the category “Non Newsstand Illustration.” gabrielcorbera.com
Jan Beatty’s books include The Switching/Yard (forthcoming, 2013), Red Sugar,
Boneshaker, and Mad River (1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), all published by the
University of Pittsburgh Press. Beatty hosts and produces Prosody, a public radio
show on NPR affiliate WESA-FM featuring national writers. She worked as a welfare
caseworker, an abortion counselor, in maximum security prisons, and as a waitress
for fifteen years. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University,
where she teaches in the MFA program.
Jane Mead is the author of three collections of poetry and the recipient of grants
and awards from the Whiting, Lannan and Guggenheim Foundations. She teaches
in the Drew University Low-Residency MFA program, and farms in Northern
California.
Jason Poland has been drawing his webcomic, “Robbie and Bobby: A Robot and
his Boy” since 2003. His self-published book is distributed in specialty comic
shops across the U.S., and his drawings have appeared in NANO Fiction, Film
Monitor, and other publications. He lives in Houston, Texas with his fiancée, Julai
and their cat, Wizard. This is his first submission to Catch Up. More of his comics
can be found at robbieandbobby.com
Joe Hall’s first book of poems is Pigafetta Is My Wife. With Chad Hardy he wrote
The Container Store Vols. I & II. Black Ocean Press will punish his second solo
collection in 2013. His poems, fiction, book reviews, and essays have appeared in
Gulf Coast, HTMLGiant, The Colorado Review, and elsewhere.
John Gallaher is the author of the books of poetry, Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies
in Cauls, The Little Book of Guesses, and Map of the Folded World, as well as the
free online chapbook, Guidebook from Blue Hour Press, and, with with the poet
G.C. Waldrep Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, BOA, 2011. His next book will
be the book-length essay-poem In a Landscape, coming out in 2015 from BOA.
Other than that, he’s co-editor of The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press.
Josh Bayer is an artist living in Harlem NY. He is part of the Comics Are the
Enemy collective and is the force behind Retrofit comic’s Raw Power, Suspect
Device, Rom and more. He has collaborated with Raymond Pettibon and been
listed in The Best American Comics series three times. He teaches at The
Educational Alliance, 3rd Ward Art School and the 92nd St Y and can be contacted
at joshbayer.tumblr.com or joshbayer.com
Judith Taylor is the author of Curios and Selected Dreams from the Animal
Kingdom, as well as the co-editor of Air Fare: Stories, Poems and Essays on
Flying. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, she teaches private classes, and co-edits
the poetry journal, POOL.
Karena Youtz lives and works in Boise, Idaho. She wrote The Transfer Tree.
Kyle Martin currently resides in Columbus, Ohio and works with children. He is
so hungover at the time of this writing that he wishes his head would just hurry
up and split open already.
L. Nichols is a Brooklyn-based artist & designer. wormulus.tumblr.com
Laura Eve Engel work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review,
Crazyhorse, The Colorado Review, Pleiades, The Southern Review, Versal, VOLT
and elsewhere. [Spoiler Alert], a chapbook she co-wrote, is available from Dzanc
Books
Lauren Levin’s is from New Orleans and lives in Oakland. She wrote Working
(Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), Song (The Physiocrats), Keenan (Lame House
Press) and Not Time (Boxwood Editions). Recent work appears or will appear in
OMG, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Rethinking Marxism, 1913,
and Catch-Up, and critical essays on Anne Boyer & Stephanie Young, and Brent
Cunningham, are in Lana Turner Online. She co-edits the Poetic Labor Project
blog and the journal Mrs. Maybe.
Leah Kaminski lives in Irvine, California, where she teaches writing and writes
and starts to like the suburbs.
Leah Umansky’s first book of poems, Domestic Uncertainties, is forthcoming
from BlazeVOX Books in 2013. She has her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence
College and has been a contributing writer for BOMB Magazine’s BOMBLOG, a
poetry reviewer for The Rumpus and a guest blogger for The Best American Poetry
Blog. Her poems can be found in such journals as: Barrow Street and Cream City
Review among others. She is also the Host/Curator of COUPLET: a poetry and
music series on the Lower East Side. Read more at :http://iammyownheroine.com
Leigh Anne Couch is the managing editor of the Sewanee Review. Her poems
have appeared in the Western Humanities Review, Shenandoah, Salmagundi, Gulf
Coast, Cincinnati Review, Carolina Quarterly, and other journals. Her chapbook,
Green and Helpless was published by Finishing Line Press, and her first book,
Houses Fly Away, was winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award. She lives in
Tennessee with the writer Kevin Wilson and their son, Griff.
Lewis Freedman moved to Madison where he now resides and co-runs the
___________-Shaped reading series with Andy Gricevich, with whom he
also edits and publishes chapbooks for cannot exist. Also, Lewis co-edits the
publication of chapbooks with Agnes Fox Press. Three chapbooks have been
published under his name: The Third Word ( What To Us [Press], 2009), Catfish
Po’ Boys (Minutes Books, 2010), and SUFFERING EXCHANGE WALKS WITH AND
(Minutes Books, 2011). Solitude: The Complete Games, a collaboration with Kevin
Rydberg, is forthcoming from Troll Thread, something Lewis Freedman is really
excited about.
Liz Hildreth’s poems, translations, and essays have been published in H_NGM_N,
MAKE, Forklift, Ohio, McSweeney’s, Parthenon West, PANK, and Sixth Finch,
among other places. She lives in Chicago and works as a writer for an education
company.
M Young is editor of The Kindlin’ Quarterly comics anthology and author of 2012
Xeric winner, Wild Child. [email protected]
www.kindlinquarterly.com
Michael Olivo
(1988) As far as comics, I started making comics a year ago in Philadelphia.
(NJ) Now I make them in California.
(American) Lately, I’ve really been, or been really, into Bob Kane.
(Graph Paper) Thanks for reading.
Nate McDonough Cretin. Makes comics. In Pittsburgh. grixly.tumblr.com
Nicholas Wright is currently enrolled in Columbia University’s MFA program. He
lives in Manhattan, where he enjoys wandering aimlessly through Central Park
and watching B movies. His writing often focuses on mental illness, both the
language used for categorization and the process of recovery. Nick’s working on a
manuscript that will illustrate his own experience with psychotherapy and his own
process of recovery.
Pat Aulisio is the coolest alien ever! he always wears sunglasses and gets all the
babes! he also carries around rollerblades “just in case.” comics and more at www.
patmakesdrawings.com
Patrick Johnson is a first-year MFA candidate in poetry at Washington University.
“Forensic” is his first published poem.
Paul Killebrew was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Canarium Books
published his first full-length poetry collection, Flowers, in 2010, and will be
releasing his second book, Ethical Consciousness, in 2013. He currently resides
in Louisiana, where he’s a staff attorney at Innocence Project New Orleans (www.
ip-no.org).
Randall Mann’s third book of poems, Straight Razor, is forthcoming from Persea
Books. He lives in San Francisco.
Rebecca Hazelton has poems forthcoming or published in AGNI, The Gettysburg
Review, The Southern Review, and others. She has received fellowships from The
Creative Writing Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Vermont
Studio Center. She was included in Best New Poets 2011 and won the 2012
“Discovery”/Boston Review Prize. Her first book, Fair Copy, is forthcoming from
Ohio State University Press. More at rebeccahazelton.net.
S. Whitney Holmes was born and raised in north-central West Virginia. She
earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, and is currently
a student in the English & Creative Writing PhD program at the University of
Cincinnati. Her poems appear in Willow Springs, Ninth Letter, and Gulf Coast.
Sam Spina is a cartoonist living in Denver. He won a Xeric award for his book
Fight last year and is finally finishing up some new comics. Check them out at
spinadoodles.com
Shane McCrae is the author of Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center,
2011), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA
Literary Award, and Blood (Noemi Press, 2013), as well as three chapbooks--most
recently, Nonfiction, which won the Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook
Competition. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Best American
Poetry 2010, Fence, Jubilat, Smartish Pace and others. In 2011, he received a
Whiting Writer’s Award.
Tara Helfer, hailing from the Valley of Steel, draws inspiration from the
convergence of urban and rural elements surrounding her hometown of
Pittsburgh. Under Unicorn Mountain she works in comics, illustration,
animation and bookmaking. tarahelfer.com
TJ DiFrancesco is from Oakland, CA. He co-edits Lo-Ball Magazine and is an MFA
candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
T.R. Hummer (born August 7, 1950, Macon, Mississippi) is an American poet,
critic, essayist, editor, and professor. His most recent poetry collection is
Ephemeron (Louisiana State University Press, 2011). He has published poems
in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic
Monthly, Paris Review, and Georgia Review. His honors include a Guggenheim
Fellowship inclusion in the 1995 edition of Best American Poetry, and two
Pushcart Prizes.” T. R. Hummer (n.d.).
Ungelbah Daniel-Davila is a poet, photographer and model from Albuquerque,
New Mexico. She draws her inspiration from Americana, car culture, and the rural
lifestyle of the American West. Her first book of poetry, Effigies II, will be out
this year from Salt Publishing, UK. She is the creator of the online zine, La Loca
Magazine.com. See more of her photography at Pinup-ology.com .
Zaccaria Fulton’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in THERMOS,
PANK, and elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate at the University of WisconsinMadison, where he teaches Creative Writing and serves as Poetry Editor for Devil’s
Lake.