Untitled - Zero Ducats

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communiqué #1
winter 2008
zerø ducats cøllective
missoula / boulder / elsewhere
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s ø m e h a v e X / s ø v er t h ei r e y e s & a r e d e a d
Last Letter……………………………..…………………..linh dinh 9
Imagine…………………………………………………… …….………. 10
I Love You, You’re Like Breakfast ……..chris alexander 12
Trumpet-teer……………………………………………………….….. 14
Silence of the Lambs Marathon………………………………… 15
Barrier Reef……………….…………..…………sandra simonds 16
No Bottled Water…………………………………………….……… 18
A Pain Century…..…………………………………….…………….. 20
My Brief Career in Heroism………………..aaron shulman 21
Bailout ………………………………………..…..………..matt hart 30
Poem………………………………………………………...……………. 31
Reckless……………………………………………………….…..……. 32
Every Morning……………….….……….kristine ong muslim 33
Page Torn From a Survivor’s
Handbook….………....................................……. 34
Another Page Torn From a Survivor’s Handbook…….… 35
Diagonal Stripe …………..………………..brooklyn copeland 36
Necking………………………………………………….. juliet cook 37
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If I Were Meriwether Lewis ………………..matthew kaler 38
For Egon Shiele ……………………………….…….molly curtis 39
It Can Be That Way Still………..shane joaquín jiménez 40
Lessening the Blows …………………….……mathias svalina 43
Tail End Charlie…………………………………………………….. 44
Pop Goes the Weasel ……………………………………..……….. 45
(Eighteen Legs) …………………………………….kona morris 46
Got Those Post-Apocalyptic
Lowdown Robot Blues…………....….. whit williams 48
Fly Me To The Moon…………………………….…………..…… 49
You Can’t Handle The Truth …………………………………… 49
Necromancy
at the Montana State Prison………………laura dunn 50
An Introduction to Buson……………..…..….. ed mcfadden 52
Some Selected Haiku of Buson………………………………... 53
Kurt or Craig………………………………………..travis sehorn 56
Arcticcotton……………….….lucas farrell & louisa conrad 58
Twilight……………………………………………….………………… 62
Elders…………………………………………………………………….. 66
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If I Talk Too Much About
Bones……….…………..…………..scott alexander jones 69
Bonnie & Clyde
Settle Down in the Suburbs ………………..…….…..….. 72
Porous Dolores …………………………………..…….karie buss 74
Those Eyes ……………………………….…..…….lauren hamlin 75
An Unhinging……………………………….….…erik anderson
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These Our Milks…………………………..……..lindsay bland
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The Art of the Ends of the Earth …………….….laird hunt 83
Ohio, China ……………………………………..m. d’alessandro 84
Done Changing……………………………………………….……… 84
The Werewolf Diaspora ………………..…..nancy stohlman 85
The Precipice Went Slack……………….……….adam perry 86
Heart Failures…………………………….….elia robert zashin 87
The Young & The Reckless…………………………………….. 88
Interview with Nate Jordon …….…scott alexander jones 90
Dedication …………………...…..………………..aaron d. scher 93
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linh dinh
La s t L e t t e r
Dear mother, wife, soul mate and
Probation officer (pick at least one).
I lost my digital camera, so I must
Use abject and chintzy words to describe
This spectacularly appalling place, where
Gray fleshy flesh is steered through climateNegating, hyper-masculine spaces. Although
We’re given individual rooms here, all six
Or seven billion of us are forced to negotiate
The same bed, for the sake of “transparency.”
Bumped by a gentleman named “Duron,” I couldn’t help
But explain that “dures” is Latin for “hard,” so “durable”
Is the universally-applauded ability to stay macho. “So
What’s your point?” His face hardened even as
His eyes betrayed some permanent hurt. Speaking
Of hard-on, I miss you very much, Dearest. No
More soon.
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linh dinh
I m a g in e
His palace surrounded, he fled through miles
Of secret tunnels, hopped into a waiting SUV
And was driven to a house of worship, where
They finally found him, hours later, praying,
“Dear Father, I ask you to honor the heroes.”
He was never stripped, made to stand naked
With his arms spread, shit smeared on his face,
Forced into high cut, low rise panties, punched,
As girls grinned and german shepherds growled.
No one jumped on his naked feet, stuck things.
Disputing widespread verdicts that his regime
Was violent, corrupt and anti-intellectual, he
Produced a hand scrawled note, listing his token
Humanitarian gestures, which failed to temper
An all-volunteer firing squad. Pow! Pow! Pow!
Hearing how his sneering vice had been wasted,
Then strung up in public, he vowed, “That won’t
Be my parting scene, scenario or shot.” Kissing
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His golf ball and horseshoe-loving dog goodbye,
He calmly killed his mistress and tight-faced wife,
Bit cyanide ampule, pumped a depleted uranium
Slug into his smirking mouth. Burned and buried
By his remaining lackeys, his lying, straight teeth
Were dug up by his bummed out enemies.
No, he was never kept in a suspended cage
In a mega arena, executed during halftime.
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c hr i s a l e x a n d e r
I Lo ve Yo u, Yo u’ re Like B reak fast
I don’t know why I always equate syrup with love,
maybe it’s the thick
or the brittle sugar of it.
Kind of weird the way
my hair stands up when you lick my ear
or when I see Mrs. Butterworth.
Isn’t it messed up that pancakes = erection.
The overpowering sour
of cheerios
in some mix of milk
doesn’t mesh well with my stomach.
Oatmeal and toaster-mates are the same
as licking an old suit,
but you and real breakfast
make up a continental stratosphere of sentiment.
You’re not overly inappropriate like butter,
I don’t get you as a fruit
definitely not toast,
you’re omelettier.
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The whiffs of smoke are supra-tantalizing,
beaming on the swells of bacon grease
are marks that squeak,
even in stints of brevity,
of hints
that you too
feel breakfast
all day, is a good passion.
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c hr i s a l e x a n d e r
T r u mp e t - t e e r
There was no snow on the shed
so I laid on it like Snoopy.
I put my trumpet to my chops
but didn’t sound a charge.
Conifers imported from New England
fill the cornfields
and it doesn’t feel like where I grew up.
I think of us in sleeping bags
laid up in the field furrows
young in the backdrop of country,
separate in the same company
bound to make music in different ways.
Sometimes there is no fruition.
My scarf flops loose and falls
I have to roll through gravity,
down into the snow
to retrieve it, before it skips
its way across the path
of where we might have camped someday.
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c hr i s a l e x a n d e r
S i l e n c e o f t h e La m b s M a ra t ho n
If I were a serial killer,
I would take all the raw meat
out of your fridge
and have sex with it.
After I finished I would set it up
so it looked like dinner was served
on the kitchen floor
and you couldn’t help yourself.
I would make sure you got salmonella
or E. coli then lock you in the bathroom
for days or weeks, however long
it takes for you to die.
When the FBI finally catches me
because I’ll go after that one I let
get away, they’ll corner me
with my penis in a turkey.
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sa ndra simo nds
Barrier Reef
The gong and gurgle
of the wooden marble machine. Gong
when one got to the end of the switchback and gurgle as each
one rolled down.
As a child I held a marble
as close to my eye as possible, watched
the cataract swirl trapped deep inside the glass.
I put my tongue to the zinc cold
just to get closer
to the inner world of fog.
The marble's destination was never
the same for when the mind shuts off the world
the surface
of the seas bulges
as if there is too much water in it.
Encephalitis of blue marble.
Or too many life forms to fit
into the ordinary skull.
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A parrot fish, it's horny beak
and four molars set deep
in its throat. Satyr-colored king coral,
where the mass hysteria of butterfly fish
above the shoal
hides what was supposed to be the queen's
prized jewel shipped
from Africa and sunk
along with cardamon and bolts of silk.
So much trapped
as if always looking
through the colored glass gardens
congealed in stone, the spires and stems, fans
and fronds
never to be let in.
Still, the sea grows and grows;
a gate opens the glasswork of night.
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san dra s imo n ds
No Bo ttl ed Wate r
I can't handle these harpsichord-esque
“lived social spaces” where everything sounds like the word 'esquire.'
No, I much prefer the radioactive firs so blistered in Nasquitarkus, Maine that when the sea
exhales sodium, it can only make the feet
more painful in your attempts to tap to Dvorak's
Prague Waltz. Guess I'm partial
to Dionysus who resuscitates near dead cardiac tissue, the almost hit
rear view wolf in the road on your way to Anchorage, lobster
boiled richer than rose in Atlantic waters, the good nauseous
sex of brushed nipples. I can't cope
with the cadaver of rooms. Give me roe before
it's caviar. No Pellegrino, I'll risk Guardia if it
means that I'll never have to stay
put. And if I tear off the violet watercolor wallpaper
of the cerebellum and write
a list of differences on the back, it will read as follows:
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“While his eyes are a baked brown hue, stones deformed
by entropic piles of material , yours
are tide pools against a twisted schist landscape that
suck in herds of gorgeous elk, carnivorous plants, an inverse Papua New Guinea where exotic flowers bloom”
and it feels good to both of us that can I rip them off.
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sa ndra simo nds
A Pa in Ce nt ury
Omnia vincit Amor
—Virgil (Eclogue X)
Fear conquers all; the emotion too widespread to evaporate.
This is why all shapes are math
pulled from abstract rain forests that sway the earth's curvature
like extinct spider monkeys.
The edgy man. The roundabout woman.
Red dirt runway that grows between destination and bronchi.
The night I gave birth to a meteorite I didn't die,
I practiced my cursive on the fermenting gurney.
Fear's cousin's ears numb in a calcium snowstorm.
The roundabout man that killed her for her jade brooch,
her crotch comparable to Kandinsky's flair.
Night that I put the meteorite back into place on the map
with my thumb, Emily fell off highway One. My boyfriend
saw her eyelids tumble over the cliff into the Pacific,
the very Pacific where all dolphins die.
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a a r o n s h u l ma n
M y B r ie f C a r e e r i n H e r o is m
Here’s why I don’t drink anymore: When I get drunk, I
get heroic.
I was an expert black-outer. Or is it blacker-out? Or
blacker-outer? It doesn’t matter—I was good at it.
I’ve often wondered: What’s the point of getting drunk
if you don’t black out? I still haven’t figured out the answer.
I ask other people the same question, but they just look at
me like…well, you know how they look at me. When you’re
not a hero, people look at you like you’re a limp dish rag.
There aren’t many heroes out there.
So here’s what happened.
I was at a birthday party.
All right, to be more specific, it was my birthday party.
I guess it wasn’t so much a party as me at home alone
with a bottle of vodka which was shaped like an extremely
curvy middle-aged woman.
And to be totally honest, it wasn’t my birthday. But
sometimes on Tuesday nights after an exceedingly gray day
you just have to measure yourself against time. You have to
know whether or not you can put down a shot for every year
you’ve lived.
I could.
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The following evening my mother called me. Now this
was weird, because normally she only calls me in the
morning, to wake me up, or late at night, to tell me to go to
sleep. She was crying hysterically. Her voice was all soupy
with tears and sniffles.
“I’m so proud of you,” she said. “My little boy, a hero.”
“I think you’ve got the wrong number,” I said, and
hung up.
As soon as I hung up on my mother, my phone rang
again. It was Sue, my friend from work.
“Well fuck me drunk,” she said.
They replayed it again on the seven o’clock news and
by then my mother was over with her friends Francine and
Gloria. They’d brought a bunt cake and schnapps. We
toasted and I told them to watch the crumbs.
The newscaster said it was an amateur video, but the
cameraman had a strong command of his material. There
was a subtlety in the guy’s technique, and you could tell he’d
seen Citizen Cane. At the end it got a little pretentious,
what with the jiggly handheld effect he was going for when
the house collapsed and flaming pieces of wood came
spitting out and the sparks started raining down, but he’s
got talent. He might have a future.
Not as a hero, though.
So here’s what happened.
A house a few blocks down from where I live caught
fire in the middle of the night. There was a family of five
asleep inside the house, including a grandma. The video
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shows me bursting out of the front door with two tykes
draped over my shoulders. I lay lil’ sis and bro coughing
onto the lawn and stumble back inside, and then I come
tripping out with pops slung on my back. We fall on the
ground together and for a second it looks kind of sexual.
But then I’m up on my feet again. After I get mom out on
the front lawn with the rest of them I go back in for
grandma. But things have gotten hairy in the house. The
camera holds steady and there’s no sign of me. Then you see
me thrashing around up in a second-story window. I’ve got
grandma in my arms like she’s my new bride and we’re
about to step over the honeymoon threshold. Smoke clouds
out around us and then we drop from the window into the
rosebushes. Grandma cusses about the thorns, and once
she’s reunited with her family I start throwing up on the
lawn in hosey colorful bursts. I’m pretty sure that was
because of the steep adrenalin comedown and didn’t have
anything to do with the alcohol.
But I don’t remember any of this. Last thing I
remember I was coeval with my shot glass and I opened the
door of my apartment.
The mayor held a ceremony to honor me.
The press showed up in full force and there wasn’t one
empty folding chair in the audience. The family I saved was
sitting in the front row. Grandma might’ve been ogling me.
My mother sat next to them, wiggly and beaming. Sue was
there. Everyone looked like limp dish rags. There were a
bunch of flags up on the stage and the mayor kissed me on
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the cheek. He’s Mediterranean, I think. He’s quite hairy
and likeable. When I spoke to the assembled crowd I said,
“If you don’t know why you do something, does that make it
any more or less honorable?”
People love it when heroes ask rhetorical questions.
I sat in my apartment and when the phone wasn’t
ringing I wondered things.
If you’re a hero, do you still have to go to the
bathroom? If you’re a hero, do you still fart? Do you still get
bad breath? Do you have to work? Does your sink still get
clogged sometimes? Do your shoelaces still come untied?
Do you still make awkward jokes that fall flat? Do you still
have to do the dishes? Are Sundays still so lonely? Do other
people still not make sense to you? Do questions about
death and God still nag you? Does the question of getting a
Ruben versus a Club for lunch still nag you? Do people still
misinterpret your best intentions? Can you fuck whenever
you want? Does the Check-Engine light in your car cease to
light up every two weeks? Do you never again shiver in the
darkness of your apartment wanting to not be alone but at
the same time knowing you want nothing more than to be
alone?
Oh, I forgot to mention. At the ceremony the mayor
held for me they gave me a large ceramic key. They were all
out of keys to the city, so they gave me a key to a
neighborhood. It’s not an especially nice neighborhood,
there are a lot of murders and rapes there, but keep in mind,
I was a hero.
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The real questions is: Who is this locksmith and how
does he feel on Sundays?
I’m not being rhetorical.
Everyone wanted to get me drunk. I didn’t discourage
them.
I was fêted day and night, and then my promoters
would shoo me out into the streets where I did my heroic
work.
It went pretty well those first few weeks of being a
hero.
I tripped a purse-snatcher and stood on his chest. I
found nine runaway dogs. I foiled the robbery of a
convenience store and I kicked a pederast in the nuts.
After each heroic act crowds of bystanders gathered
around. I stood in front of them and made jokes that were
extremely well-timed.
My mother would call, sobbing. “My little boy, a hero,”
she’d say.
The vodka company sent me a claque of middle-aged
women shaped like curvy vodka bottles. We fucked a lot.
When we were done, we played euchre.
They understood my best intentions.
There was talk of a movie being made about me.
I got an agent, the best agent around. He was known
for his tendency to cry during meetings and his skill at
closing the big deals.
There was no need for me to go to work anymore. I
didn’t have to go to the bathroom, my breath smelled
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unerringly floral, and I always knew what sandwich to
order for lunch.
I still farted, but that’s because I like farting.
A captain of industry wined and dined me at his house.
He was the CEO of a company which manufactured rubber
novelty masks of famous historical personages. I was
Montezuma. He was Abraham Lincoln. His wife was
James Brown.
“I’d like you to be on my board of directors,” he said,
slamming a bottle of well-aged whiskey down on the table.
I took a shot. “I’d be honored.”
It took a second bottle before I blacked out.
I’d watch the evening news—no more amateur video:
the camerawork was professional, the editing smooth and
clean—and head off to my next fête.
Then I’d black out and do wonderful things.
Sue called and said, “Well cover me in saran wrap and
shit on my stomach.”
I no longer measured myself against time. I measured
myself against deeds.
My agent and I had a meeting with a powerful
producer and at a trendy restaurant which didn’t believe in
forks or spoons.
“The thing about being a hero is that you don’t think,
‘One day someone’s going to play me in a movie,” I said,
digging my knife around in the bowl of gazpacho in front of
me. “But the thing is, at any given moment there are
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thousands of people out there thinking, ‘I want to play a
hero in a movie.”
“See what I mean,” my agent said, getting all teary and
tremble-voiced. “The man is a walking movie written about
himself. Does that make any sense?”
The producer stabbed at his salad, then looked down
under the table and back up at me. “Your shoelace is
untied,” he said.
It was around then that things stopped going so well.
I couldn’t drink enough to be able to black out.
I kept going on my blacked-out missions of derring-do,
but I mostly just got beat up. I had dried blood on my face
and a bunch of bruises which all looked like Gorbachev’s
birthmark.
This was a big disappointment to everyone involved.
There was muttering and restiveness in the hero
community. Someone keyed my car and I got a lot of prank
calls.
I ran into the mayor at the restaurant. He shook my
hand with gross and distant formality, but he was still very
likeable.
I woke up one morning in an unfinished, unleased
office space and there was a pederast standing on my chest.
My curvy-bottled vodka women left. On the way out,
one of them said to me, “By the way, your breath, it stinks!”
There were no more fêtes. The movie got deep-sixed.
My agent was stoic and tearless.
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I went to the boardroom for the meeting of the board
of directors, but the door was locked, and the knob had no
keyhole.
Since I couldn’t black out anymore, I was very on top
of doing all my dishes.
My mother called. “It’s late,” she said, “go to sleep.”
My mother called. “It’s late,” she said, “get up.”
Euchre is a shitty game when you’re playing it by
yourself.
Here’s a question, and I’m not sure whether it’s
rhetorical or not.
What do you do when you’re not a hero anymore?
When you’re just me, alone on a Sunday, and your sink gets
clogged?
Sue called and said, “When are you coming back to
work?”
“As soon as my car’s out of the mechanic’s,” I said. “The
Check-Engine light was on again.”
If you hadn’t noticed, heroes don’t tell their own
stories.
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ma t t ha r t
Bailo ut
On the backs of our eyes are giant vegetables
which destroy our ability to cite specific caterpillars.
Above them the hardwood floors lisp and worry.
They worry about god.
They worry about elections.
Salty sweet and butcher paper.
They worry about electrons.
They think the sky is an ostrich feather,
but anyone alive knows better it’s a raincoat.
Tomorrow it will raincoat
and you’d better wear your heart out
to the demonstration caterpillar.
Salty sweet and butcher paper.
Giant vegetables destroy us.
The bus stop is waiting
to worry an ostrich.
Our marbles with being,
the floors lisp and worry.
More than anyone living,
they’re here to destroy us.
Tomorrow will raincoat
the butcher.
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matt ha rt
Poem
In Cinci… In Cinci, the brightness.
In Cinci the brightness of ancient philosophers
flooding the streets with reasons for everything’s being,
even as it’s missing, with nobody watching
out the window or listening and singing
along with the shadows.
The owls on the march with their babies.
The concrete blocks drop-kicking the universe.
I can’t remember the last time I rubbed
up against my wife, but soon again I will again,
and live in the grass stain, under cover of darkness.
In Cinci, the darkness besetting the goldfish,
his bowl on fire and the family’s tree.
Clearly the movement’s a mysterious piglet,
the forest of unlisted numbers to call.
In Cinci the brightness, a cardiac arresting.
In Cinci, the blind man’s critical dog.
Flood of concussions, insanely parading,
pinning my heart to a wallpaper wall.
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matt hart
Reckless
You can’t be out of control in control, but in poetry you have to be.
And you can’t be greener than ever the meadow, but you might be
chocolate and Hamlet same time. Your job’s debacle, both fuck-up
and flood. The audience is wringing its neck in its hands, its limbs
in its trees being chopped off by henchmen. Keep in mind that
misunderstanding is a gift of present’s absence, the place you need to
build a new stadium for to die. Either it’s malignant or it isn’t.
Either it’s a risk or it’s not. So too when it comes to your living room
wolf. Especially the birdbath of coming undone. Index of last lines,
mountains of scribbles. The relationship between the writer and the
reader is an impossible distance that pretends of a closeness. We
aren’t stuntmen—we are actually hurtling toward spontaneous,
unpredictable combustion at the pump.
DISK!
POOP!
UNDIES!!!! said Koch. Influence reminds us, if we let it, what we
aren’t. To write a thing recklessly one has to be willing to ruin the
words into the page, to pay attention differently to the soul’s motion
sensors. No more fine tuning the cardboard piano, let it be a
cardboard piano, sadly, and… And NOTHING! Let it sit out in
the rain! Stick your big face in the anemone’s crotch. Craft is but a
re-visitation in the shadows, and visitation means only there’s a body
in the box. Always wear a tie when you talk about the weather, but
only if it clashes with the lizard in the parlor. Terrific/tremendous
says the error in terror. Practice makes nervous, and then we go
windmill. Lights out with fangs out, light-headed with racetrack.
When we collide in the airway, neither one of us is breathing.
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krist ine o ng musl im
E v e r y M o r n i ng
We leave behind the forecast on the apocalypse.
Most people have gotten tired of listening to it.
By flipping a coin, we set the weather for the day.
We lock the doors, hide the keys under the
welcome mat, and bring out the tarpaulin sheet
with the sun and clouds on it. Nobody will
ever wonder about that hole in the sky
where Murphy, the cat, has dug its paws in.
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krist ine o ng musl im
Pa g e T o r n F r o m a S u r v i v o r’ s H a n d b o o k
Upon entering a one-way
cave with artificial lighting,
one must not be lured by
landmarks to a buried treasure.
All the gilded nails, the chinks,
and the dangling screws will
someday tighten the lid of the coffin;
their forms will resemble the sad
thing called hope, for easy access.
A nightly feast of puffer fish
and belladonna is proven
to coax instincts of survival.
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krist ine o ng musl im
Ano ther Page To rn Fro m
a Survivo r's Ha ndboo k
Upon entering a one-way
cave with artificial lighting,
one must not be tempted
to probe even the widest
of corridors; those edges
have been designed to impale.
Every wrong turn coincides
with the line of sight; that is
why getting lost is an easy task.
A nightlight is necessary
for removal of foreign objects
inside the sleeping bag.
And the thermos, even if tightly
screwed, still dissipates heat.
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b r o o k l yn c o p e l a n d
D ia g o na l St r ip e
No one wants warm oranges.
On a splintered picnic table
in the sun, someone’s mom
has peeled and split a pair.
The flies await permission.
The slices lie exposed
in Tupperware—
plump, pale curls,
too much like severed fingers.
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j ul i e t c o o k
N e c k i ng
The cooties turn into ravenous parasites.
The girl germs desperately hurl
like tiny razorblade boomerangs.
Her fingers are fleshy ribbons wrapping themselves
around the necks of pet birds who must be hanged.
Pet kittens must be drowned in dirty janitor’s mop water.
Pet poodles must be pummeled with stained lucky stones.
Her legs are pumice stoned and shaved, packaged
with dead electric eel and nobody’s touching that appetizer,
so bristly in spite of ministrations. Her not so pretty ponies
are tethered in a circle. The rope is chafing.
The pony ride turns into a back seat Tilt-O-Whirl
without room to maneuver away from smashed Milk Duds,
wet wads gobbed to sticky seat. Turkey neck pops in her head.
Gobble gobble. Mottled wattles. Dark meat. The wishbone snap.
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matthew kal er
I f I We r e Me r i w e th e r L e w i s
& not fiercely manic
& harbored no hunger in my guts for pistol shot
& never splayed out naked on a white bear rug
before the fireplace’s tearing heat
while brandy sang of its disappearances
& had no Montana ranges strung-out
across my accomplished heart
vast as the razor
of near starvations
& survived that wild sort
of life-experience (we cowards call it so: a genial term, less effusive)
I’d marry a pretty immigrant girl
& start a ganja farm
with an orange grove
& one perennially ripe lemon tree
& get kind of fat off cupcakes
& drink port all night
& piss weirdly in tall grasses
& trip out on the red-headed fireflies’ pinwheeling
& have a batch of kids
& name the first three
Midsummer ,
Night,
& Dreamtruth just to begin
an ache
for any legacy better than mine Done
& done
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m o l l y c ur t is
Fo r E g o n S c h ie l e
I want to believe you loved them all, all
of your languid doll-faced models…
I see you pausing to caress
the sharp angles of the undressed
form of this one every now and then
to bring out that melancholy smile
on her cadmium red lips.
Dwelling corporeal, in the skin,
while others would paint piously
the pastel-robed and sandal-clad saints.
Tragic yet unashamed,
this decay, this quiet pleasure…
but at times they seem grotesque,
bodies as fragile as a fish’s belly, and as white.
And how strange, one lonesome, stoic girl
reclining in pose with her hand up her skirt.
39
s ha n e j o a q u í n j i m é n e z
I t C a n B e T ha t W a y St i l l
After we cleaned up the rest of the glass, she finished
the whiskey and went inside. Through the screen door, I
saw the kerosene lamp flicker to life in the house and
disappear up the stairs. Then her silhouette emerged
through the open bedroom window. The light and shadow
were soon extinguished. I rocked back and forth on the
porch swing, nursing my mint julep and staring at the
killing moon.
When I finished my drink, I grabbed the bottle of
bourbon at my feet and emptied it into a glass. I threw the
bottle out into the fields. It disappeared into the midnight
world. I didn't hear it land. Come winter, those fields
would lie frozen two feet down and packed with snow. But
there would be wood fires in the stove at night. And there'd
be whiskey in everything we'd drink, and under the covers
the cold nights would last until even the stars went out.
From my shirt pocket, I pulled out a matchbook
Midge had brought back from a bar in Knoxville. A gold
book with a cartoon girl in lingerie on the cover. I lit a
match and held it up so the flame was caught over the
moon. Let it burn down to my fingertips. Then I did the
same with the rest of the matches, one by one until they
were all gone. Then there was just me and the red moon
40
and the wild and stricken creatures of the world. I put the
empty matchbook back in my pocket.
Dark sounds came from the forest. Wild dogs on a
midnight hunt. Out in that darkness, howls from a fresh
kill. I knew how they felt. I took out the knife from my boot
and laid it next to me on the swing. Those animals had
come this way before.
41
42
ma t h ia s s v a l i n a
L e s s e ni ng t h e B l o w s
(for 2 or more players)
One child waits in the waiting room. Another child sits in
the well-lit room & speaks into the microphone. The
speakers in the waiting room distort the second child’s
voice into screeches. The first child holds his head in the
parentheses of his hands. The second child continues
speaking into the microphone & in the waiting room the
voice is indecipherable.
Occasionally the light flickers. Mechanical beds thrum on
the other side of the double-doors & the first child looks
up to see if the door opens.
The second child must continue reading until he reaches
the end of the script. Then he drinks a plastic cup of
water & begins the script again.
The script begins: Have hope. Have hope. Your waiting
is almost done.
43
ma t h ia s s v a l i n a
Ta i l E n d C ha r l ie
(for 4 or more players)
The night before they go in behind enemy lines the
children write their names on their chests with
permanent markers. They write their names on their
shoes with grease paint. They carve hearts into the
plaster beside their beds & cram them full of initials.
The children fall asleep repeating their names to
themselves. They discover new names inside their names.
The new names are the names their ghosts will have.
They knot little nooses of dental floss around the names
& tie them to their pinkies.
The machine gun bursts splashes in the sand, as if flaying
it with whips. The sky is so blue that someone will have
to give it a name like Tom or Beginning. One of the
children finds that his gun is made of ice. Another child
finds that his gun is made of dried dirt. A third child
finds that he is the gun & he cannot stop killing. In
Pittsburgh the children are burning the federal buildings
tonight.
44
ma t h ia s s v a l i n a
Po p G o e s t h e W e a s e l
(for 4 children & an audience of voters)
One child must come from a family that sleeps in the
caves. One child must come from a family that sleeps
underground. One child finds a hollow tree & fills it with
the stuffed animals he steals from the supermarket trash
bins. One child bites into a doughnut & breaks his front
teeth on a piece of sea glass. The children decide which
child is it & the It child must run for president.
The It child walks into crowds of thousands, shaking
hands with all the men & kissing the cheeks of all the
women & rubbing perfumed oils on the foreheads of the
babies. He must appear on TV & pretend like there is no
camera in the room. He says words & then some of the
members of the audience of voters repeat the words.
Other members of the audience of voters go home &
rewire their radios.
When the It child is assassinated backstage after a speech
the other children write books about the It child. They
appear on radio talk shows & discuss the mystery of the
It child. They drop a bucketful of pennies into the dryer
& listen to them clatter.
45
k o n a m o r r is
Did you know that I have eighteen legs to call home with
but never use one? I’m an ingrate artifact from the time
of dust in corners. I live on root beer sucking candy and
no sleep. All I’ve ever wanted for christmas is my two
front teeth, and yet they grew in through my ass and
make it hurt to swallow. Does the sound of his voice
make you melt away? Nay. That is not lust, that is not
liking, that is nothing more than giraffes masturbating
into the face of the sun. You know what I mean.
Strangely, coincidentally, yet you do. Afternoons passed
and nothing happened. The winds came and I waited for
my beloved Freddie Mercury poster to blow away. It
never did. I sat for four days, all the while imagining the
next gust would steal him, but it never happened. I
thought perhaps it was his mustache, that startled look in
his brown eyes, he weighed himself down on the thin
sheet, and nothing they could throw was strong enough.
46
k o n a m o r r is
I love to eat. I love to sit on his face, and eat. I love it
when he sits there looking at me sitting on his face,
eating all he wants. We were born this way, he and I.
Sitting, eating, frank and june.
Cow faced darkness seeps across my cluttered floor.
The toilet plunger hops over to kiss my forehead.
It shits of stink but hey, nice to have a friend.
Sound was like sound when sounded soundfully.
The model touched the tip of her nipple and remembered
why she fell.
47
w h it w il l ia m s
G o t T ho s e Po s t - A p o c a l y p t i c
Lo w d o w n R o b o t B l u e s
My first BigDog™ automaton
Will grow food in the backyard
Stamping weeds and mice
Harvesting corn and squash
In honor of the Tonkawa
My second BigDog™
A sensitive headless artist quadruped
Will play Brahms piano concertos
And tuck me in at night after
Chamomile tea and ginger snaps
I will ride the third bot into town
Thru smoking ruins for smokes
Canned peaches and girlie mags
And I suspect this will be the one
To turn me in
To the alien overlord
48
w h it w il l ia m s
Fly M e To The M oon
Sinatra spits
On his Learjet window
A bourbon saliva snail drips
Over the Hoboken skyline
With sad streetlight shine
Mutters a curse
From the old country
Vows never to return
While Shirley MacLaine
Sucks him off
At 10,000 feet
Y o u C a n’ t Ha n dl e T h e T r ut h
Dreamed last night I was
Monk playing the
Vanguard with hands
Twice the size of
Lobsters boiling in the
North Sea and during
Straight, No Chaser the
Goddamn alarm woke me,
Radio saying we are all
Children with Bombs.
49
l a ur a d u n n
N e c r o ma nc y a t t h e M o nt a n a St a t e P r is o n
Tonight I lift eyes to the folio,
stickily sealed, peeling it open
as if lifting a flank of skin
to see inside you.
Titled Necromancia, with charcoal drawings
of the dead, fucking in black and white.
Where only the fibula or collarbone
penetrates the spaces
the receded flesh left empty.
This volume is what has passed between us.
Twice while working at the library,
you requested this book,
and I sent it, wrapped in brown paper
to Montana State Prison.
Twice I tucked a note to you in its pages
about how the dead cannot procreate,
how we must not let absence multiply.
To keep us safe, we keep them sealed from us,
like a zipper lifted shut,
like books shut tight on the shelves
like my body’s only purpose these eight hours,
to wrap books and lick stamps.
What light leaks in for you, there?
50
Do you feel this same life in a large stone shell?
Curly rows of barb wire etch borders in the sky,
where you sit, fingering pages
where the dead act out life.
Another form of burial, in cement walls
or behind your face-skin, when the body
is cold and wishing to be warmed
by another body, where shafts of light
are all that penetrate between steel bars.
Steel bars remind you
of the thighs spread open
by your love lying across a day bed.
And I think of Alexander the Great’s breast plate
a reflective gold after he was gone,
where the soldiers who loved him
tried to call him back
by pushing flesh in the holes of his heart shield.
On the Day of the Dead a skeleton walked past me
and blew a powder off her palm
that colored the air flour-white, and blinded
the couple behind her marching with portraits
of their lost ones. I watched her hand,
a curved palm like it still held the weight of the dust,
but it was drained like a body-shaped emptiness
cold and calling to be filled.
51
e d mc f a d d e n
A n I n t r o d uc t io n t o B u s o n
Matsuo Basho once said that poetry “is like a fireplace in
summer or a fan in winter.” For a long while I read this
line as a comment on poetry’s utter lack of utility.
Thinking of it recently in the light of Yosa Buson’s haiku
shimmering of the heated air / nameless ephemerids,
white / swarming I find it deeper and more interesting to
read as a statement on the intensification of poetry — its
ability to make what is hot that much hotter, what is cold
that much colder. Buson, in direct lineage from Basho,
had, both as a poet and painter, a knack for creating
multiple meanings in a few short strokes. Whether it was
a discarded torch on the water’s edge of a short summer
night, or a bamboo shoot, the priest’s nephew, scaling a
temple, Buson has the ever attentive-eye of the naturalist.
Indeed, Buson made numerous pilgrimages around
Japan, both celebrating and gently mocking the life of the
patch-robed monk that he was at these times:
小田原で合羽買たり皐月雨
bought a raincoat
at Odawara
fifth month’s rains
52
e d mc f a d d e n
S o me Se l e c t e d H a ik u o f B u s o n
鴈立て驚破田にしの戸を閉る
the wild geese rise in the air
with a gasp
the snail’s operculum closes
しののめに小雨降出す焼野哉
day breaks
it starts drizzling
a burnt field
小雨や小磯の小貝ねるゝほど
a light spring rain
the little shells on the little rocky shore
a little wet
53
旅人の鼻まだ寒し初さくら
the nose of this wafarer
still cold
a cherry in bud
行春や撰者をうらむ歌の主
departing spring
feeling bitter toward the jurors
the poet
うは風に蚊の流れゆく野河哉
in the wind above
mosquitos go flowing past
the field stream
蝸牛の住はてし宿やうつせ貝
for the snail
no more living in this abode
an empty shell
54
雨日嵐山にあそぶ
筏士の簑やあらしの花衣
Rainy day fun on Mt. Arashi
the raftsman’s rain cape
white-petal-clothed
in the storm
Portrait of Yosa Buson
(1716-83)
by Matsumura Gekkei
55
t r a v i s s e ho r n
K u rt o r C ra ig
a hole is hole
a tailpipe, a tea-cup, a bugle
for a 60:40 homosexual
reverend — church
of the lost dog
debuting the new play
"the continuing saga
of colleen and murphy:
episode 12, lost at sea"
its a good distraction
from your boredom
with 43 year old lady thighs—
a farmer, mongoose killer,
pill inspector, pill tester—
the starship enterprise tattooed
on the farmer’s prick—
the power-screw gun
method of mongoose death—
signing up for drug testing
not for the money
but for the drugs.
56
arcticotton
twilight
elders
by
l u c a s fa r r e l l
&
l ou i s a c on r a d
57
58
l uc a s f a r r e l
a rc t ic c o t t o n
Somewhere the field of furious eyelashes burns whit. the
flowers pantomime the direction from which the wind.
grievances pronounce themselves sheepishly. the moon, a
single handcuff, chain-torn. on the lam. that was years ago.
now we all seek salvation like a cottonwood seed seeks
water. here, longing is blown open, is Chance flicking his
cigarette obsessively. the moon brightens with each new
brush with the world. there was only one moment in the
history of the world, neither is it predicted to happen again,
that all sets of living eyes were simultaneously caught in the
blink. for this brief instant, the presence of absence
intuitively agreed upon. stars worry themselves into being,
as does a field of arctic cotton on the brink of inundation. as
do we, as do our colorful lines of questioning. we will, we
harvest more for the wear.
for an instant, the black flooded the white. pupils evicted
the whites of our eyes. for an instant, the image
decontextualized, afloat. somewhere a field of eyelashes
white vistas burn into the skull. what was glimpsed in such
a moment?
in what ways can we speak of it?
in what ways to it?
59
60
61
62
l uc a s f a r r e l l
t wi l ig ht
what council of elders will grieve with me now. with what
insistence so many wise tears. hold a handful of nightcrawlers
up to the sun – what champions the light. a saggy grand
drape, the afternoon. in her hand, the bride whittles curious
shapes. who appeases. indivisible by all that won’t become of
us, eyes like sheetmetal steadying twilight. i apologize for
nearly everything since my heart hurts. and since my heart
hurts, i name things in the world after twilight. things i can’t
possess. like multiplication tables. when i was five, I counted
on my hands all the ways i would be sorry. no i place my
hands in loose soil and feel, though i’m wrong, my fists
increasing.
we were never alone though the table was beneath us. what
gathers around the scenic slop. we’ve humped saying grace
through decades of war and still the sky seizes not our
belongings. asin, elbows, rest on the hearts that rest in
branches. what long ago tree still readily persists. i am in
need of the curious splendid. i am in math class dreaming of
math class. we are of no great consequence when, inside our
hearts, coastlines determine our every tide. i am sorry we
can’t stop ourselves from being at times so often ourselves.
there weren’t supposed to be trees here. and for that, voicings
in trees. we thank thee, scenery, we’d be alone were it not for.
63
64
65
66
l uc a s f a r r e l l
e l d e rs
soon the migration will populate the tundra. left to steer
alone this tradition of vehicles, a mosquito wraps itself in
the makeshift. finds it difficult to breathe. there’s no saving
a tradition that considers dementia, prioritizes liquid
otherness. the moon eats with its mouth open. concedes the
slop of vista, praises on all fours the sublimest apology put
forth by ravens –
what comes undone in the unsaid
is another’s longing for virtue.
this can’t be what the meadow has concluded. though the
blood this time of year is drip, is dank.
we were obsessed with a field in a field of obsession. the
light was on you too. the question just stood there. the firesquad was heard in the distance, but the light bent back on
my immediate mind. it fell like deet on a forearm. distantly i
spoke of our tradition, a field of elders. the waiting grew
loud and curious.
67
68
sc ot t a le xa nder j o ne s
If I Tal k Too M uc h Abo ut Bo ne s
what I mean is our ancestors sucked marrow.
When I say some of my ancestors traded slaves
& some escaped the holocaust
you’ll notice I don’t use the word blood
& if I say blood is thicker than water
I mean 1,060 kg/m³ is thicker than 1,000 kg/m³.
The times I mention scar tissue
I simply mean don’t worry
blood will clot to stop your bleeding.
Skin will patch things back together.
This isn’t a metaphor for relationships.
By skin I don’t mean sin.
When I talk too much about the body
of parts at times dislocated or conjoined
what I mean is let’s sleep together.
Whether you say my mind’s in the gutter
or the clouds, I can only assume you mean
the cerebral cortex. It’s somewhere
between my ears elegant words take shape.
And by words of course I mean
fluctuations of air passing thru the larynx.
Might I remind you that come dawn or dusk
all eyes struggle between color & grayscale.
69
Might I remind you painters call this the golden hour.
I don’t feel I need to address the heart.
Yes, it’s shaped like The Delta of Venus.
In fact, choose any curve of her Botticellian form.
But the heart also resembles a prostate gland.
It can stop beating, but don’t say it’s been broken.
Don’t say it’s been stolen.
Unless we’re talking about Shelley.
If we say his fiery heart was plucked
from that seaside funeral pyre
let’s quote yellowed medical journals:
A progressively calcifying heart resists cremation
like a skull, a jaw, or fragments of bone.
If you swear it was me who stole Shelley’s heart
If you say it’s cold, it’s hard, it’s made of stone
I will list my family’s history of frail hearts:
How one heart was coked-out on the dancefloor.
Its female counterpart, a jetlagged narcoleptic.
If you insist my heart’s made of wood
that it sustains all colors of flame
If you insist my heart’s made of clay
that layers erode with each season of rain
If you insist my heart is a flaking onion
& I dismiss the makeup running down your cheek
as lachrymation , what I mean is my brain
has convinced my mind the lows
like love, are nothing more than
the blushing embers of synapses firing.
70
If you press your ear to my chest
& tell me to hold my breath
If you say tectonic shifts give pulse to stones
that hearts are closer to stones
than to whatever’s lodged in this soundless ribcage
I’ll explain how the brain can train the heart to stop.
How a yogi flat-lined into hibernation
underground for seven days
& when the doctors woke him
began to shiver.
71
sc ot t a le xa nder j o ne s
B o n ni e & C l y d e Se t t l e D o w n i n t he S u b u rb s
You put the cute in execute
I put the ex in exclamation point!
We put the pair in paranoia
I put the annoy in paranoia
You put the cunt in ctrl-alt-delete
I put the cock in ridiculous
& the occasional orifice
We put the warship in worship
I put the slightly-attracted-to-certain-skinny-mantypes
in shoegazer, sungazer, stargazer, seagazer
You put the keys beneath the TV stand
so I’ll be late for work
When my dead confederate grandfather
says Jew’s-harp I hear juice-harp
I put neither in Juniper —
that pinecone smell of gin on my breath
72
come morning, like green
Listerine™, not whisky
I put the Adam in atom bomb
which you put in the bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp
I park our Dodge Ram in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong
You put the Eve in EVOL
which is LOVE in pink lipstick cursive
on the bathroom wall behind the mirror
We put the fence in offensive
& down the center of our queen size—
It was off-white & picket
I whitewashed my side to spite you
73
ka rie b uss
Po r o us D o l o r e s
I’m afraid there’s gravel in my back
From being bowled over
by pigeons—purple pigeons.
When pigeons attack…
not with beaks
but the slapping of wings.
The gravel attached to my back
has burrowed craters.
The gravel which left me,
left scars irreparable.
When showering, the craters
fill with soap, suds of soap.
Then I call you up at work
to come and rinse
the suds out, so that my skin
doesn’t crack. After rinsing,
my craters cup the water,
so you use tissues
to sop the puddles up.
74
Task completed, I’m naked—
you want to have sex.
When having sex, my craters
make fantastic finger grips.
Afterwards we burrow in bed
and don’t speak of pigeons.
Once you found my craters
were the perfect place
to keep loose change
if you cover the holes
with scotch tape.
l a ur e n ha m l i n
Those Eyes
Those eyes were what I wanted.
I saw him there, alone, surrounded by people. His
big, vacant, membrane covered eyes that blinked an oily
film and smelled like soil from a can. He looked at me.
Blink.
Once I thought of him as a fish I couldn’t get the
thought out of my head. His eyes weren’t the kind you
could lose yourself in. Not the kind that would do a rail
of coke off your thigh and make you forget about your
dentist appointment. No, those eyes subjugated the rest
of him. The rest of him that was completely of this
world. Curly hair at just the right length, threaded
through with enough gray to feel like intrigue but not
enough to sap virility. I imagined him virile indeed, him
with his fishy eyes blinking softly, eyelids closing with a
faint click in the darkness.
I’m Catholic, so I brought him home on a Friday.
75
He strips his scales at the door. Catches his tail on
the hinge. My collection of water glasses on the table
confounds him. His gills bulge and collapse with the
shock of unfamiliar air. I can see his pulse on the inhale
and his dread on the foundering. Approaching from a
slant, I am careful of the refraction, I slide my arms
around him, clucking softly. In the thrall of the current
we float over soft surfaces, spin around tables, and crash
through lamps. And finally before we reach the bed I
plunge it in. Barbless of course, curled around the lip,
and then we eddy out with intent.
And so. We are dancing without weight and his
hand is cradling my neck and driving me further, lifting
me up. Because he is a fish, because he lives beneath a
rock that I can never find, I unclench my fists and open
my eyes and feel the hot sticky July air stumble through
the window. It floats over us like 2 p.m. fog in the San
Francisco hills and lays hovering and watchful. A car
moans by and my eyes close. I smell a spring-fed lake and
worms and light flashes through my eyelids. Headlights
soak the room, my head rolls back over his arm and I
open my eyes to see his. They are twitching in a frantic
grimace, his jaw jutting out and nose recoiled. “Look at
me,” I say, breathless and full. A single drop of sweat
rolls off his nose and onto my collarbone as he looks up,
looks up at me like I’ve asked him to.
76
Blink.
The lovely wet membrane recedes from the bottom
of his eye to the top, taking with it my breath. With a
final click, those eyes, they are gone, and he is there on
top of me. The sticky watchful air sucks out of the room
like a plane losing pressure and I can only say, “Stop.”
77
erik a nderso n
A n U n h i ng i ng
It wasn’t, in its waspish way, an unattractive neck, but
one that, like the face on the head it supported, was
covered in a coarse mat of hair. The woman bent over
and kissed it. My lips bristled to watch it. So this is my
neck, I thought, even as the woman bent again to kiss his,
whispered to him are we leaving?
That night, I dreamt of grazing his nerves with a razor.
I’d been sleeping poorly. The doctors had prescribed me
pills and so, less awake than asleep, I’d been baking.
Bingeing on candy. Ice cream. Half-eaten coldcuts
littered the sheets. Suddenly woozy, I reached for his
neck, but found lesions instead on my shins.
My eyes widened. I crawled back into bed. Leaned over
the edge and saw the neck there, now severed. I asked
aloud what it meant to do, but it must have known better
than to answer.
78
lindsa y bland
Thes e O ur Milks
One.
She did not fully develop
born so quickly upstream in a basket
lipped sweet with milk
she her mother’s taste
on river brushed with morning heat so slow to leave her tongue
Two.
In a dark town where nothing is open she tells me her stories:
One about a dead mother
One about a dead baby
And one about food.
(These are her examples of things that hurt and I am not
unaccustomed to pressing cotton to a cut.)
Granted, this island comes with no maps, she says
Though she has not yet learned to read symbols: half circle,
new moon
(below the knees, where we make shade)
79
Three.
what arrives here
comes after the flood. Were she not human
she would have no ordinary way
to float belly up and winded and full.
She could not
fasten and unfasten outside the chest.
She could not
taste cancer through the breast
she learns how to remove them,
mark with scars
where skin seems a decoration.
Involuntarily
she begins to grow and cry.
We watch her, our linen
hung on a line and yet we do not think
this our primary failing in a smoke storm.
What we choose to tuck and fold
so tightly, pin from behind
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Four.
as a child
she considers what is far off to be smaller, inside.
She draws circles in various stages of decay on her chest.
She lifts maps from her memory
(easter egg hunts, carnival ping pong balls)
and does not decipher between these
our good shapes
(half circle, new moon)
and the comfort she finds in a goldfish prize,
the disassembly of a horse’s spine
Five.
folded fingers under her chin,
she examines the ribcage of a dead horse.
She asks for no pictures
(and though I must not lend myself to it)
from the nearby orchard she picks pears
not yet ripened here
and places each fruit inside the ribs.
As if it were a bulrush basket.
As if tall grasses around us began to rush.
81
82
l a ir d h u n t
T h e A r t o f t h e E n ds o f t h e Ea r t h
She knew that when she built the house.
Her idea was that when she would build the new house.
In essence, that the new house when she would have it built…
(Something kept slipping and tumbling within her; she could hear
it, a radiator slow to react, beginning to knock)
That new house, she knew, would one day be built, it would
constitute a kind.
A wild efflorescence all her own, a shining, freshly growing thing.
Once upon a time a woman lived in a woods.
Her idea was that this new house.
That house.
Sometimes it would shine for her.
All horror.
(As she sat in her chair in the woods, fanning flies, deer appearing
at the periphery, speaking, beginning to speak, too
loudly, even in the half dark)
83
m. d’a le s sa ndro
f r o m B ig B o o k o f Pr o p h e c y
O h io , C h i na
now a confusing postcode
then there are river borders
but it had to be sold
better yet seized like an asset
next to go is Florida
better to inherit a peninsula
D o ne C ha ng i ng
but there’s more to see
surely more to reminisce over
less to worry about
if i’m ready to work
there’re upheavals in communist
countries no more to speak of
drastic changes concerning freedom
and the unnaturalness of nature
which i’m done changing
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n a n c y s t o h l ma n
T h e W e r e wo l f D ia s p o ra
Maybe I should have known when you were resisting
Paris with such vigor. You’d talked of nothing else for
years, yet you flinched when I presented you with the
tickets. You knew. Maybe you thought you could beat it.
That should have been my first clue.
Or I could have done the math and realized that your
big, proud Parisian family was completely displaced: one
in Chile, one in England, one in Spain, you in America
and three in Mexico, not counting Raquel herself, so
desperate for Paris in her empty Mexico City home that
even the maid had to speak French.
But my first clue came under the Eiffel Tower of all
places, symbol of romantic Paris. You were pacing.
Cursing in French. Already a bad sign. Our first full day
there. Still jetlagged. I guess you’d been gone too long,
forgot why the rest of your family moved away, and I
didn’t put it all together until I saw your fangs.
85
ada m p erry
T h e P re c ip i c e W e nt S l a c k
At the beginning of a land-locked way home,
a sign read:
"ice
may
exist.”
If given permission, water would become solid.
If asked a question
my eyes would finish your sentences
blended like whiskey & coke, aimed
on a precipice tempting
as an orchid sexually attractive
enough that male wasps would love it
to the point of ejaculation.
86
e l ia r o b e r t z a s h i n
H e a rt F a i l u re s ( # 1 ) : A l l M y P e t s
Now I’m saying “snail-like” with a snarl—
“gangplank’s not the only way”—
I’m grabbin’ at that loose brick
on the back wall of the fireplace below deck
because I won’t let you take yourself
out to sea
before my crime—I’ll be the one to treason
the purple-gray of your veins
run deep into your marrow,
I’ll be the one to love everything you love no more.
87
e l ia r o b e r t z a s h i n
T h e Y o u ng & T h e Re c k l e s s
I was out of luck hours ago, years,
yet still I lack the cloak for this:
to have seen those young men street fighting
over that girl and know I’m no longer young,
still, just as desperate. Elbow deep
in dust just to find the record
she left behind,
the one I loved.
And if it could change a thing I’d swear she bled
over that jukebox playing all the old standards,
but all I have is her favorite immaculate cardigan,
the angel she wrapped around herself
before quietly stepping up & out of this tomb.
That’s when I knew I was beyond recovering—
you can only hobble so many horses
before you find yourself in the place you’ve been avoiding
your entire life: your tip-top of the mountain.
On mine, her eye-shadow hung dark & low,
cheeks olive smeared;
hers was the softest face
88
and all I needed was a simple break.
But I was strung out on the ghost I’d become,
the haloes I might reach,
and all I could hear was a beautiful pig
sucking at the sun,
twisting the life out of the lasso’s end.
That woman, I was convinced, was still in love
with my flesh & blood,
with my skin & bones, and nothing much more.
89
sc ot t a le xa nder j o ne s
A B r i e f I nt e r v i e w w i t h Na t e J o r d o n
Nate Jordon holds a BA in English from California State
University, Fresno and an MFA in Writing and Poetics from the
Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. He is the founder of
Monkey Puzzle Press.
S c o t t A l e x a n d e r J o n e s : First off, explain how Monkey
Puzzle Magazine & Press came about.
Na t e J o r d o n : It all got started in 2007 after a
nightmarish bout with some bad acid while listening to the
Brian Jonestown Massacre. Well, sort of. I realized the
direction Naropa University’s literary journal, Bombay Gin ,
was taking. In an effort to gain publicity or garner respect
in… whatever circle they were trying to impress… Bombay
Gin stopped publishing its own students and started
focusing more on prose and poetry by Amiri Baraka, Anne
Waldman, even transcriptions of talks by William S.
Burroughs and other legends. Sure, they’d publish a token
student but the whole thing became exclusive. So I figured
if they won’t publish our students, I will. I knew I was
surrounded by all this talent, but talent left undiscovered.
Then one day after a workshop, with none other than Anne
Waldman, I asked her some question about “getting
discovered.” She said, “Don’t wait to be discovered.
90
Discover yourself.” Glue this next to the whole DIY thing
from the punk scene and […] Monkey Puzzle Magazine was
off and swinging from branches.
S A J : What advice do you have for starving artists?
NJ : I like this bit of advice from Hubert Selby Jr., author
of Last Exit to Brooklyn:
“Being an artist doesn't take much, just
everything you've got. Which means, of
course, that as the process is giving you
life, it is also giving you death. But it's
no big deal. They are one and the same
and cannot be avoided or denied. So
when I totally embrace this process, this
life/death, and abandon myself to it, I
transcend all this gibberish and hang out
with the gods. It seems to me that that is
worth the price of admission.”
S A J : What are your thoughts on the role of
countercultural literary movements in relation to “the
establishment”?
91
NJ : Oh man, without countercultural literary movements
in our society, we could very well be living in some sort of
Nazi state. American countercultural literary movements
go all the way back to Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s
Almanack and Common Sense by Thomas Paine. In more
recent times, we can thank Yugen and City Lights
Booksellers for spawning the Beat Generation and the
subsequent cultural revolution it spawned. The important
thing about countercultural literary movements is that they
must remain active and cyclical. The establishment will coopt anything new and repackage it for mass consumption.
The underground becomes above ground and then what?
You have to go underground to find the roots.
92
a a r o n d . s c he r
A c t ua l D e di c a t io n F ro m :
Bo undary
Ef f e c t s
in
the
E l e c t r o ma g n e t i c
R e s p o n s e o f a M e t a ma t e r ia l u s i n g t h e P o i n t D i p o l e I n t e r a c t io n M o d e l
A t h e s i s s ub m i t t e d t o t h e F a c u l t y o f t h e G r a d ua t e
S c ho o l o f t h e U n i ve r s it y o f C o l o r a d o i n p a r t ia l
f u l f i l l me n t o f t h e r e q u i r e m e n t s f o r t he d e g r e e o f
D o c t o r o f P h i l o s o p h y, D e p a r t m e n t o f El e c t r ic a l &
C o mp u t e r E n g i n e e r i n g , 2 0 0 8
Dedicated to future Aaron and person reading this
long after I have disappeared completely. If you make it to
70 and read 40 books a year from here on out, that's only
1,720 books. Ape-brain wants the sea. Surround yourself
with the sea in all directions. Navigate by the stars to
Kefalonia. Your face wants sea breeze, not oatmeal soap.
Disappear to Tannu Tuva and learn the art of throat
singing. Wave Isaac Newton's Principia at passing
motorists and demand potato salad for good company.
Find yourself in a Korean bathhouse and offer a naked man
your sandals. Purchase your own coffin and use it as a
dinner table, TV stand, or piggy bank, and spend one night
in it so that you never forget.
93
In Castiglion Fiorentino
94
photo by Amanda Ensign
95
96
Last April, Shane quit his office job in NYC and
made his way westward by train toward Big Sky country.
One wine-inspired night during his spring sleeping on
the hardwood floor of my apartment in Missoula as
Starving Artist in Residence, we acquired a box filled
with cardstock after running into my old downstairs
neighbor by the dumpster. His wife had recently died,
and he had inherited a small cache of scrapbooking
materials, bedsheets, and acid-washed denim remnants
he had no use for. Of course, we set aside the bins of
denim for the future quilting of a massive patchwork
Henry VIII puffy-shoulder regal suit. But what to do
with all this paper: Postcards? Confetti? A thousand
origami Bladerunner unicorns?
Before the Zerø Ducats website vanished without
warning into the binary ether from whence it came, the
splash page summed up the project as: “A priceless as in
no-price not precious punkrock pocket-calibrated print
journal of fringe poetry and microscopic prose of the
post-savant, composed entirely of pilfered, dumpstered,
and freecycled treematter.” Immense gratitude to all who
contributed, propagandized, and rummaged thru
hamburger wrappers and coffee cups for the paper these
fleeting words have been printed on.
—Scott Alexander Jones
Missoula, MT / October 26, 2008 / a Sunday
97
Robert Moses, who ruined New York City, died the
year I was born. So did Earle Haas, who invented the
tampon. Those wormfood Prometheuses never knew of
the internet, nor seven billion people on this planet, nor
September 11 , nor the rise of the 52 ounce X-treme
Gulp™.
t h,
I am 27 years old. Fifty years from now, I will most
assuredly be dead. So will just about everyone included
in these pages. What will happen that we will never see?
Zero Ducats is part of our response to that question,
which is ultimately one about our transitory experience in
this positively-charged void. Zero Ducats comes from
our understanding that everything is impermanent, yet
new forms and energies constantly emerge from the void,
and while all endeavor may ultimately be folly, there is
genuine human value in trying to create something less
impermanent, something that will rage – no matter how
insignificantly – against the dying of the television glow.
Many thanks to Aaron Scher and Kona Morris, our
other two ducateers, for assistance in the form of pep
talks, siphoned Laserjet ink, and lots and lots of pilfered
paper. With any luck, kids, someday someone will write
poems on our processed pulp too.
—Shane Joaquin Jiménez
Boulder, CO / XXV Nov 08
98
dr a m a ti s p e r so næ
Chris Alexander is a poet in the MFA program
at The University of Montana who is currently
plotting to kidnap Oliver the Humanzee and
abscond with him to the Creationism Museum in
order to prove something profoundly philosophical.
Erik Anderson 's work has appeared (or is
forthcoming) in American Letters & Commentary,
Trickhouse, Sleeping Fish, Zone 3, The Recluse,
Jacket, Rain Taxi, and others. A contributing
poetry editor at the Denver Quarterly, he also coedits the magazine Thuggery & Grace.
Lindsa y Bland is currently teaching and working
on her MFA in Missoula, Montana where she cohosts the New Lakes Poetry radio show and serves
as a poetry editor for CutBank Literary Magazine.
In her free time she sits in her bathtub pretending
it's 1836.
Yosa Bu son (1716-1783) was a Japanese poet and
painter from the Edo period.
Karie Bu ss lives in Iowa City. She writes poetry.
She is a receptionist.
99
Juliet Cook’s poetry has been published by
Diode, Diagram, Octopus, and many other
sources. She is the editor of Blood Pudding Press.
She is the author of many quirky little poetry
chapbooks and her first full-length collection,
‘Horrific Confection’, is available now as a free ebook from BlazeVOX. For more info visit her
website at: www.JulietCook.weebly.com.
Brooklyn Copeland was born in Indianapolis in
1984. Her e-chapbooks are The Milk for Free
(Scantily Clad Press) and Northernmost
(Ungovernable Press). Her print chapbooks are
Borrowed House (Greying Ghost Press), Floating
World (Further Adventures Press), and Pearl of
Siberia (Wyrd Tree Press), all forthcoming. She is
the founding editor of Taiga Press.
Molly Cur tis is from Bozeman and currently in
the MFA Program at The University of Montana.
M.D’Ale ssandro is moving to a city near you. A
former architect, he holds an MFA in creative
writing from Naropa University, and edits the
semiannual literary journal swap/concessions, now
in its third issue. He is founder and editor of
bedouin books and has authored two books of
poetry: Book of Prophecy (Vantage, 2004) and
Bedouin in America. His poems and stories have
appeared in Monkey Puzzle, Brown Bagazine and
The Bathroom.
100
Linh D inh is the author of two collections of
stories, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap
(2004), four books of poems, All Around What
Empties Out (2003), American Tatts (2005),
Borderless Bodies (2006), and Jam Alerts (2007),
with a novel, Love Like Hate, scheduled to be
released in 2009 by Seven Stories Press. His work
has been anthologized in Best American Poetry
2000, 2004, and 2007, and in Great American
Prose Poems from Poe to the Present. Linh Dinh
is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again:
Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and
Three Vietnamese Poets (2001), and translator of
Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan
Nhien Hao (2006). Blood and Soap was chosen by
the Village Voice as one of the Best Books of 2004.
Laura Dunn lives in Missoula, Montana.
Amanda Ensi gn is a photographer from the
Seattle area currently living in Missoula, Montana.
101
Inuvik (meaning, 'Place of Man') is the oil and gas
mecca of the Northwest Territories and the
Canadian Arctic. Lucas Farrell & Louisa
Conrad spent the summer there paying witness to,
among other things, the endless light, the peculiar
bedding of the drunken tundra, and the faces and
voices of the people who subsist in and around the
Mackenzie Delta. For more information visit their
website: www.unfinishedbridge.blogspot.com.
Lauren Hamlin is working on her first novel and
laboring toward an MFA from the University of
Montana. When she’s not bitching about hangovers
she's venturing toward one. She spent 4 years in
San Francisco mining material exclusively from law
firms and the 22 bus. She once had a sex dream
about Danny DeVito and she's not proud of it.
Mat t Hart is the author of Who's Who Vivid and
three chapbooks: Revelated, Sonnet, & Simply
Rocket. A new collaborative chapbook with Ethan
Paquin, Deafening Leafening, is forthcoming from
Pilot Books in 2009. He lives in Cincinnati where
he edits Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry,
Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety and teaches at
the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
Laird Hun t, graduate of the Kerouac School, is
the author of The Exquisite.
102
Shane Joaquín J imén ez is a student in the
MFA Program in Writing & Poetics at Naropa
University, and co-founder of Zero Ducats. His
fiction has appeared in Greensboro Review, Bat
City Review, and Monkey Puzzle. He is the author
of a forthcoming book of short stories, It Can Be
That Way Still, published by Bedouin Books.
Scott Alexander Jone s is a poet in the MFA
program at The University of Montana, nonfiction
co-editor of CutBank, and co-founder of Zero
Ducats. His poetic spacetime coordinates include
past, present, and/or future incarnations of: Third
Coast, Forklift Ohio, Bombay Gin, Camas,
Monkey Puzzle, and The Cape Rock, as well as a
travel article in Brave New Traveler. A chapbook
of his poetry is forthcoming from Bedouin Books,
spring 2009. He is currently teaching himself the
Tuvan art of throat singing.
Nate Jordon holds a BA in English from
California State University, Fresno and an MFA in
Writing and Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School
of Naropa University. He is the founder of Monkey
Puzzle Press.
103
Mat the w Kaler drinks alone in a park above the
Needle, worries the many inviolate knives inside,
tries for compassion and endures while sleeping on
an inflatable mattress in the living room of a
married couple that double as great friends. Some
days he wishes to cry in a stone church, or fuck
while not drunk. Only some days, those less-gold
counter tensions. This past spring he completed an
MFA in Poetry from The University of Montana in
Missoula, the city of his birth. Without paying local
tax (allegedly), over the last eight years, he resided
on The Isle of Malta, in Spain and Hawaii.
Currently, he lives and works in Seattle, WA. His
work has appeared, and may still, in: Left Facing
Bird, Fawlt, Neo, Zafusy, and Camas.
Ed Mcfadden is a second year MFA candidate in
Poetry at The University of Montana—Missoula
and Editor for CutBank Reviews. His translations
of the Edo Period Japanese haikuist Yosa Buson
have appeared in the Kyoto Journal. His own
poetry can be read in Sugar Mule or at his little
house under the shadow of Mt. Jumbo. His sonnet
Sharp Relief won an honorable mention in the 2008
Nebraska Shakespeare Sonnet Writing Contest
and he has also had work performed at the Berkeley
Repertory Theater as part of the San Francisco
Monday Night Playground series. This past
summer he received the University of Montana's
Nettie Weber Award to attend the Port Townsend
Writer's Conference.
104
Kona Morris is in the MFA Program at Naropa
University, on the editorial board of Fast Forward
Press, and was co-founder of the Write Trash
writing group in Fairbanks, Alaska. She received
the Redwood Empire Mensa Award for Creative
Non-Fiction in 2006 and has been published in
Toyon, Be Brave Bold Robot, The Bathroom,
Fast Forward, Monkey Puzzle, and Bombay Gin.
More than 600 stories & poems by Kri st ine Ong
Musl im have been published or are forthcoming in
over 300 publications. Her work has appeared in
Adbusters, Bellevue Literary Review, Caveat
Lector, Ducts, Farrago's Wainscot, GlassFire
Magazine, New Madrid, and Otoliths.
Adam Perry was raised in Pittsburgh, PA and
spent 2001-2007 in San Francisco playing drums in
various rock bands. He currently lives in Boulder.
Aaron D. Scher is a Doctor of Electrical
Engineering who instead of designing bombs is
teaching himself the art of celestial navigation.
Travis Sehorn is a Missoula-raised performer
who has toured nationally multiple times, alone and
with a traveling theater group, The Missoula
Oblongata. When performing live, he is Pebble
Light. fueled by narcoleptic visions, love letters,
fancy-dancing, traveling, writing and oceans. Travis
has the shakes but likes to keep in unity.
105
Aaron Shulman lives in Missoula, Montana.
Sandra Simonds is finishing her PhD at Florida
State University. She teaches Poetry and Creative
Nonfiction. Her first book, Warsaw Bikini is out
from Bloof Books.
Nancy Stohlman 's first book, Live From
Palestine, was nominated for a Colorado Book
Award in 2004. Her fiction and nonfiction have
been published in Fast Forward, Resist, The
Bathroom, Counterpunch, CommonDreams and
in the anthology Peace Under Fire. She is currently
in the MFA Program at Naropa University.
Math ias Svalina is a co-editor of Octopus
Magazine & Books. He is the author of the
chapbooks Why I Am White, Creation Myths, &
The Viral Lease. His first full-length book,
Destruction Myth, is forthcoming in 2009.
Whi t Williams works in library cataloging at the
University of Texas at Austin. He spent the 90’s
playing lead guitar in the band Cotton Mather.
Currently, he feeds birds and plays congas.
Elia Robert Zashin lives and works between the
rooftops in Austin, Texas, the city in which he
turned one year of age before returning 28 years
later.
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