Untitled - baldhip magazine

BALDHIP MAGAZINE
Caitlin Baird & Jess Knowles
Editors
Ray Lister
Website
Annah van Eeghen, The Girl Without Hands
Cover
the editors enthusiastically thank our donors and contributors,
without whose faith & generosity baldhip magazine could not exist.
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Contents
Mallory Bernice
Erica Anzalone
Portia Elan
Coco Huang
Amy Carlberg
Michelle Vider
Benjamin Willems
Roxanna Bennett
Kate Balfour
Samantha Borje
Kiana Browne
Kathleen Jones
Jim Redmond
Giuditta Rustica
Ali Blythe
Mitchell Garrard
Chelsea Uphoff
Julie Paul
5
6
16
19
20
21
23
27
29
30
31
33
34
35
37
39
42
43
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MALLORY BERNICE
On Louise Bourgeois’s Sans Titre, drawing, 1947
Adah’s mother said to her: At one month old, you already feared death.
This remains unexplained. She only said it once. Adah’s fear often wraps around
her fingers, a laurel green film, translucent, kind of pretty. Fingers darken in dishwater on days she confesses
she’s brave. It takes a kitchen sink to reveal spirit. Adah in water. Adah unscathed, bettered by water. Mornings
under black alder. Unclean wind folds pigweed. Adah at Lighthouse Park, branches bridged across both arms.
Act of saving, somewhat reverent. Tuesday bath. Barbed, scentless, sapless, branches bend under bare legs,
gnarled arms arc over her. In doing this, her spirit might be caged. Brewster’s Pub, Adah’s father found on the
floor, asleep in drink.
Her father in a brown coat. Elbows and breast pocket patched. Her father in trousers, sweat-stained, grassed at
the knees. They sit on a picnic table, rain-rotten and cedary, face the shore, knead the knots in their necks.
Adah’s father swills Beefeater from a vase, laughs at a favourite joke. They do not clap mosquitoes overhead. He
stuffs wireweed into rice straw paper, smokes it saying it rids bad pollen from the body. Adah leaves secrets
here. Her laurel fingers find the blue strip where clouds allow sky. Her message stretches fifteen miles. Sex, my
face, my body. Her wishes and wrist are tensed. Adah, her father, coated in lemon juice light.
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ERICA ANZALONE
She is not where she is
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.
Is that a good
book, a white
woman asks me
on the flight
from Boston to
Las Vegas. Is
she a vegetarian,
she persists,
after she reads
the title
“Meatless
Days.” My
answer is just as
feeble: “Her
mother was
Welsh and her
father was
Pakistani.
Apparently there
was a famine.”
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The face of the
woman on the
cover is also
white. I wonder
if it is you, Sara,
for the first few
chapters, and
then your
mother for a few
more chapters,
until you reveal it
is your sister Ifat
near the end of
the book. But
really, I think, it
is all three of
you and more,
the endless
multiplication of
conception.
The face of the
woman on the
cover is also
white. I wonder
if it is you, Sara,
for the first few
chapters, and then
your mother for a
few more
chapters, until you
reveal it is your
sister Ifat near the
end of the book.
But really, I think,
it is all three of
you and more, the
endless
multiplication of
conception.
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The face of the
woman on the cover
is also white. I
wonder if it is you,
Sara, for the first few
chapters, and then
your mother for a few
more chapters, until
you reveal it is your
sister Ifat near the
end of the book. But
really, I think, it is all
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magazine
three
of you and
more, the endless
multiplication of
There are
two on the
cover,
mother and
child. I can’t
tell if the
child is a girl
or a boy in
his or her
blue romper
and whte
tights. Girl,
I guess. But
there is
something
about the
big head of
hair that
makes me
think boy.
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The
mother
wears a
star on
her
forehead.
Her black
hair is
perfectly
parted,
her skin
the shade
of the
sari she
wears,
her
downwar
d glance
is demure
and
absentmi
nded as
though
she could
forget the
child
tugging
on her
hand.
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Ifat is not
really in the
photo, nor is
she in the
body the
coroners
wanted to cut
open, nor is
she in the plot
meant for
your father.
She is not
where she is,
not a body
rotting
underground.
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She is
the
idea of
a face.
The
face
that
launche
da
thousa
nd
ships.
It was
her
beauty
that
killed
her,
you
murmu
r to
yoursel
f, and
not
your
father’s
politica
l
activitie
s, not
the
scalpel
that cut
throug
h layers
of
muscle
to part
Pakista
n from
India,
not the
car that
crushe
d her
into
the
very
land
she
loved.
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It is wrong
to strip a
food of its
sauce and
put it back
into its
bodily
belonging.
It is wrong
for a
daughter
to be
forced into
her father’s
plot.
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Would you
prefer that
she sleep in
these
swaddling
pages?
Would you
prefer that
her ear be
turned
towards
God, that
her six
hundred
wings
remain
hidden
beneath her
sari, that
she
perform no
miracle?
She is not
where she
is but she
is, isn’t she?
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PORTIA ELAN
2 poems
A Woman Like You
For Suzi
tamarack tamarack tell me
your blue news, close to my nose.
The blue news of standing inside
the weight of the throat of believing.
We both have our faith in seasons
and do, do to the tune of Me, our blood-sick
dance before them. Sick is perhaps not right.
tamarack I am a red fool, you must know: I am through
and through and I am though,
unit of pulled rug/you deep in grey.
Honestly, honed tea, horned true;
you love me though.
I’ve been fishing and in and in
the belly of the leather fish I found I find
a chicken foot: what a stomach, leather fish!
But tamarack I want to play a different
game, the game where we O tamarack yes you know:
name the clouds mud and the rocks nova.
As if we could ignite granite to hydrogen break
with a boot tip, book top, brick treat. tamarack
I love watching you do yoga.
Through my slag glass eye
I spy: the lake drinks itself and the cat wakes
thirsty and having to pee and the lake will not share.
I feign, I fan: this is not the dream I meant to walk into.
Don’t think I’m a wise man just because
my lips aren’t loose. U/U/U. tamarack we are Tin Man
at attention: the easy lay
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in the body and in the salt that the lake doesn’t love
I press my mouth to mention this above all:
TODAY IS THE DAY OF MY BIRTH. The salt cannot run away.
tamarack blue, tamarack bruise, I paint your knots to eyes
looking out at the hot love-lines between
these faulted selves of dust. I take this dust seriously.
What lucky needles that say to the dirt
that says to your roots: I am yours.
I come to you like a dog,
my dug love, no padded band only faith.
There’s not god in me and no god in you
and the lake buoys every empty Bud Light can I give.
I am nighted with you and with you
ends the night. What could a shorn girl like me
know ‘bout shedding but what’s taught me tamarack.
Clouds mud & this dirt bed. The seasons say we can
until we can’t and tamarack a woman, a me:
only takes a candy promise to cut me loose without you.
Give me just the sight of the morning moon that crowns you,
tamarack, here as I dance the snow
with an open ear. We carry / we carry the weight;
we give each other grace.
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Using The Mouth Again After Some Time Not
The coffee has grown sullen in its cup
Do you want it or not?
Are you staying or are you going?
I am going to pour it down the sink
If you don’t say something soon
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COCO HUANG
Snow White
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AMY CARLBERG
Looking at Boys on the Internet
You show me your blacksmith,
I’ll show you my bicycle vendor.
/
Name scratched off, then
repeated, sealed deep in ink.
/
The first one to get to three
little words is a rotten egg.
/
The last one to repeat them,
Sacagewea. Useless bit.
/
Love leaks from us
like currency, fondles us
/
like a bromance, furls
in our hands like a bridle.
/
Love stands in front
of us like a title.
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MICHELLE VIDER
Hey, Feminism
someone said i should examine my fantasies
if i’m dissatisfied with my reality
i daydream a lot but lately in these
the richest of my lesbian years
i keep coming back to this daydream
the one where i have a rich husband
and let’s be real here
he’s rich and he loves me
in my daydreams—i’m married
i’m married to a man and he loves me
he supports and encourages my work
we have a joint checking account, but
we also have our own checking/savings accounts
i think he’s so rich that our assets go through a
holding company or an LLC or something
did i mention he adores me?
it’s actually the sickest kink i have
this fantasy where a man is taking care of me
some time ago, we all swapped patronage for meritocracy
so my daydreams don’t know how to make this work
i fall back on what the 20th century taught me to want
a handsome man in a suit—i’d love it if he laughed
his money will give me everything i want
and i don’t want much at all
i hope that if i knew of any rich queer women
i would dream of winning them over
we’d establish a bourgeois paradise together
but wealthy, queer, female? come on
that’s ellen
we only have one ellen
i would never take her from portia
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proximity
that’s the difference between a dream and a daydream
in dreams you’re driving an ATV on the arms of a spiral galaxy
chasing kate middleton, three corgis, and the beowulf poet
and you pursue the beowulf poet with the most fervor
because you want to know why his poem is so fucking boring
how did he con centuries of the world into thinking his work is hot shit
does your work need more dragons? is that the secret? dragons?
but daydreams skim the surface of reality
and plausibility
a wealthy queer woman who, out of love, wants
to bankroll your modest artistic success?
you’ve picked the three descriptors
most unlikely to have any money—
but if i marry a rich man
i can become that wealthy queer woman
of someone else’s dreams
(my imaginary husband, he’d understand;
he’s more than a black amex—he’s like—
am i thinking of dorothy parker’s husband?
no, edna st. vincent millay’s. leonard woolf, too
not a scott fitzgerald, with his nervous alcoholism,
his sad and needy penis issues with hemingway)
darling, just love me and our occasional orgies
featuring beautiful women of our acquaintance
i don’t know what i can offer this man
except a warm light to orbit the rest of his days
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BENJAMIN WILLEMS
beach
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ROXANNA BENNETT
2 poems
Q&A
Not answers but anniversaries like a fist inside.
Not answers but needs & unmeaningable.
Translate fuck, anyplace not here.
Translate never, & want.
To get dressed is being.
To get dressed is hours,
every obligation & decision
an articulate blade, an echo
that does not repeat.
Repeat after me: leave
this place. You were previously
intact, now radically sorry.
This version of you is
(to her face) usual but
alone. Work on the act,
repair. If we arrive at meaning,
it is through not needing
meaning in order to exist.
Not answers but ferocity, belonging.
Not answers but isolated, absolute.
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Women Without
Women, widespread, want welcome when working
without waging war. Women who witness will winter
where wants were withdrawn. Without warning we
were walked, wearing winter, with world wounds:
who we would wife, who we would write. Women,
widespread, want. Welcome when working without
waging war. Women who witness who we want
worshipped. World wounds, why we were what
was won. White winter waves, worsens. Withdrawn
women, who were world’s wife. We who were women,
widespread, want welcome when who was waging war.
Women who witness will winter where wants were withdrawn.
Went without. Without warning. Without witness. Without women.
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KATE BALFOUR
visiting home iii
from my old dinner seat, you define the depression with extreme subjectivity:
four feet across, a handwidth deep
my words rattle in your mouth like loose teeth or buttons in a jar.
from the window’s acacia, a familiar owl watches. you have not seen him. you say:
the yellows and blues of van gogh,
the name a tangle of phlegm in your throat.
from his bed, the dog does not look up. he dreams he is the owl obscured by snow.
i trace my hand on paper to become three-handed.
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SAM BORJE
Organic
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KIANA BROWNE
Red
Whoops
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KATHLEEN JONES
Marooned
You are trained to make a desert island a game, to populate it
with comforts. As if your emergency would include the
nourishment of your top three songs, top five books, your
dearest person. An island with coconuts. As if you knew how
to pick favorites. Your world is not an island but a train tunnel
and you chug along jumping time but never tracks. You’d be
stranded without seven pairs of underwear for a six-night stay,
phone wallet and keys, boarding pass or printed map. Without
the certainty of six nights until home. The word for this might
as well be forever. Liberated or stuck. All your washing done
by hand and with salt. All your food sunbaked, sand gritty
between your teeth. All your moments alone, trying to recall a
face or a line, ears straining for the whistle wail that used to
soothe you to sleep every night.
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JIM REDMOND
[Insert Title Here]
[insert image here] best to start sequence with
how many tabs, lite-headed profusely, re-move excessive tissue, paper trail from here to [insert joke here]
for internal records [insert something variegated in same way as you would mood lighting]
I like what you did with: polycarbonate dreamlife
I wasn’t so sure about:
[insert slight nausea tailing into total despair] smoke lifts and stays, lifts and stays, for a long time
[insert all the appropriate receptacles] you should consider a more controlled substance
[insert a more technical difficulty]
you should consider a more disposable income / output have you even thought about all the leash laws lately in
a more intimate way? I mean to say limits, but also exposure, a third person
partial inebriated, free indirect intercourse
please [insert a more beautiful mechanism] [insert insert which opens like pop-up into the predawn]
all of your acutest angels spilled out like pencil shavings, it must have cost something, at least the price of
materials
you read like all you have left is the receipts to hold onto, like the back of a baseball card [insert next slide]
[insert there is no next slide] stuck in the spokes of what exactly are you trying to do here?
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GIUDITTA RUSTICA
Brothers iv
Brothers vi
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Drops of Madness ii
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ALI BLYTHE
2 poems
Let’s Together Quietly
The future builds monsters
with microscopic locks
like cancer cells. Click.
I am not here.
I am patrolling the future
in a lab coat putting an ear
to every numbered door.
Every numbered door
has a framed black & white
or sepia photo of someone
looking into a camera
and laughing at the person
behind it, who also has a door
and a photo and a person.
Let’s together quietly reach
the end of this thought
process and go get breakfast
no matter what time it is.
We’ll take the lenses from
our lovely eyes and have coffee
one sugar just how you like it.
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Shattered
Your eyes look like
beach glass fresh
from a pounding.
I wish I could float
you inside an empty
bottle and raise your
many tiny sails.
But one has to accept
the tense of a feeling.
You will never be
well enough again
to exist on anything
but a diet of thin ice.
You will recurrently
have the sense someone
is checking the time
which you suspect
might be suspended
from nurse-clean clouds
by a delicate gold chain.
You will have to drink
meds from a plastic
cup. Next, you won’t
remember a thing.
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MITCHELL GARRARD
2 poems
Texts 18-59
where are you?
where are you all?
where are you all?
wheredja go?
where’d you all go?
where did you go?
where’d you head to?
where’re you?
people, where are you?
where ya at?
wheredyago?
where are you?
where are people?
where ya at?
where are you all?
where’re you?
where are people?
where are you all?
where you at?
where are you?
where’re you?
where’s everyone?
where?
where are you?
where you?
¿dónde?
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where’re people?
where’re you?
where the fuck is everyone?
where are you now?
where’re you?
where are you?
where you?
where are you?
whereareyou?
wheredidgo?
where are you all?
where did people go?
where did you go?
where?
where are people?
where are you lot?
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MITCHELL GARRARD
2 poems
Capitol Ice
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CHELSEA LOU UPHOFF
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JULIE PAUL
Other Versions of the Dream
There were no forts in these dreams, no peepholes where we
could spy on the British, no one was eating chocolate-covered
jujubes, the plants were not intent on strangling babies, frozen
men were not being sold by the slice, pillows did not turn to
living creatures who wanted to take us into their Mormon-like
universe, my grandmother was not making a cake filled with
cream and sawdust, no one spoke Old German or limped, dogs
did not behave like world leaders, hair did not grow on bananas,
nothing shook the whole Southern hemisphere or changed the
earth’s axis, no one peeled human skin off another because it
was the wrong colour, nothing delicious was forbidden, god was
only a tube, a cloud, a feeling, unconcerned.
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Contributors
Erica Anzalone holds a Ph.D. from UNLV, where she was awarded a Schaeffer fellowship, and an MFA from the
University of Iowa. Her first book of poetry Samsara is the winner of the 2011 Noemi Press Poetry Award. Poems from
her second manuscript 24 Hour Flower have appeared or are forthcoming in the the Colorado Review, The Literary Review, and
Juked.
Kate Balfour recently graduated from the University of Victoria where she studied writing and English. She lives in a
cabin on Okanagan Lake.
Roxanna Bennett is an artist-educator, freelance writer, poet and one of the poetry editors at Halfway Down the Stairs. Her
poetry has appeared in Descant, Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, Qwerty, The Malahat Review, CV2,
Vallum: Contemporary Poetry, Popshot, Slice Literary Magazine and others. Her non-fiction work has appeared in or at Gender
Focus, Hip Mama, Boxx Magazine, Feminists for Choice, The National Post, torontoist and other publications. Her first full length
book of poetry The Uncertainty Principle launches 2014 from Tightrope Books.
Mallory Bernice was named after her nana. Last year she was an intern for The Malahat Review. Her poetry has appeared in
PRISM International, Bywords Journal and The Islander. She is going to do her MFA in September. Both excited & scared
about it.
Ali Blythe's work has appeared in literary magazines across Canada and in Berlin. Blythe's first book is forthcoming with
Icehouse Poetry at Goose Lane in fall 2015.
Sam Borje is a recent graduate of Emily Carr University with a BMA in Animation. She is a self-proclaimed aggressive
tea drinker and wannabe superhero. She is interested in minority representation in popular media and cats.
Kiana Browne has been a compulsive doodler since age six, and more or less an artist since age twelve. She enjoys
bending reality (she considers herself a surrealist) and finds it far more uplifting than sticking to the strict rules of realism.
Her work generally consists of thick black lines, and is all free hand.
fluentfather.tumblr.com
Amy Carlberg is a poet from Toronto who is currently undertaking her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. She misses all
her friends on the West Coast dearly.
Portia Elan writes and teaches in Oakland with her Gemini cat. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Birdfeast, The
Rumpus, and other journals. She holds an MFA from the University of Victoria.
Mitchell Garrard is from Seattle, Washington, where he spent most of his life watching game shows. He now resides in
Olympia, a town that makes it easy to believe in poetry. Recent work has appeared in The Camel Saloon, Futures Trading,
Otoliths, The Kitchen Poet, Shuf Poetry, Uut Poetry.
Coco Huang is a conceptual mixed media artist based in Vancouver. Her art is inspired by memories of those close to her,
meanings she draws from everyday life, her experiences as a Taiwanese Vancouverite who has traveled extensively around
the world and even just spontaneous encounters. Since each conceptual idea may require different mediums, Coco varies
in her use of materials but enjoys painting, collage, and photography in particular.
Kathleen Jones holds an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she worked in the
Publishing Laboratory. Her work is forthcoming in Ninth Letter Online and Middle Gray, and was most recently published in
Iodine Poetry Journal and Gesture.
Julie Paul has published two collections of short stories, The Jealousy Bone (2008), and The Pull of the Moon (forthcoming
with Brindle & Glass, September 2014). Stories, poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals, including The
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Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, Event, PRISM International and The Rusty Toque. She lives in Victoria, BC and at juliepaul.ca.
Jim Redmond has lived in Michigan his whole life, but has since moved from Detroit to Austin, TX. He graduated with
an MFA from the University of Michigan a couple years ago. Some of his work has been published or is forthcoming in
Columbia Poetry Review, PANK, Weave Magazine, RHINO, TYPO, Sugared Water, NANO Fiction and The Pedestal Magazine
among others. His chapbook, Shirt or Skins, recently won Heavy Feather Review's chapbook prize.
Originally from Messina, Italy, Giuditta Rustica currently divides her time between Denmark and Germany. She holds a
Masters from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, Italy, and has also studied art in Copenhagen, Berlin, and Prague. Her
work has been exhibited throughout Europe, including Denmark, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, and Lithuania.
Chelsea Lou Uphoff is a young multidisciplinary artist now residing in BC. She studied art at Sheridan College and the
University of Victoria.
Annah van Eeghen is a Vancouver photographer. She was born and raised in Powell River, a small west-coast town in
BC, Canada. Influenced by environment and locale, van Eeghen explores ideas of history, narrative, and story-telling
within photography.
Michelle Vider is a writer based in Philadelphia. Her pop culture essays have appeared in The Toast and Pop Mythology. Find
her at michellevider.com.
Benjamin Willems is an artist and writer and editor
@benjaminwil
web.uvic.ca/~bwillems
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