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9/30/13

Christine Herzer

Ripping off the story

Last night someone hit on me, my whole life movied inside of me, I was afraid, not much, and then very afraid, I wanted to fall through the place I had fallen through in 2004, sometimes the place appears on my face, if someone touched my face when the place is present,

I wasn’t into language when I was with him, I am not sure how much language I had in me at the time, how much language I lost, how much language has grown back, I wanted to accept the ride the guy had offered.

Last night I wanted to go backwards and I wanted to go forward, having sex would have meant going forward, having sex would have meant going backward, bringing some guy home would have been meant going forward, bringing some guy home would have meant going backward.


I would like to think that I would have wanted to speak.

Christine Herzer is a poet and visual artist. She divides her time between Paris and India. For more information about Christine Herzer's work see http://christineherzer.tumblr.com/  and http://honeymooninthefridge.tumblr.com/.

9/27/13

DAREDEVILS Trailer


Stephanie Barber's feature film, DAREDEVILS, premiers on Oct 3 at "Views from the Avant Garde" in NYC. More about the movie.

9/26/13

Meg Ronan

from a series called Dr. Elizabeth Pine-Rumelhart

METHODS

Betty clawed up           laws slumped

          exposed each participant to features

mossed&moldy





(See Appendices B & C)


MASS CARD FROM DR. PINE’S MOTHER

bless her fainting ascenders her
unhinged descenders bless her
floating digits and if need be
deliver her, lord, eyes to my
doorstep and when her sockets
germinate and fresh sponge
fills    scoop them shawl swaddled
wet and snagged     I’ll sacrifice
the heap fire or feeding
for her peace



CONFOUNDED EXPERIMENT

Participant C9 clipped          reported it
Dr. Pine suffered

a visionary incision          an
asynchronous         riot          in her sleep

she suffered
an unwarranted           episiotomy
how can we
ever account for these things
no, she wasn’t pregnant

most likely caused her aversion
to As&Vs&Ks

her liturgical affinities
her architectural allergy         to eaves

we must take          detailed
personal histories



DR. PINE CALLS THE LAB ASSISTANT IN FOR A MEETING

all the cells vibrating
a sickness
a missing electron

that’s what makes us have the words

frantic     chaos     frenetic     anxious

the idea of lostness
we are comforted (she flirts)
by our claustrophobic
relapse

can i offer you some cabbage?
no harm, we will learn
one another’s
domestic habits

here it is.

okay, can i have it?

oh, that’s what you meant. 

stop being so slavic.

a phantom limb, phantom feature.     havoc.


RESULTS

(See Appendix A)




DISCUSSION:  CONSPIRACY THEORY

new hypothesis for further research:


the feature is a braid     depends upon      depth perception     another      dimension


can’t be detected around this axis
this hinge


they keep you in this fog so you’ll do it again


find a new way to associate with an h, an a, a t          see
parentheses and think yes, maybe it is all different than what i thought, think, i was missing this theory, this theory of parentheses, i couldn’t have done anything right


they keep you in this fog


convince you that syntax has something to do with it, has everything, is your sun goddess, is your frenetic stillness, you think you can be a vibrating table, all buzz but still serve as surface


it’s our job at the center to keep inventing evolutions of cognition
so we can keep believing it
right now to develop x-ray love

so we can observe it


See more from Dr. Pine-Rumelhart in the Pink Line Project and in Apartment Poetry Qtrly. Meg Ronan works as a shopgirl at Bridge Street Books in DC.

9/25/13

Katy Bohinc

FOR THE RECORD

I have two
Dreams: one
Where we can
“just be friends”
Everything is !
Two: we make
Love which may
Or may not read
FUCK or love
Or both in
Your. Either
Way in a very
Straightforward
I did really
Like that poem
You posted
And HUSHMAIL
Try it. & BTW
I have two
Dreams but
All I really have
Is too much
Record.

katy bohinc is a poety who lives in new york. via dc&china&france&ohio. she is honest and emotional. read some of "Dear Alain"—a project of love letters from a mathematical poet to a mathematical philosopher—here & here.

9/24/13

Alex Gallo-Brown

Hummock of Ore Derves

It’s just fucking boring
he said to no one
in par tick you lore,
groaning in line for
the hummock of ore derves—
or what have you,
he never could
spell that word.
Bored in his seat,
then bored in the line,
then bored with no cash
grinning his stupid face.
An Asian man offered
to buy his drink—
he accepted, assuming it
to be harmless,
also beggars can’t and so on,
then wandered the night worried
he might again encounter
the man’s countenance.
The work being read—boring.
The conversations being held—boring.
He thought maybe he was boring,
then suppressed the supposition,
a flush worrying the flesh
in the pockets of his face.
Oh lord, he thought, make me interesting.
Make me carefree and beautiful
and inspired and rich.
The bar tops shone mirthlessly
in some other country
while he was marooned here in America
making impressions of rocket ships
with the muscles of his face.

Alex Gallo-Brown has had work in The Rumpus, The Collagist, The Nervous Breakdown, Bookslut, and a number of other places. He is from Seattle and currently lives in Atlanta.

9/19/13

Justin Alexander Kaye


Justin Alexander Kaye put together a blistering review of John Dermot Woods's comic book, Activities. Kaye's scathing attack matches Woods's form, but—he argues—does it much better.

View it on Issuu:

See also: John Dermot Woods's Comics Month, El Greed, Sasquatch Stories


Justin Alexander Kaye lives in Washington, DC.

9/18/13

Jordan DeBor

RED PHOSPHORUS



I was once in a kool aid commercial

I'm sure you all saw it

I was skateboarding and biking

and pretending to have fun

while drinking the kool aid

and pretending to be happy

while drinking the kool aid

and pretending to be American

while drinking the kool aid

and pretending not to be upset

when the wall burst open

and the kool aid man wasn't there

I wish I was alive in 1978

when the kool aid man

was as real as red phosphorus

I’d be the only one left

Still drinking the kool-aid



PHOTO BOOTH VACATION



lets take a photo booth vacation

we can go anywhere

we can be on the moon

and look back at our home

or we could ride a roller coaster

and pretend we're having fun

or we could go to Paris

and destroy the Eiffel Tower

or we could find ourselves as fishes

and relearn how to breath

or we can just be here

in our rooms

separately together

lets make believe



MAGNANIMOUS



How many stars will we call "sun"

How many planets will we call "earth"

Will the moon remember us

When we abandon her

And all the bones that the sun graced with cancer

Will they be jealous of us

When we die so far away from them

What will our mothers say

When we don't come home



I will one day be the sun in your eyes

The heat of an afternoon

The warmth of so much skin

The fire in your guts

And i will one day be the cancer

That will tear you apart

As I shine so fucking bright

So very far away


Jordan DeBor is an editorial assistant at PEN American Center. He has previously done editorial work for BOMB Magazine, Open City Magazine and Books, and ClusterMag, and co-edits Noncanon Press. He graduated from Hampshire College with a B.A. in American Literature and Literary Theory. He was born in London and splits his time between Sydney and New York.

9/16/13

Matthew Zingg

permanent residence [13]

Was the exact month for rain—for the damp root
coddled in dirt—for cicadas teenaged

with fogged bodies—set to roar their
tympanic eulogies—freight train

like whirring through the forest’s dark edge:

there three friends—swat the things off each other—

one who won’t last the wailing season—who will
twist his body into the trees—the other

I will drag up the stairs of his apartment—
later in life—drunk—keening—

I will always be dragging one or the other up—
my nails blue with earth—my voice plea worn:

Y quiero morir cantando—says the song—

says there are types of wonder that rely
on destruction—says desire is perpetual

until it’s a carapace hung out to dry
on a limb like some prehistoric verse:

(hang there—my cicada—in witness of my love):

I was taught how to lean off the front porch

like a celebrity
with a pocketful of prescription drugs—

there was a screen door over my heart—
a painting the size of stained glass above my head—

I had no idea: I ran naked into the air howling
around my body—the world

a piece short—I couldn’t see a thing
past the furious wings of my song


Matthew Zingg’s work appears in Cider Press Review, The Madison Review, Low Log, and Opium Magazine, among others. He received his MFA in poetry from Adelphi University. He runs the Federal Dust reading series in Baltimore.

9/10/13

Sarah Jean Alexander

HARD CENTER


If you see a person everyday for many years,

you won't notice when they begin to develop

wrinkles, and suddenly there is a canyon running

through each of her cheeks and when you kiss

them your lips won't find the deepness foreign

as flesh presses against softer flesh even though

your skulls are closer together now than they

were forty years ago. Older skin has its up sides.

I think one of the most important is that there

are no surprises. If you plan for your future,

it will never happen. If you close your eyes and

focus on your lights and blacks, you can breathe

yourself a new lung and it will be the same as God

pushing apart the heavy clouds and blowing

warm air on the top of your head, smiling onto

your crown and whispering, "Easy, easy, easy."

If you are very tired of life, just stop. And if you

love someone, why can't you just tell them, "Look

at me, I love you, Please stay with me, I love you,

Please don't go," and then maybe that person won't.

I mean, when a person is not touching me, I miss them.

I mean, there are so many things I am doing when

she is not around that I won't remember when I am

eighty years old and she is still not around. I mean,

look at my face and tell me how it makes you feel.

I mean, I mean it, all of it. Even if we wanted to,

we couldn't pack our suitcase and walk out the back

door. We are always holding the hands of too many

secrets and we are in the hard center of our lives.

The fish tanks would algae over and the cichlids

would be forced to daydream towards nothing,

slowly regressing to the dark parts of the glass box

until tiny bodies lined the sealed corners of the tank

from bottom to top, sleepless fish with half-dead eyes,

their creepiness reaching me on the spot, even now.

The newspapers would stack on the porch in an

embarrassing bricking against the front door,

the neighbors put off by our complete disregard

for the lack of aesthetic uniformity of our house plotted

in-between theirs. They would think, "How rude,"

and talk about us behind our backs and between

the lines of thin painted fences. Anyway the zipper

on the suitcase is broken and you said to me,

"Trash bags are only for trash," so the fish are

still alive and the paper is let inside one by one

and when the neighbors talk we pretend not to hear.

I look up and see a butterfly stuck in the air. I think

it is flying against a soft wind but it really does look

stuck in the middle of the space above my head,

trying to move and not moving at all, and

when I think of you this is what I see except

when I think of you, you are sitting at a desk.

If you see a person everyday it is like they are

standing very still.


Sarah Jean Alexander edits Parlor, an online magazine for exquisite corpse poetry. She is the poetry editor of Shabby Doll House and has work published at Hobart, Spork, Pangur Ban Party, Thought Catalog, Pop Serial, Keep This Bag Away From Children and HOUSEFIRE. Sarah Jean lives in Brooklyn with her orange cat.

9/9/13

Amy McDaniel

The Mistake/Error


A mistake is something you know better than
Like do you still think of America as an experiment?

Or, to me it seems as if the porch light will never go out—
But I would have said porch light was one word: porchlight.

That’s an error because I didn’t know the rule and on purpose
I still haven’t learned it. I still want to think the eternal porchlight.

I believed that Marilyn Manson was Paul from the Wonder Years
Because things being the same as other, dissimilar things pleases me.

We watched the sun set. We were on the beach and we watched the sunset.
Lest you imagine the sun setting over the ocean, let me correct the mistake. It

Set over the tops of buildings on the other side of the highway over the Inter-
Coastal Waterway. You know the rule—not all oceans are to the west of all

Beaches. So we had to stand on tippy-toe and move around to find the right
Angle to see it. Sunsets, orgasms and eyes are all beautiful and powerful,

So you may not believe me when I say this one was special. Especially
When I tell you that I thought I saw the sun burning red beyond

The dunes but what I really saw wasn’t the sun, it was, as my
Friend sadly, kindly pointed out, the sign for the Crab Trap.



Amy McDaniel lives in Atlanta with her dog, Annette. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Tin House, PANK, The Agriculture Reader, Saveur, H_NGM_N, and elsewhere. Selected Adult Lessons, her chapbook, came out in 2010 from Agnes Fox Press and promptly sold out. Now she is revising a novel about cheese, wine, and coincidences.

9/6/13

Brian Foley

HOMEWRECK

As clouds out number people,
all afternoon a feeling -
nowhere are people
being right. Lately
it seems late, less dry brain-
paint staining the insides.
In certain self adjusted
buoyancy, a wish to dis
agree is willing to stand
in rain longer than anyone.
I seem to distaste
concealing and bake hate
as ordinary to excuse it,
cussed because I can’t expect
what’s flammable to flame
from within. Why wouldn’t
I animate urge ingredients
with general wreckage?
I’ve enough ordinary wax.
Little derogatory bits.
It gets so you can feel
these things totally
alive inside of a crime
uncommitted, just
like the dusk forgot
how to spell me, now
a collapse I doubt into.
What I’m abandoning,
by building vocabulary,
out baiting beautiful moments
that lack a referral.
I want to family
with the way you phrase
woods, how you take apart a life
to preview what works
well with others so.
Only in unprovoked
flinch do I solvent
a center easy as advice
as usual. Who do I know at
the end of a green light?
Alone, it is easier to go
right than left or wait
for red to calm down.
Just getting antique
you’re free
to fix on zoo hours,
made to visit some
wilderness & see
the unimagined animals
out of touch. A lightning
you’d like to get over
laying in the wheeling night.
But you who remind me
remind me full of oil
nothing in the chest
seems to move.
I woke this morning
never more clearer,
unclocked because
I didn’t bother to look
up and feel. Any second
a birthday will appear
and I won’t forget to
remember the present.
The idea being
you like holding things
pretending a friend.
I guess you could say let
the static do its nothing.
Deleting a worry from the earth
scraped off the clichƩ of sky
is wasted right now
instead of studying witness.
Unimportant what minor
keys jiggle the handle
flush for rewinding a life span
in the right direction.
As if peeling an eye at what
I’m abandoning by being
browsed down is
blood to be immortal by now.
To behave built,
building back what
ever is left of of particular
shatters, churching
everything to get at height.
No other reason porters
a plunge into laughing
past today. A comma
can’t tourniquet
the sky toward some crowd
or belief, the bag it comes in
hits the dream bar,
keeps on ending just shy
of sum up. Such an
organ isms with fear
with the hard feelings
its brain will run out.
Opening that grip,
abducted light. Such a hulk
had held me up for hours,
a little digital dayshine
everywhere always with
a difference in it I’m unwilling
to attach to now as was then.
More collaborative days
are ahead of us or isn’t
It nifty to think. So.
Some engine will find you
then nature is calling.
I don’t know his real
Name, but attempt it,
to wrap a noodle around
a spoon and never do.
Some terrible form is such weight
versus shape, you can’t make it
as a room where the furniture
won’t move, it must be
predictable as the moon
fucked in the air museum,
as sure as your beware
of the dark and dogs.
Ill just stand here and love
my oven, its lotto
snoring in its soul.
It needs not a septic
or a glitter to sue.
It stares back used
poor already
& hungry an hour later
evinced with pine or appetite
& liable to skillet dew.
To take the back seat
from knocking straight
is heart surgery, I keep
hoping someone
will be home to know me,
someone to know me
from home.
After objects, I’m showered out.
Whatever it is they do
to put in shadows
I invade a way to pretend
a mend out of it.


Brian Foley is the author of The Constitution (forthcoming from Black Ocean, 2014).








9/5/13

Tony Mancus

The greatest verbs

never settle
into gardens
                    Ink shooting up
from all the pens
uncapped & showy-like

porn for paper bags
& mystery folded into the onion-
skinned plants


Tony Mancus is the author of three chapbooks – Bye LandBye Sea, and Diplomancy. He co-founded Flying Guillotine Press with Sommer Browning in 2008. He works as a quality assurance specialist and lives with his wife Shannon and their two yappy cats. 

9/4/13

Angela Stubbs

All Lines Point To It

1. No accidents

2. No alcohol

3. No asking

4. No bonding

5. No commiserating

6. No details

7. No difference

8. No flexibility

9. No gifts

10. No history

11. No knowing

12. No knowledge

13. No leaning

14. No love

15. No luck

16. No needing

17. No past

18. No perfect

19. No picking

20. No please

21. No prying

22. No regression

23. No reward

24. No shabbat

25. No sharing

26. No static

27. No texting

28. No waiting

29. No want

30. No winning

30. No wish

31. No wonder

32. No words

33. No no

34. Noyesnoyesnoyesnoyesnoyesnoyesnonononononono

35. No

36. Yes


Angela Stubbs lives in Los Angeles and is an MFA graduate of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Sleepingfish, Black Warrior Review, Bombay Gin, esque Magazine, elimae, Puerto del Sol, The Nervous Breakdown, Not Enough Night, Marco Polo Quarterly, Lambda Literary, DIAGRAM, Astrophil Press, The Collagist, Bookslut and others. She is the author of a fiction column at The Nervous Breakdown and recently completed a collection of hybrid fiction entitled, Try To Remain Hidden and is at work on a collection of poetry.


9/3/13

Kyle Flak


MABEL MY DEAR

you held my hand all through the new kung fu movie
we were at the mall
and then we were buying popsicles
later we were naked
much later than that you were showing me the pinball machine you keep
in your garage
i felt like we were too old for everything
you kept pulling champagne out of surprising places
i said, “okay. i get it. you’re a fun person.”
but then stuff kept happening
stuff is still happening


Kyle Flak is from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He won the Chris Toll Prize in 2014 for WHAT HANK SAID ON THE BUS, a manuscript from which these poems appear. His recent volumes of poetry include The Secret Admirer (Adastra Press, 2010) and Harmonica Days (New Sins Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in Mudfish, Poetry East, Spinning Jenny, Whiskey Island and various other literary magazines. He went to school at Northern Michigan University and the University of Massachusetts. Currently, he works at a library.

9/2/13

Guy Benjamin Brookshire

The Universe War



Guy Benjamin Brookshire was born in Arkansas in 1977, got covered in fire ants in 1980 and has since traveled widely. He studied poetry at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. He is the father of two girls and writes and collages in Vallejo, California. He has completed his first novel: VACATION.