Maya Diablo Mason was published in The First Hay(na)ku Anthology (Meritage, 2006) and her collaborative work has appeared in Otoliths, 21 Stars Review, BlazeVox, Of(f) Course, Long Island Sounds Anthology 2008, Marsh Hawk Review, and is forthcoming in EOAGH. A high school student in Long Island, New York, she plans to pursue a career in drama, visual art, or writing.",
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author: "Carmen Firan",
role: "Author",
title: "the caretaker of dreams",
text: "in every dream I speak a different language
and in every language words have a different color
hot-air balloons rise from their foreheads
inflated on the purple horizon
from all we say in our lives before and to come
there remains only the flight path, the wing\'s whisper
the island where I took refuge
free inside so many walls
on which I scratch neither hearts or love-words
but signs in the language I speak while sleep
a dialect of Old Angelic still useful for crossing borders
I have a vocation for happiness
a sort of unconscious facility
at making an ally of the caretaker of dreams
who\'s always ready to lend me the silk cocoon
in which words sneak past customs
intimate objects I carry with me undeclared
nothing\'s to be done about my golden dowry
dead languages yield just the powdery dust of stars
",
sources: "",
biog:"born in Romania, is a poet, a fiction and play writer, and a journalist. She has published fifteen books of poetry, novels, essays and short stories. Her writings appear in translation in many literary magazines and in various anthologies in France, Israel, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Canada, U K, and the USA. She lives in New York. Her recent books and publications in the United States of America include: Rock and Dew, (Sheep Meadow Press), Words and Flesh, (Talisman Publishers), The Second Life (Columbia University Press), The Farce, (Spuyten Duyvil Press), In The Most Beautiful Life, (Umbrage Editions), The First Moment After Death (Writers Club Press). She is a member of PEN American Center and the Poetry Society of America and serves on the editorial boards of the international magazines Lettre Internationale (Paris-Bucharest) and Interpoezia (New York). She is the co-editor of Naming the Nameless (An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry), Stranger at Home, Poetry with an Accent, and Born in Utopia (An Anthology of Romanian Modern and Contemporary Poetry).",
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author: "Larry Fondation",
role: "Author",
title: "HIGH WINDS",
text: " Sagebrush and succulents. Rounded bushes scattered like clumps of hair. High winds; it hasn\'t rained in months. The tumbleweeds are balls of fire waiting to happen.
Dirt roads in Los Angeles County. Now and still. An hour\'s drive outside the nation\'s second largest city. Avenue P. Avenue R. Avenue T-4. Avenue T-10. Like they have run out of names. Flat barren stretches. Dirt dividing dirt. Waiting again: waiting for rain, waiting for subdivisions. Short days and long nights.
It was 17 degrees this morning in Los Angeles. High desert. The Mojave – 28 miles from Edwards Air Force Base, the some-time landing strip of the Space Shuttle. Creosote in clusters. Trucks full of peaches pass me on Pearblossom Highway. The small, dry, tan-colored hills undulate off the roadside – naked bodies reclining, languishing on the landscape.
With little purpose, I have been here in the Mojave for days now, perhaps weeks. But, just as I wanted, things are blending together now, blurring.
Her nails are painted black. The sun is scarlet. When it drops, there will be no light. At midnight, the sand is black but it glitters. I drink coffee at Carol\'s Coffee Shop. The bar next door is called The Trap. Soon I will go there to drink. I will order straight whiskey. Nothing fancy. Bourbon. Probably Wild Turkey. When I do, the girl on the next bar stool will be weathered, but beautiful. Her nails will be painted black.
I am trying to limit my world. I think I am succeeding.
The motel is small, about a dozen rooms. I am the only occupant. She comes with me. There is nothing around the place for miles. The radio said the winds would gust tonight, up to 60 miles an hour. Sand whips against the tin-covered door. The room is furnished sparely, sparsely – a bed, a dresser, a chair. The television is bolted to the wall. We have brought in a bottle of liquor in a brown paper bag. We have already been drinking for hours. Now we drink straight from the bottle, and then from the plastic cups we find in the bathroom. A touch of class. She rubs the back of my hands with her fingertips. Her nail polish is chipped. When she takes off her shirt, her breasts are firm and round. She takes off her boots and her jeans. She lies down, clothesless, on the cheap mattress. She looks every bit like the rolling hills punctuating the landscape just outside our doorstep.
",
sources: "",
biog:"Larry Fondation is the author of the novels Angry Nights and Fish, Soap and Bonds, and of \'Common Criminals\' and \'Unintended Consequences,\' both collections of short stories. His fiction focuses on the Los Angeles underbelly. His two most recent books feature collaborations with artist Kate Ruth. Fondation has lived in LA since the 1980s and worked for fifteen years as an organizer in South Central Los Angeles, Compton, and East LA. His fiction and non-fiction pieces have appeared in a range of diverse publications including Flaunt (where he is Writer-at-Large), Plastique, West, Fiction International, Night Train, Quarterly West, the Los Angeles Times and the Harvard Business Review. He is a recipient of a 2008-09 Christopher Isherwood Fellowship in Fiction Writing. lfondation@aol.com ",
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contents[15] = {
author: "Hugh Fox",
role: "Author",
title: "FRAGMENTOS",
text: " 'Listen, I might as well tell you straight,' said Dr. Goldmark, 78, vastly overweight, his skin the color of old (sun-tan lotion/sun-lamp, or was it just him?) gold, always sounding like he was enunciating a papal decree about the Last Judgement/Armageddon, 'we\'ve all gotta go. I\'ve got prostate cancer myself, chemo-this, radiation-that, whatever I can do, but even without it I\'d still have to go relatively soon, and....'
'Is that giving it to me straight or is it labyrinthically?'
John Bonnet in bed, as pale as whipped cream but still radiating out an aura of superman-ness , like he wasn\'t flesh and blood at all but some sort of cybernetic game figure.'
'So we\'re all doing to die, but that\'s not really what\'s on my mind.'
'I appreciate your making a house-call,' a little weaker now, his Knight Templar psychological shield down.
'Well, we\'re pals and, you know, housecalls were standard in the old days, my father made them all the time,' head down, a moment of prayer-homage, 'May he rest in peace.'
'Not me! Rest in turbulence!,' laughing, but Dr. Goldmark not responding, sitting there as serious as an empty picture frame on a living room wall.
'Why so serious? Is my end so imminent?'
'Look,' Goldmark persisting in almost solemnity, 'I\'ve been reading your fragmentos for decades. There must be about fifteen volumes of them published by now.'
'Twenty-three. You don\'t have the early ones.'
'But I\'d like to...how to put it...I\'m serums and shots and x-rays, not thesauruses, and in all your work I feel messages, but they\'re always implicit, never quite spelled out, no credos or papal declarations... just for fun could you spell them out a little clearer for me.'
'Deathbed confession.'
'Lifebed confession.'
'I\'m not any prophet or pope...I\'ve always declared, in fact, that I\'m pure entertainment, no \'messages.\''
'I wish I had a camera, a recorder...at least I have my ..somewhat failing...memory.'
Bonnet suddenly getting very grim, preoccupied, squirming for a moment and then getting statuefied. Goldmark had never seen him this way before, kept thinking Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, To Be or Not To Be, This is the Question, then Bonnet suddenly 'lifting up,' back against the bed, like he was ready to take
2.
the oath, 'Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and....'
'OK,' blinking, a little unsure and hesitant now, but still encyclicalish, 'Let me give it a try...' Closing his eyes for a moment, Goldmark thinking he\'d conked out, or worse, but then the words started in, like sleep-talking, soft, tiny-pawed, but at the same time in their own way Moses on the Mount prophetic, 'First of all, no Amorites versus the ancient Jews nonsense, with God on the Jews\' side: \'You can kill them and their children, take their animals and land.\' I and Thou became US, no matter what the beliefs, languages, colors, all part of the same club. To be human is to be same-human, in fact glorying in differences.. And it\'s true, the whole time I was growing up in Portland, the more foreign/exotic the better, my parents liked diversity like it was precious gems, that was the main thing, abraços, nothing to do with murder. Like sometimes I go into these fancy chain restaurants and over in the corner there\'s this whole family, a birthday party or something, all the grandmas and grandpas, kids, grand-kids, great-grand-kids...or maybe it\'s a few old women together, I always think widows, sometimes a few survivor guys...you get the sense of like there\'s something inside them all that says \'This is great, the way it ought to be,\' I know it sounds corney, but I don\'t even want to say love, let\'s call it one tribe, the whole world as one tribe, you see another colored face, hear another language, and instead of turning you off, it turns you on. I\'m an ex-Catholic-turned-Jew, maybe I want Christmas back, the Savior coming and he comes, we\'re saved, in our synagogue the local Moslem minister comes and gives sermons, we go over to the mosque, the Rabbi talks there. Love black, love YAKSA MASH, DOBCHA, Polish-Czech....love oriental, everyone works, not just a few bigshots on top and everyone losing their jobs and houses, everything imported, nothing made here, build new furniture factories, grow cotton, weave wool, make shoes and carpets, radiators and screwdrivers, hair-dryers....and re-create neighborhoods, parks, a sense of belonging, turn off the imports and limit lap-top time...I\'m back on the river and in the Scottish Highlands, on the seaside, in Cádiz, Spain, in Venice and Stockholm, pass the dumplings in Prague and then come back to the working woman-man USA...and the wild turkeys keep turkeying through my head, the deers and grouses...re-countrying it even in the middle of the city, like in Cambridge...'
He stops, worn out, there\'s obviously a lot more to share/say, but he\'s not up to it.
'So, OK,' says Goldmark, 'Any major problems or changes and give me a call, there\'s that Mrs. Gorman who lives upstairs, right? Free room and board for a little now-and-then care.'
'I\'ve got an emergency bell if I need her,' pointing to a little bell-
3.
pad on the table next to the bed, 'she\'s a good cook, lots of corned beef and cabbage. As Irish as I was supposed to be growing up...'
'We should have all stay \'there,\' you know what I mean, our pasts. Me in a shethl in Bohemia somewhere, you in Athenry, no Nazis, no potato famines,' stopping, looking up at and then beyond the ceiling, a look of hope turning slowly to disgruntalment, then a final smile and 'Shalom,' and he was gone and Bonnet closed his eyes and let the rains of exhaustion wash him painlessly into dreamless sleep.
",
sources: "",
biog:"Born in Chicago, 1932, polio at age 5,cured with new pre-Saulk experimental medicine, childhood immersed in opera, violin, piano, musical composition, art by his ex-violinist-turned-M.D. father, and frustrated actress mother, then 3 years of pre-med and a year of Medicine, dropped out of medical school and got a B.S. (Hum.) and M.A.(English) from Loyola U.in Chicago, first trip to Paris,London, Florence, Rome, Amsterdam, etc., then a PhD in American Literature from the U. of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Married Peruvian poet Lucia Ungaro de Zevallos. Prof. of American Literature, Loyola University in Los Angeles (now Loyola Marymount University) , 1958-1968, Professor in the Department of American Thought and Language, Michigan State University (1968-1999). Now retired. His most recent books are The Collected Poetry, Icehouse & The Thirteen Keys to Talmud (Crossing Chaos), and Revoir. ",
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contents[16] = {
author: "Jill Glass",
role: "Author",
title: "All Left",
text: "The headshot says, 'I\'m opening a Quizno\'s franchise. So I can control my destiny.' We\'re on a coffee date at my local café. Arranged by my dentist. He had no way of knowing how I feel about actors. 'Can you control mine?' I say. 'I\'d like to be a varsity cheerleader. Then a supermodel.' The headshot acts like he gets it. He smiles. His teeth are the color of soap opera.
He tries to follow me the two blocks home. I shake him at the corner of Forty and Skittish. Uh-oh. There. Under the mascara bush. Another gutted cat. Coyotes are crossing Ventura at Vineland. Coyotes are biting the hand that feeds them. Coyotes are knocking at my front door. Wait. Coyotes don\'t knock. They ring the doorbell. I\'d doorbell you now if I knew where you lived, Mr. No Forwarding Address. You slay me.
Animal Control says it\'s all in the canines. Precision incisions. They cut like surgeons. Slice through flesh to steal the heart. Leave the carcass hollow but whole lotta love. Oh, no not that word. It gave you a headache. Was that it? When I bought you the generic Advil? Or the time I used the same Kleenex twice? Our marriage bed is on the porch. What took me so long to think of it? I am waiting for Salvation. Or at least a soldier from its Army.
It started the night you saw my piqué turns. I had you spun on Ballerina legs. You didn\'t see the flaw. My extension. Always a problem on the right side, never the left. The left was on fire. Half a dancer. If I had two left feet I\'d have been Gelsey Kirkland. Too many nights at the barre.
First date. Vino Vino. A girl came up behind me and tucked the tag into my t-shirt. Oops. Other than that, I was all left. You said, 'I\'m going to fuck up your life.' Note to self: mark the time. On the watch I bought at Rite Aid.
Tomorrow, Mattress Discounters. Tonight, the couch. The sleeping pill is pulling. You had pretty shoes. Pretty feet. Like a girl\'s. Pretty eyes. Pretty mouth. Pretty teeth. Regular white, not soap opera white. I drowsy-dial. New York 411. No listing. You can\'t be listed. You were almost famous. I was scared of her. You know. Elisabeth Shue. Sorry. Li-sa. Why did you tell me you\'d dated? Painkiller high? From the time you rode the pony wrong and your jeans wore a hole through your ass. I told you to post. No letter. Miss you. Still.
On our second date, you said tell you something I\'d feel silly telling anyone else. Since Northridge, I have a superstition. I believe I control all the earthquakes in Los Angeles from the keypad of my alarm system. Not the main one, just don\'t touch the one in the laundry room, next to the detergent. It was actual Tide. You can\'t always scrimp. Sometimes you want the real thing.
",
sources: "",
biog:"Jill Glass is a former Sr. VP of marketing at A&M Records. Her fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Ninth Letter, ZYZZYVA, and Flashquake, and performed at the New Short Fiction Series, Los Angeles\' longest running spoken word series. She is a graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Fine Arts program. She lives in Los Angeles.",
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contents[17] = {
author: "Lyn Lifshin",
role: "Author",
title: "THE MAD GIRL WOULD JUST AS SOON HAVE RERUNS OF NIGHTS HIS FACE WAS ALL BLOW UPS",
text: "nights wild as mustard
leaving that much of
a stain nothing
takes out without
taking what\'s
been stained with it.
Tangy, yes but the
ambience was more
like chlorine she
said after you pulled
away though she
reeled you back, as if
it was in, where you
were best she\'ll
remember it better
before of course
the final dissolve
",
sources: "",
biog:"Lyn Lifshin\'s books include: the award-winning Another Woman Who Looks Like Me, and The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian; Barbaro, Persephone; 92 Rapple Drive; Drifting; Nutley Pond; Lost In The Fog; Light at the End, the Jesus poems; Before it\'s Light; and Cold Comfort. Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines, and Ms. Lifshin is the subject of an award winning documentary film, Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass, available from Women Make Movies. Her poem, The No More Apologizing, the No More Little, Laughing Blues has been called among the most impressive documents of the women\'s poetry movement, by Alicia Ostriker. An update to her Gale Research Projects Autobiographical series, On the Outside:Blues, Blue Lace, was published Spring 2003. For interviews, photographs, awards, more bio material, publication details, reviews, interviews, prose, samples of work and more, visit her web site is www.lynlifshin.com forthcoming in 2010 KATRINA from Poetic Matrix Press.",
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contents[18] = {
author: "Lyn Lifshin",
role: "Author",
title: "THE MAD GIRL FEELS LIKE THAT DOLPHIN",
text: "slithering up the Hudson
wrong way, trapped.
Something in her leans
against flaking wharves
she can\'t escape hurling
toward. The grease of
night coats her lips,
her fingers are driftwood.
What\'s gone, a charm
like the shadows, the
lightning and trains in
that Joshua Tree Motel
where not even his smell
stays, is on her as she
plunges past bleached
docks, driving smack in
to dead ends
",
sources: "",
biog:"Lyn Lifshin\'s books include: the award-winning Another Woman Who Looks Like Me, and The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian; Barbaro, Persephone; 92 Rapple Drive; Drifting; Nutley Pond; Lost In The Fog; Light at the End, the Jesus poems; Before it\'s Light; and Cold Comfort. Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines, and Ms. Lifshin is the subject of an award winning documentary film, Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass, available from Women Make Movies. Her poem, The No More Apologizing, the No More Little, Laughing Blues has been called among the most impressive documents of the women\'s poetry movement, by Alicia Ostriker. An update to her Gale Research Projects Autobiographical series, On the Outside:Blues, Blue Lace, was published Spring 2003. For interviews, photographs, awards, more bio material, publication details, reviews, interviews, prose, samples of work and more, visit her web site is www.lynlifshin.com forthcoming in 2010 KATRINA from Poetic Matrix Press.",
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contents[19] = {
author: "Marc Lowe",
role: "Author",
title: "UNTITLED",
text: "Flying on the wings of a dead bird I come to you every evening licking a plate of foie gras that has been prepared on the run. This is no nightmare, say I, but rather a dream of the way things must be between you and me. One dips and dives, shimmies and shakes through seas of uncertainty, each of us no more than a pawn placed on this earth to suffer, and then suffer again. Language is a game that takes us out of our heads, transports us to new and expansive exigencies. Wonderous is this landscape, impossible though it be to parse the leaves of the (ex)foliage that grow from your shins like radishes, the stuff of mirth, of matter, of mind. Who has given us this daily bread that we should forsake our only lover in favor of a pneumatic wraith? Who has cut open the shell that becomes the shaker inside of which the seeds of our youth have withered and died? What empty sounds this instrument makes when struck with a fist, or a fine-tuned fork! What hollowness resonates through our tongues when we bite into the scent that wafts from its exposed innards! Death surrounds us and we do not fear it, for it comes to one and all eventually, and there is no escape.
In bed you sit erect, eyes focused on the visions that chill you, make your teeth come loose and fall into the palms of your outspread hands, one by one, soundlessly. My tongue tastes your hair, your eyes, the insides of your wax-laden eardrums. You are weeping, but I have come to comfort you at the end of the tortuous road. You are blind, but I have come to restore your sight, albeit temporarily. When you touch the keyboard my heart expands, flutters, clicks like a pacemaker taken from the hollow chest of a man whose initials are D.C. You limn your life in ways others wouldn\'t understand. There are no voices here, there are only reflections (or was it confessions?), a line you have heard somewhere before, sung by one with a golden voice who understands suffering as well as you yourself do. Out at sea, you drift with the drifters, aimless and wretched, a tawdry fool with no sense of direction. North becomes South becomes Southwest becomes Northeast becomes Nowhere at all. And this is where you stand now, staring straight into the light, I behind you, my scythe at the ready. ",
sources: "",
biog:"Marc Lowe\’s work has appeared in 580 Split, Big Bridge, BlazeVOX, Caketrain, elimae, Farrago\’s Wainscot, Pindeldyboz, The Salt River Review, Sein und Werden, Storyglossia, and others. He is an associate editor of Mad Hatters\’ Review and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction writing at Brown University in Providence, RI, where he has been working on multiple book-length projects. Visit www.malo23.com for more information.",
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contents[20] = {
author: "Mary Mackey",
role: "Author",
title: "NIGHTLIGHT",
text: "more than the mad witches in the closet
combing the snakes on their heads
or the soft lumps of
flesh under the bed that turned
and moaned constantly like bare
maple branches scraping a windowpane
more than the blue things that hung
down from the ceiling
candle wax monsters
dripping teeth bared clawing away
rattle rattle like rats in
the wall
all of these were nothing compared
to the black sheet that folded
itself around me each night
at eight
anything could come out of it
demons speaking in tongues like crazed
preachers rusty blades
bent on slitting me from ear to ear
strange, thin men with melting
faces who would only speak in whispers
as they went about their gristly business
worse yet nothing might come
out because nothing was in there nothing
had ever been in there
a child could fall into that open pit
as easily as she could fall into a well
fill herself with blankness
feast on black blood
forget the keep the pulse in her wrist
ticking forget to breathe
",
sources: "",
biog:"Mary Mackey, author of five collections of poetry and 12 novels including The Widow\'s War, just published by Berkley Books. The poems in her most recent collection, Breaking the Fever (Marsh Hawk Press), have been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, Dennis Nurkse, Garrison Keillor, Ron Hansen, Dennis Schmitz, and Marge Piercy for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Often mixing Portuguese and English, they are lyrical, mystical, sometimes fierce, and at times even shocking. Mackey’s crisp-edged perceptions are \'set down with a sensuous, compassionate, utterly unflinching eye (Hirshfield).\' Visit wwww.marymackey.com for a sampling of her poetry.",
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author: "Mary Mackey",
role: "Author",
title: "Sugar Zone",
text: "Sempre me amedrontou I have always
been afraid tankers strung out along the horizon
like a necklace of black
seeds a ideia de ter um filho of the idea
of having a child let\'s get drunk
on cachaca forget her outstretched
hands her face the delicate angle of her nose
her children selling candy roses cor de piedras
color of stones amathest, emerald, diamond
all day the tankers come and go the mill grinds
barefoot men and women cut
and cut
for a whole week I missed Solange
Durante uma semana mes equeci
then clairty for three days
limpeza limpeza
they sleep on the
black and white tiles that wind beneath our feet
steal the food off our plates
We eat behind fences
the ticks drop off the
trees and settle between our cold beer
and cashews plastic straws blow down the beach
like transparent wands a ciudade so voltarava a existir
depois de 20 de janeiro (this city has only existed
since the 20th of January) for twenty minutes we
stood in the deserted street
figuei olhando looking
for something
no longer
there
",
sources: "",
biog:"Mary Mackey, author of five collections of poetry and 12 novels including The Widow\'s War, just published by Berkley Books. The poems in her most recent collection, Breaking the Fever (Marsh Hawk Press), have been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, Dennis Nurkse, Garrison Keillor, Ron Hansen, Dennis Schmitz, and Marge Piercy for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Often mixing Portuguese and English, they are lyrical, mystical, sometimes fierce, and at times even shocking. Mackey’s crisp-edged perceptions are \'set down with a sensuous, compassionate, utterly unflinching eye (Hirshfield).\' Visit wwww.marymackey.com for a sampling of her poetry.",
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contents[22] = {
author: "Suchoon Mo",
role: "Author",
title: "Call An Ambulance",
text: "I am in love
I love her
I am love sick
I am a love sick man
my love for her is sickening
I am sick
I am sickening
don\'t call her
call an ambulance
",
sources: "",
biog:"Suchoon Mo, a Mad Hatters\' Review composer, is a former Korean Army lieutenant and retired academic living in the semiarid part of Colorado, with his wife, a dog and a cat. He is a loner who writes poetry, composes much, and photographs nature. He is a martial art black belt (taekwondo) and officiates at championships on national and international levels. In summer time, he goes hunting with his air rifle, and shoots grass hoppers. Birds usually clean up the scene of killing. He is a voracious reader but he doesn't read novels anymore. They are too long and too wordy. He likes occasional coffee. He pours sugar in a cup, then pours coffee. This minimalist procedure of coffee drinking eliminates the use of spoon. His approach to poetry and music is similar. The ultimate objective is to create poetry with no word and music with no sound, and find truth which is not true at all. ",
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contents[23] = {
author: "Suchoon Mo",
role: "Author",
title: "To Be Nor Not To Be",
text: "let us go
you and I
to the sea food restaurant
where shrimps chant in the frying pan
and women don\'t talk about michelangelo
the sound of mantra
the voice of shrimps
the frying pan
mantra
mantra
mantra
to be or not to be
that\'s a silly question
just listen to shrimps
before you eat them
let us go
just you and I
",
sources: "",
biog:"Suchoon Mo, a Mad Hatters\' Review composer, is a former Korean Army lieutenant and retired academic living in the semiarid part of Colorado, with his wife, a dog and a cat. He is a loner who writes poetry, composes much, and photographs nature. He is a martial art black belt (taekwondo) and officiates at championships on national and international levels. In summer time, he goes hunting with his air rifle, and shoots grass hoppers. Birds usually clean up the scene of killing. He is a voracious reader but he doesn't read novels anymore. They are too long and too wordy. He likes occasional coffee. He pours sugar in a cup, then pours coffee. This minimalist procedure of coffee drinking eliminates the use of spoon. His approach to poetry and music is similar. The ultimate objective is to create poetry with no word and music with no sound, and find truth which is not true at all. ",
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contents[24] = {
author: "Suchoon Mo",
role: "Author",
title: "Going Home: Homage to Santoka",
text: "I danced with a girl
she had three legs and danced well
I was quite drunk then
when she goes to church
with the red shoes upon her head
a miracle will happen
she undresses
like an onion peeling itself
I have tears in my eyes
earth worms underground
are you happy there?
I spread my arms
she spreads her legs
martial art
saint valentine\'s day
two sparrows are not mating
my mind is empty
my bladder is full
oh I am sorry
you were playing a tuba
I didn\'t know
I can\'t eat bacon
the soprano is screaming
like a dying pig
so many lights on the street
I lost my shadow
the undertaker
he dumped the deceased in the pit
took the casket home
a frog came to the door
it was a jehovah\'s witness
reborn
in a dense fog
I drove past an abandoned house
it was my home
- previously appeared in Journal of Truth and Consequence ",
sources: "",
biog:"Suchoon Mo, a Mad Hatters\' Review composer, is a former Korean Army lieutenant and retired academic living in the semiarid part of Colorado, with his wife, a dog and a cat. He is a loner who writes poetry, composes much, and photographs nature. He is a martial art black belt (taekwondo) and officiates at championships on national and international levels. In summer time, he goes hunting with his air rifle, and shoots grass hoppers. Birds usually clean up the scene of killing. He is a voracious reader but he doesn't read novels anymore. They are too long and too wordy. He likes occasional coffee. He pours sugar in a cup, then pours coffee. This minimalist procedure of coffee drinking eliminates the use of spoon. His approach to poetry and music is similar. The ultimate objective is to create poetry with no word and music with no sound, and find truth which is not true at all. ",
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contents[25] = {
author: "Jefferson Navicky",
role: "Author",
title: "Carsonville – pop. 13,500 ",
text: "more than the mad witches in the closet
combing the snakes on their heads
or the soft lumps of
flesh under the bed that turned
and moaned constantly like bare
maple branches scraping a windowpane
more than the blue things that hung
down from the ceiling
candle wax monsters
dripping teeth bared clawing away
rattle rattle like rats in
the wall
all of these were nothing compared
to the black sheet that folded
itself around me each night
at eight
anything could come out of it
demons speaking in tongues like crazed
preachers rusty blades
bent on slitting me from ear to ear
strange, thin men with melting
faces who would only speak in whispers
as they went about their gristly business
worse yet nothing might come
out because nothing was in there nothing
had ever been in there
a child could fall into that open pit
as easily as she could fall into a well
fill herself with blankness
feast on black blood
forget the keep the pulse in her wrist
ticking forget to breathe
",
sources: "",
biog:"Jefferson Navicky\'s work has been published in Bombay Gin, Tarpaulin Sky, Cross-Cultural Poetics, Chain, and is forthcoming in Artifice. In 2007, Black Lodge Press published his chapbook, Map of the Second Person. He teaches Composition & Literature at Southern Maine Community College and lives in South Portland.",
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contents[26] = {
author: "Jefferson Navicky",
role: "Author",
title: "NIGHTLIGHT",
text: "At a bar/restaurant that used to be a bank in Akron, near the Football Hall of Fame, I eat lunch with my mother, father and brother. Mother leaves to wash her hands. Father and I order the soup, his favorite, but a giant bowl of greasy oatmeal arrives with cucumbers on top. Father eats all his soup in a matter of minutes. My brother orders a quiche served in a small bowl. I am jealous. I eat a few bites of my soup but have to stop because of the gag reflex. Then we drive to a bigbox bookstore. Mother wanders off to look for books on dyslexia. My father, brother and I find an old paperback thriller father gave my brother and me when we were young. He explains how he continues to order it for his friends through various channels, different editions, a new preface. My brother and I are arguing with father about the story line, a discrepancy of plot, when I look over to the magazine rack and see my friend B. who has driven up from down south. B., who hasn\'t seen me yet, lets out an orgasmic sigh when he finds the magazine he is looking for. I am very excited to see B. as I haven\'t spoken with him since graduate school. I go over to talk. He says to me, 'You\'ve got to see this magazine – they\'ve put the complete gestalt smell of a World War II battleship inside its pages.' We stand shoulder to shoulder and he opens the magazine. The smell of musty clothes and metal drifts out like the moment of entering my grandparents\' house, but there\'s something else present, something closer to sinking.",
sources: "Jefferson Navicky\'s work has been published in Bombay Gin, Tarpaulin Sky, Cross-Cultural Poetics, Chain, and is forthcoming in Artifice. In 2007, Black Lodge Press published his chapbook, Map of the Second Person. He teaches Composition & Literature at Southern Maine Community College and lives in South Portland.",
biog:"",
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contents[27] = {
author: "Mary Beth O\'Connor",
role: "Author",
title: "Sociology",
text: "For over two hundred years, the objects have been on the move from house to house, making the occupants rich, changing their luck, qualifying them to marry the hero or the prettiest girl in Miss Beck\'s class--or dooming them to poverty, social ridicule, depression. Why are people drawn toward the odd 18th century ladder back chair? Why are the most valuable objects drawn toward the richest houses? Why are the golden retrievers out chasing sticks flung way out on the water? I say it is because of the sad reality. Cherry armoires, porcelain topped tables exert a palpable energy which creates a conflict: emptiness requires fulfillment. It\'s simple physics. The object feels the draw, the pull--it\'s a kind of horizontal gravity. Over at Mr. Cleaves house, the new Empire sideboard is left overnight alone in a bare room. It cries but Mr. Cleaves has instructed his family to ignore its cries, difficult as that may be. For, if attended to and comforted, it will become passive and lazy. Left alone, however, it will exert its true personality! It will draw expensive silver and china from houses near and far. Of course, it\'s a dangerous period, that first night, because if it turns out to be a weak piece of wood, not even worthy of the name 'furniture,' it will suffer the same fate--it will be drawn into the house of--Who knows?! It will begin to tremble, then shiver and shake, then slide slowly out the door and there will be nothing Mr. Cleaves can do to stop it. Hence the furrowed brows and visible signs of worry on collectors and mere owners (Ha!) everywhere. Until the power of various items has been established, it\'s anyone\'s guess what one will find when he comes downstairs in the morning! And new neighbors are always arriving, and suspicious. Invite the Ransoms over for a drink and watch them eye your stuff, matching their pets against yours.
",
sources: "",
biog:"Mary Beth O\'Connor lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York State and teaches at Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY. Her chapbook \'Smackdown! Poems about the Professor Business\' won the 2006 Teachers’ Voice chapbook competition and was published early in 2007 under the pseudonym Anna E. Moss (say it fast), because she had a few concerns about keeping her job, but what the hell. Ms. O\'Connor has also published in Compass Rose, Blue Earth Review, Massachusetts Review, Blithe House Quarterly, Nimrod, Blueline, and some others. She\'s thrilled to appear in this collision of Mad Hatter and Bunk!",
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contents[28] = {
author: "Sarah Sarai",
role: "Author",
title: "hAve You Been Married, the Sister asK",
text: "I were chosen I know to asignify aboriginal
rage Ascribed esoteric as waltztime frenzy.
I know were visited like were mystical
and like were slut Or mysticless but
belovable and not slut but container.
For Radiant Fountain, She does overflow
to willing and un.
Neath bottom line am to our death will get
years before were wished.
Clear enough if say I: Sister,
unthink pincushion angels ajig and
no meaning in a ring (O! Smêagol) Til
boom-boomed in fire heart-scalding. Then
cleansy in love (for sweet glide to Home).
",
sources: "",
biog:"Sarah Sarai is an unsymmetrical woman with a symmetrical name. Her poetry collection, The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX), is a mystical tender playful filigree of a recently released book. Fiction and/or poetry in Fairy Tale Review, Mississippi Review, Threepenny Review, Willows Wept Review, et al. MFA/fiction/Sarah Lawrence.",
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contents[29] = {
author: "Sarah Sarai",
role: "Author",
title: "We Are Jack Kerouac",
text: "Though not in the sense
we were born in Lowell Mass
or beat it out of there to
get famous, though we
gassed up and burned rubber
in Lowell Mass and in
other states and cities
we hitched rides and smoked
cigarettes on route 66 and
interstate 90 and on weed
and acid on a crazy-eight-
curlicue of L.A. freeways
merging like a concrete Möbius
swapping out autos so on
Thanksgiving-Friday in
nineteen seventy something
we knew that sensory swirl
would be ours, daily everlasting;
in the daily everlasting we\'d
lean into endless curves,
and though laws of identity
have things equal to themselves,
i.e., Jack = Jack, there\'s
the poetic corollary that things
are equal to much that\'s wild
and so beautiful, like our
holy transfixion on birds
thrumming wings in
the blue guitar of dreams.
But truly we\'re Jack Kerouac
when morning light catches
now our thrumming adventures,
embarked on long ago.
",
sources: "",
biog:"Sarah Sarai is an unsymmetrical woman with a symmetrical name. Her poetry collection, The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX), is a mystical tender playful filigree of a recently released book. Fiction and/or poetry in Fairy Tale Review, Mississippi Review, Threepenny Review, Willows Wept Review, et al. MFA/fiction/Sarah Lawrence.",
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contents[30] = {
author: "Tom Savage",
role: "Author",
title: "The Meets",
text: "Lakme meets The Pearl Fishers.
Mars meets Pluto.
Ozzie & Harriet meet Dracula.
The Marx Brothers meet The Holocaust.
Irma Vep meets Suor Angelica.
Russalka meets Die Walkure.
The First Emperor meets Hello Dolly.
La Fille Du Regiment meets Ivanhoe.
Das Rheingold meets the composer Heinechen.
Casablanca meets L.A. Confidential.
H.D. meets Queen Victoria.
Mary Stuart meets Grand Hotel.
Allen Ginsberg meets John Milton
Oscar Wilde meets Sappho.
Jean Genet meets Joan of Arc.
Satyagraha meets The Mahabharata.
The Peony Pavillion meets Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
Moby Dick meets A Brief Encounter.
The 39 Steps meets A Stairway to Heaven.
Abbott & Costello meet Bach\'s B Minor Mass.
The Lost Horizon meets Kundun.
Walt Whitman meets Basho.
Shakyamuni Buddha meets the Maitreya.
The Tempest meets Tea and Sympathy.
The Magic Flute meets The Red Violin.
Lucia Di Lammermoor meets I Love Lucy.
Michaelangelo Buonnarotti meets Michelangelo Antonioni
Federico Fellin meets George Melies
Odilon Redon meets August or Jean Renoir
Auguste Rodin meets Rodan
Arthur Rimbaud meets Rambo
Amy Beach meets Voltaire
Victor Hugo meets de la Rochefoucauld
Marcel Proust meets Goethe
James Joyce meets Mary Magdalene
Murasaki Shikibu meets Gertrude Stein
Frank O\'Hara meets Buster Keaton
Tennyson meets Flaubert
Edith Sitwell meets Emily Dickinson
Sir Mick Jagger meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Claude Debussy meets Toru Takemitsu
Owen Wister meets John Wayne
Willa Cather meets Aphra Behn
Marilyn Monroe meets Cleopatra
Anne Bradstreet meets Marianne Moore
Elizabeth Bishop meets William Shakespeare
Dante Alighieri meets Knut Hamsun
Ingmar Bergman meets Gustav Klimt
Gregory Corso meets Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lord Byron meets Torquato Tasso
Aristophanes meets Farid Ud-Din Attar
Fanny Mendelssohn meets Sigrid Unset
Claudio Monteverdi meets Jean Cocteau
The Night of the Hunter meets The Twentieth Century
Les Enfants du Paradis meets Beyond Rangoon
The Full Monty meets The Man Who Came To Dinner
Dinner at Eight meets Les Quatre Cent Coups
Zero de Conduite meets The Bowery Boys
The Three Stooges meet Moliere
Naked Lunch meets The Sun Also Rises
H.G. Wells meets Thomas Wolfe
The Christmas Carol meets Parsifal
Tristan und Isolde meets Die Aegyptische Helene
Ah Wilderness meets King Lear
Frederic Chopin meets Wislawa Szymborska
Edgard Varese meets Robert Schumann
Noel Coward meets Jean Racine
Nothing Sacred meets The Burmese Harp
Die Frau Ohne Schatten meets Woman Without a Face
Street Scene meets The Old Dark House
Island of Lost Souls meets Elmer Gantry
Knocked Up meets After Life
King Kong meets Blithe Spirit
Mr. Deeds Goes To Town meets North By Northwest
The Thief of Baghdad meets The Man Who Laughs
M meets You Can\'t Take It With You
Philadelphia meets O Brother Where Art Thou
The English Patient meets Dr. Kildare
The Hairy Ape meets Mighty Joe Young
Sunset Boulevard meets Journey to the End of the World
Citizen Kane meets Monsieur Verdoux
Turandot meets The Birds
Ivan the Terrible meets The King of Hearts
Phantom of the Opera meets A Night at the Opera
Dinner at Eight meets Guess Who\'s Coming to Dinner.
Steamboat Round the Bend meets The Titanic.
The Devil Wears Prada meets The Earrings of Madame De...
Quai De Brumes meets The Sweet Smell of Success.
Strangers on a Train meets The Shanghai Express
After Life meets The Night of the Living Dead.
Dark Victory meets Orphans of the Storm.
The Little Foxes meets The Red Balloon.
Regle de Jeu meets Les Enfants du Paradis.
The Gay Divorcee meets Shoot the Piano Player
God and the Buddha meet and disappear into each other.
",
sources: "",
biog:"Tom Savage\'s latest book of poetry, his ninth, is called Brainlifts. It was published in August 2008 by Straw Gate Books.",
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contents[31] = {
author: "Davis Schneiderman",
role: "Author",
title: "Black is the Color/ None is the Number",
text: "We will not talk about the rotting maggots drooling over a distant relative\'s fortune; we will not talk about the Last Supper or the epiphanic moments at the end of James Joyce stories; we will not discuss the macrobiotic, isomorphic, corrupted plane of dissected sheep brains cluttering high-school science labs at the state and county pen; we will not talk about the tubercular lines of schizophrenic mental patients shut up by the apparatus of hook, line, and sinker, or lock, stock, and barrel by the anal retentive repetition of your most god-awful roach motel; we won\'t consider raising our sphincters toward the sky on Bastille Day or letting our subliminal kidneys excrete vials of ethereal urine and so remove effete nitrogenous matter from the blood; we won\'t even think about your goddamned happy hour with its shimmering bags of cellulite and collagen, the gel-filled facsimiles of breast meat cutting an arcane swath across that composite film of makeup, ash, crushed pretzels, and beer foam on the bar, reminiscent of your breath upon a window pane warmed just above the freezing point; we won\'t discuss the cut-off shorts and tank tops, the high-school mascots of half-feathered falcons, pre-processed burgers, and extinct, impotent lumberjacks sporting confederate flag buttons made from your secret cache of genetically altered swine; we won\'t imply that yes, a gelatinous conspiracy of candy magnates spikes everything with the cartilage of your ancestors caught up in the fervor of professional sports and lovemaking by applied mathematics; we won\'t fixate on the shunts of broken light peeling in from those dim basement windows; we won\'t watch those 13,000 camels jump through 12,999 needles in endless variations of musical chairs and negative dialectics; we won\'t broadcast the necessary angels dancing on pins and needles in your lazy child\'s legs, those little eyeballs rolling across the inside of baby fat layers, accelerating the process by which we all receive cancer; and most, importantly, we won\'t mention the net-and-bolt operation of the ever-growing multitude, the rotting limbs of oil-soaked retinas, the sorry gaze of the steel-toed work boots; we won\'t talk about the way it\'ll all go down Moses, the soft caress of bodies, the sexual dynamics of entrepreneurial elephants and syphilitic donkeys; we\'ll never tell anyone how we\'ll creep into the boardroom with our city-street perfume, our nine to five bedroom eyes and the cocksure swagger of our faux-leather briefcases; we won\'t tell your crooked truant agents about the lawsuits, the infringements, the incidents and payoffs, the wet, lolling lilt of your tongue and we chant the forbidden names of our old world saviors, 'Astaroth'— 'Baal'— 'Umma-Segnus'—'Sebek'; we won\'t forget your faces, scarred by the chemical drinking water, mutilated by age-defying makeup and jump-cut gangster films; we\'ll never say a word as we raise your expectations and entice you with French Fries soaked in beef tallow, washed in the blood of your people, baptized in pools of ultra-solvent hemoglobin; we won\'t even think to mention when our crooked fingers rub your head, warm and inviting, when we place our fingers on your wet lips and together incant the dewdrops; we\'ll never tell a soul how your face smelled of sunshine as the 3-inch titanium bolt penetrated the side of your skull, shocking your brain into hemorrhage, splattering delicious blood all over our blue Wal-Mart aprons; and we\'ll never tell anyone how softly you fell, there, in the boardroom at the end of the earth, just after the data has been processed in a stream of cum and industrial surfactant, ecstatic at the rise in your own yellow-tinted fortune; if asked, we\'ll keep our mouths shut, and hold everything in our matrix of skin, in a secret of tendon, of ligament, of bone.",
sources: "",
biog:"Davis Schneiderman is a multimedia artist and writer whose works include the forthcoming novel Drain (Northwestern University Press 2010), the novels DIS (BlazeVox) and Abecedarium (Chiasmus); the co-edited collections \'Retaking the Universe: Williams S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization\' (Pluto) and The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism\'s Parlor Game (Nebraska, 2009); and the audiocollage Memorials to Future Catastrophes (Jaded Ibis) (published in Mad Hatters\' Review). His creative work has been accepted by numerous publications including Fiction International, The Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, and Exquisite Corpse. He is Director of Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books, an editor of \'The &NOW AWARDS: The Best Innovative Writing,\' and he directs the NEH-funded Virtual Burnham Initiative. He can be found, virtually, at www.davisschneiderman.com.",
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contents[32] = {
author: "John Moore Williams",
role: "Author",
title: "strange flesh, or, happily neverafter",
text: "we are never closer to the estate of beasts than when we are children. the
smile\'s a wicked scythe\'s gleam, reminder of the cut wheat, the slit shell
disclosing a tooth-cracking kernel.
when the boys come
round the corner they are always disappearing. feral flocks of seagulls
flapping up the quay, bone beaks like styluses writing in the deflated
octopi\'s expired ink. their coats flap up, leathery, in the seabreeze, the
spoiled cunt tang, forgotten angels of their own cradles. the hours
watched in vigil for a slowly lapsing self.
what his hand discovered flopping in the humid fault; a fat maggot
writhing. on command it vomits a pearly silk. this he weaves into the new
coarse hairs, tattered flag for a new prow. this he feeds to his father
who grows big in evenings, sipping the excrescence of rotted grain from
amber vases. it\'s all a question of degree. as in, is Saturn a star in
waiting?
Wendy sucks a cigarette rolled in sugar and spice, they say, giggling,
she\'s practicing; Pan\'s tattered jacket adorned with a puppy dog\'s snipped
tail (the dog itself always running, yapping, round him, satellite to a
failing star, always begging for its tail back; ever since it lost it it\'s
lost the knack for communiqués, a torrid clawing behind the ears earns a
rumbling, chthonic growl, a swift kick in the belly a happy yap) Wendy
pinned there in lieu of his shadow. The leavings of which: a staccato
track of limping threads, worm cilia waving in the soft night\'s toxic
breeze, HO gauge train tracks whistling forlornly into the night\'s hollow
meatus. Botched Siamese-ing for estranged twins.
When he sleeps the snails gather to sip the opal essence of his thin,
shivering sweat. Their mucusoid tracks twine down from the furred caverns
of his nostrils, weep from the meaty corners of his eyes, accruing in
horny bands across his back in the night, sealing over the angry weals of
the bullwhip Wendy wields, sometimes, at his bequest.
standing here on the streetcorner they remind her of nothing so much as a
murder of crows, in their iridescent pinions waiting for another social
crucifixion. each one\'s tongue\'s an Xacto knife. She forgives them, as she
knows she must, for if they didn\'t wield them thus the sharply angled
blades would only make a mess of the soft pink inner meat of their cheeks;
that would never do.
Tootles is ever and always
saying \'tootles.\' it\'s so cute.
it\'s not his marbles he\'s lost, indeed,
it\'s these he\'s always winning.
he\'s got a leather bag a-jingle with their glass.
his eyes, they resemble
nothing ever so much
as the tired analog watch strapped
to a bundle of dynamite
there\'s nothing so sad as an animal grown old. its newfound impotence
inexplicable as a man\'s assumed pilgrimage toward ends can never be. its
confusion over the shuffling hobble it has acquired so clear in emptied
eyes.
to get back to the streetcorner. there they strut, heads jutting
mechanically forwards and back, looking for a corpse\'s secrets to whisper.
the words, if words they\'d be and not sere gusts of no season\'s wind,
would have to come out round the sugary lumps of gum harbored in the
crannies of molars, and this, surely, seems impossible enough. Wendy\'s
been chewing hers so long it has surely gone moldy. but she\'s not telling.
Tootles is floating over there, and it\'s only the thin band of floss the
Twins have bound \'round his ankles – that, and the purse full of glass –
that keep him down. he bumps, desperate as any one of the congregation of
moths that are always accompanying him, against the lamppost. this latter
the moths ignore in favor of the honey runnels of Tootle\'s frustrated
tears. their long wire tongues lap ever so delicately at these rosary
beads, never breaking the tenuous meniscus, only skimming a microscopic
particle off the top. a pound of fat is as relative as morals to a child.
with these loving, soft furred beasts, no doubt he would have drowned by
now.
Wendy remember the first time they ever tried. supine on rough turd-brown
carpet, her lacy blue and white panties, having been husked out from
beneath her pinafore, which stands now thrusting absurdly straight-upward
in the air, down around her ankles. Pan\'s down there, his cunning tongue
telling lies her little pink pearl, truculent in its drunkenness (they\'d
been sipping añejo all night long from crystal wine glasses) refuses to
buy. the door hangs, a lolling wooden tongue, open, and at one point she
glimpses Tootles shuffling by, heading to the bathroom, latest winnings
clinking glassily in his furry little palms. Hot tears trickle out from
the pursed lips of her eyes. Despite all this, when morning\'s light
flooding thinly through the window above found them still together, Pan
curled, fetally embracing her thighs, she\'d nearly drifted out the window.
it hadn\'t taken any of Tink\'s golden powder at all.
all boys are hunters at heart, Wendy knows; it\'s a question of genetic
memory. Pan\'s got a fine memory, Wendy knows; otherwise, why would he
still have returned, generations later, for spring cleaning. (It\'s only
now that Wendy\'s noticed that there\'s another girl\'s made her way to the
corner; she\'s only noticed because of the way Pan\'s been flitting back and
forth between Wendy and the newbie.) It\'s not a question of specifics,
whether it was this year or thirty later; a hunter\'s memory doesn\'t work
like that. for instance, he may not remember the markings of this
particular one that got away, but he\'ll remember how it escaped him, and
learn from his mistake. the next one won\'t be so lucky. (It looks like
Alice, as far as Wendy can remember the story.)
Tink\'s a streetcorner slinger, her vials
deadly as any Doc\'s lead. though her
munitions glow magically, Wendy\'s
never known a child could resist turning
dusthead. Tink: I did it all out of love
Wendy knows it, she does, if the batch
is poisoned, it\'s all Pan\'s fault. Pan\'s
the man, really, it\'s him as turns \'em
all on; it\'s not my fault I love him, and
all his eyes fall upon
we, Wendy thinks, are the world\'s last and best hope to laugh at itself.
all the death it machines so efficiently, wrapping pretty pink meat up
beneath breathable plastic. it was the best way to turn a profit out of
the war, you know. after all, do you know how much it costs to raise one
head of cattle! just to turn out a few burgers, a steak or two, a
shepherd\'s pie?! \'twas lucky we learned a way to produce petroleum from
the bones, eh? we, Wendy thinks, professional mourners at the unending
funeral. I wish we could get paid.
Alice doesn\'t like scones; they make her all big, an alien in her own
pretty skin, and although Wendy\'s just politely offered her one, she must
reluctantly decline. and as soon as she sees the thwarted look on Wendy\'s
face, she knows she\'s made the right decision. Pan has no truck with big
girls, they both know. But the vial? That, Alice doesn\'t know – she can\'t
remember what happened the last time. So she asks:
'Will this one make me big?'
Tink and Pan give simultaneous, knowing chimes. And Wendy only looks ready
to spit acid.
'No, no, no. This one makes you fly.'
So now they\'re all flying, though Wendy hadn\'t wanted to tonight – there
was a show to see, after all! – but with Alice out she\'d had no choice.
Michael\'s the worst of them all, already flying higher than any of the
rest, even Pan, and still chasing a gaggle of those silly little azure
ones, looking for more, though no one else can see them. Wendy calls out
after him to come down, but he just calls back, \'no, Mother, I don\'t want
any tea,\' and then everybody else is giggling, Alice worst of all. Alice
hates tea.
Wendy can tell Pan\'s got something else on his mind. they\'re all
fluttering like wraiths now, and Pan passes an eggshell-smooth hand
through Wendy\'s cloacal periphery, fluttering lithe fingers across her
ivories, which then emerge clutching a placenta-dripping egg. \'one less
babe sacrificed to old daddy Cronus,\' he says and Wendy frowns; he\'s
always calling her Daddy Darling that, and her dreams are now filled with
images of him (and she couldn\'t say which she\'d rather it be) sliding into
her bed to impale her with a huge stylus of scrimshawed bone. in the
dreams she\'s always the size of a voodoo doll, or so it seems, so she
can\'t say whether the stylus really is a spear, or merely a pen. \'this one
was doomed not to be a mommy,\' Pan\'s saying with that weed-whacking grin
of his, and with a comical windup, hurls it down to the city below, where
it explodes in pigeon-shit monochromatics upon the helmet of a riot cop,
momentarily arresting his feverish nightsticking of a protestor crowned in
sprigs of datura.
Wendy sees the city splayed below, Cartesian two-dimensionality where the
flatlands allow, spiraling into extra-Euclidean space where earth sweeps
up from sea in sensuous hill slopes. below the sea an oblivion just barely
scintillating with refracted light. she thinks of lives as those shards of
luminance on the deep obscurity of time\'s restless sea, but then, that
would imply the necessity of a source, a moon to scorch the darkness to
life. much better the city itself, a more conveniently humane metaphor;
Cartesian subjects arrayed on a Cartesian grid. localizable, thus
knowable, coordinates. pick your number you\'ve a name, a desire, a status.
Space states us. Not, \'I think…\', but \'I occupy space…\'
But then, what is she, bereft of streetcorner now, floating up here in the
silence the Boys\' laughter hardly penetrates?
he says he knows the story\'s always say it\'s mother who bore death into
the world. pandora\'s box, eve\'s apple – the hero he \'not born of woman\',
or at the very least, \'of virgin\', of woman not woman but girl, thus
unpossessed of eve\'s state of death. he says he knows it\'s he – he\'s seen
the maggots erupting from pirate\'s and redskin\'s fallen flesh – the maggot
that he carries worming its way into the other.
he\'s never let it touch her yet.
each body she encountered was, inevitably, his. though she could not be
sure in what way(s) she meant that. \'meant that\'; there is something to
question: did she ever \'mean\' it, or even state the thought? in the end
the questions are fruitless before the fact. one way or another he
possessed them as surely as she possessed them (they her?). whether it was
her obsession that was medium, carrying him through her flesh to swallow
each isolate body she pressed herself against, or whether it was in the
most minute perception of details, the thought that this one\'s nipples
were neither pierced nor as small and prickling pink as his, or that this
one\'s hair was an oil spill of tentacles next to his field of windblown
summer wheat, the fact remained, more solid than each body she rushed
tidally against. in the end it was the former possibility which was the
more terrifying: that in her flesh\'s loneliness, it\'s aching distance from
him, his cells had somehow come to occupy the yawning space between her
own, filling her up with the negation of him, which roared endlessly out
to consume each new boy, each tender lass, till the grey light of dawn
found their eyes all iris-night, their flesh repulsive as an ancient
maid\'s.
though he was the very potential of boy to become man, become murderer,
though locked in hairless flesh through exile, he had never seemed so
feral, so fearful, as the night Tink realized that – just as another
pitiful joy pumped fitfully, a remote and thoughtless engine, into the
fleshly ends of her thighs.
nighttime. we are never closer to the estate of beasts than when we are
thirteen. hovering on the cusp of some cataclysmic change...tectonic
siftings just beneath the sheaths of dead flesh that slick us – oil on
ocean waves – pushed up and back and aside by corpuscular magma, up
through the cracks in us, in the shell of \'innocence\', newfound
imperatives resculpting once genderless flesh into a named cast, the mold
an alphabet of teeth have carved from the hull of flesh and bone. forever
worrying the pink flesh that webs cheek to jaw, the web dissolved to
ragged threads the tongue\'s blind worm shoulders aside.
these the soiled intimacies we embrace. the glut that is their glory,
their fetid musk a paean to things denied, the lightless grottoes we can\'t
abide, the humors they secrete. Tink thinks. watching Wendy watching Alice
watching Pan, a Bermuda triangle of eyes in which countless dreams shuttle
back and forth, into and out of lost regions, never to reach their charted
shores. the naked writhing that hurtles from those eyes! they are all
flying now, the world slipstreaming along torsos webbed in lace, an
incessantly discarded lover, and all they all can think is Pan. Pan the
man, the boy-man, the panic that shutters them to goose pimples.
all through the ceremony – Alice\'s rite of passage – she nurses that
throbbing, the exquisite brevity it enshrines and translates into memory,
restorative storage. his mouth upon her breast, the angry, scarlet eye his
mouth transubstantiated in its angry suckling. from nipple into gate,
throbbing moment of intransient passage, portal to a pulsing, intransigent
life. this is the one, the only, amelioration for this moment, watching
Alice, in breathless waiting, throbbing off into the kiss that will, she
thinks, poor girl, give her life, as the rabbi\'s words quickened golem\'s
clay flesh, redacted genesis.
",
sources: "",
biog:"John Moore Williams is the author of three chapbooks: I discover i is an android (Trainwreck Press, 2008) and writ10 (VUGG Books, 2008) and, with Matina Stamatakis, Xenomorphia (Wheelhouse, 2009). His visual and verbal works have appeared in Word for/ Word, Other/Clutter, Otoliths, Turntable / Bluelight, BlazeVox, Shampoo and elsewhere. His work has also appeared in the anthologies &Now, Avant-Garde for the New Millennium and Ectoplasmic Necropli.",
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contents[33] = {
author: "Stephen Webber",
role: "Author",
title: "Tulip Temple",
text: "In spring on the sidewalk rehearsing vowel sounds.
'I would love to be able to lift weight with sunshine,'
she spoke with a strong, perfumed French accent,
the kind that pronounces La Sorbonne and Mont Blanc
without error and in almost every sentence.
'Sounds rounder,' her friend corrected in a voice like hers,
'I comprehend I feel it too these sounds are hard.'
Please repeat. 'I would love to be able to lift weight with sunshine,'
chin held high, wrists full of airiness.
Her friend took heart. 'Mmm, oui. Again.
Your ahs your ohs– like his, rounder more round.'
The weather grew warmer, the wind relaxed
we moved inside her downstairs house.
She tested my ear, whispering.
'I would love to be able to lift weight with sunshine.'
'The phrase you turn is marvelous,' said I.
She sat here, and spoke soft.
----------------
This guy Charles next to me,
I notice pairs of things,
people holding hands.
His cowboy boots, her actual glasses.
unpaired objects, pairs in things,
the man selling shaved ice from the back of his pickup –
there is a side of him I never see.
The same is true for him of me.
Charles recalls his earlier intoxicated chanting of
Yomaloma, yomaloma, convinced it means something.
'Back in the days of Earth First,' he says,
'Ed Abbey and me would do such-and-such.'
Charles goes on like that.
I toss pebbles at the washed-out road
to smooth it out, make it reflective,
you know, like me. Each house along the street
deserves to be atop a little hill,
I remember dripping near the beloved\'s pool:
'You\'re exactly what I want,
everything about you is right,' she said, I stood naked.
Yomaloma, yomaloma, says Charles,
twice, so it exists.
-----------
",
sources: "",
biog:"Stephen Lloyd Webber has had poetry published most recently in Sous Rature, Whiskey Island Magazine, Western Humanities Review and Yellow Medicine Review. I have flash fiction forthcoming in Skidrow Penthouse and a literary essay on Sun Ra\'s poetics in Black Magnolias. I serve as associate editor for Puerto del Sol in Las Cruces, where I live with my wife, painter Jade Boswell.",
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author: "Stephen Webber",
role: "Author",
title: "The Scarf Exhibit",
text: "She spoke with the old man long enough to finally coerce him to transform water into seaweed, and the
seaweed dispersed into snakes. When he was done he transformed her into a multicolored scarf and she
floated downriver through serpents and seaweed. A snake bit through her – the museum where she hangs
today had not known this was the cause of the mend. She washed in a water source, her essence changed,
her appearance was made presentable.
",
sources: "",
biog:"Stephen Lloyd Webber has had poetry published most recently in Sous Rature, Whiskey Island Magazine, Western Humanities Review and Yellow Medicine Review. I have flash fiction forthcoming in Skidrow Penthouse and a literary essay on Sun Ra\'s poetics in Black Magnolias. I serve as associate editor for Puerto del Sol in Las Cruces, where I live with my wife, painter Jade Boswell.",
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contents[35] = {
author: "Changming Yuan",
role: "Author",
title: "Yellow Comedy",
text: "Using my yellow tail
I yellow-swam
From the Yellow River
As a yeast of the yellow peril
Against the yellow alert
In yellow journalism
With a yellow hammer
And a yellow sheet
I yielded to the yellow metal
At a yellow spot
Close to Yellowstone
People call me yellow Jack
Some hailed me as a yellow dog
When I yelped on my yellow legs
To flee from the yellow flu
Speaking Yerkish like a yellow warbler
I have composed many yellow pages
For a yeasty yellow book
To be published by the yellow press
Don\'t worry, I will yell low.
",
sources: "",
biog:"Changming Yuan grew up in rural China and authored three books before moving to Canada. Currently Yuan teaches writing in Vancouver and has had poetry published or forthcoming in (for example) Descant (CA), Exquisite Corpse, Kritya (IN), Iodine, Istanbul Lit Rev (Turkey), London Magazine (UK), Nokturno (Finland), Porcupine, Private (IT), Sentence, Stylus (AU) and more than 80 other literary journals.",
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contents[36] = {
author: "Louis E. Bourgeois",
role: "Author",
title: "Tract",
text: "Marcel Hoon, dressed completely in black, stood on the empty tomb of H. Logenback and spoke slow and clear to the presumed mourners: you flat-nose sons-of-bitches, hear me, hear me. You must understand that H. Logenback was not a man of distinction but of distillation, his mind I mean. So, you look at me funny as if I don\'t understand my own message. But there my friends you are mistaken! This message is not for you tin-heads, you Malcodian haters, you sidewalk glancers, you Dada worshipers. What I said is not a reprieve, but an oblation, a sizable reduction of your airtight stigmatas. Crush me if you can but you\'ll not crush the revelry here. What was that Mr. Slogan? You driscoordination distention? Come, come, good friend, where are your forced metal voices now? I\'ve got it in my hands Mr. Blocker, don\'t you worry none sir, don\'t you worry Mr. Rennco, I\'ve got your concept. Do you remember the size of his hound? I remember the size of that son-of-a-bitch well! There he is now chewing on your Remington? Winchester? Hey Zeller! You remember that day, that day in Cuba, Alabama, after the dog kennels arrived, that day when Joe shot all them ducks? You remember, I know you do, that day when Sally was slapping herself having listened to too much Lana Turner. You son-of-a-bitch get off my shoes. Now, there was that time we were harvesting wheat and this dead bastard here Logenback turned to me and said, 'I decree ye as the Harvestor of Cut Breaths.' Yes he did ladies and gentlemen, he sure did. He got it from a book the darn fool. I told that son-of-a-bitch I was going to slash his goddamn throat if he didn\'t get his damn discoder right. Johnson was right out there on the fucking turnpike. I saw the son-of-a-bitch myself! No, they wanted to go crabbing the durn fools! On the 1088 they were trying to blast him but they couldn\'t get him. So they were going out there messing with the toggle switch when that boat blew up. Throw the cats back in the water; throw all the cats back in the boat dear friend of the Epicurean family of solid members and of the hundred-dollar prize. Back in Swahili they were doing it, doing it before dawn round the campfire, for at least 10,000 words but they didn\'t get the Freudian slip thing right; that was before I fired him. With all the sucking and murder, what would you expect? I mean they were out there dying to get back, no control though, and then their last infraction, an experiment going, and so we tied the dog back on the leash and had our way with him, trying to get things tight I guess. What do I care? What with the strain of one voice, hell, I didn\'t create the End of History. They were trying to say it but they didn\'t know how. What? When? Don\'t go starting again. Do you know how goddamn long it has taken to get this right? Do you know how much pain I\'ve had to go through to get this right? Bound forever by two means and two heartaches. The Creator wouldn\'t have it that way. What were you trying to think? Well, let me tell you, it was disembodiment, and the longer we waited the worse it got, and Johnson over there wasn\'t having any of it. All form and no content makes Johnson a bad boy. They got all the fishes out of the water but they were stone dead, ready for market, but the market was closed, so we took them to Nigger Joe, but Joe was having whisky problems, so we gave them to Carolyne, but Carolyne was having a bad case of the greenmind, so we left the fish on side the road in a bad way. So we got to the point where we couldn\'t persist anymore so we went to the Bayou Club in downtown Oxford, that town next to Batesville, or is it Seville? All those Yankee towns sound the same to me! What about you Fred? You still married to that detestable bitch you found on Magazine Street? The one with the good lips? I told you once bastard not to refrain. We didn\'t go burrowing, we stayed right here disconnecting. So what? The problem is that any sentence you put into existence could be your last, or worse yet, your future. But he has his eyes on the goddamn shutter again; I told him not to go doing that, doing that, to those tortoise shells. But he\'s got that goddamn Isidore Ducasse with him again, what do you expect? So she had to go weaving tapestries again, tapestries of dead brains. Su Conto wasn\'t that way, he was tabiculum, that is Latin for table or basket, you choose. No, not that again, I\'ll have to burn that tape. It\'s obvious that I\'m trying to hide something, aren\'t you the scholar? You Friedman Holmes? You bad painter? I told you not to use oils shithead. Armadillos with all the good wigs and black migs, of the Dolorian. So, they got to where they couldn\'t do it any more; so we had to search them real good and hard on the backs of their heads. No, the ambulance was broken but they did import some good used morphine. It was tedious out there; we shouldn\'t have told all our secrets at once. It was black inside. They went and filled in all the cracks, silly bastards of Lords, with the biographers and wine, and I haven\'t had no alcohol in 10 years, long before the coma and the special training. I have what they\'ve been wanting for years but I ain\'t telling Southmoose, not this time around. Perhaps some other time when the moon is a little better and the tide\'s in sprinkling the shore with bits of glass and seaweed, in rushing jet streams. Yes they got the croakers; they were there; I saw them as well as you did. I told you to stop it with the ideas. Falling back on the thing? Me at once? And all today. Where\'s Will? You done gave up on Bill didn\'t you? I didn\'t. He\'s here in my back pocket; that\'s where I keep him, clean and crazy, where the goddamn transom broke before I could use it. Heart full of pain and dead animals. It wasn\'t very soothing the way he headed the Pass, kept the publishers off his back, off his wife too, away from the sewers, and back to the liberating forces of Dichum-mic-kill red everyday the last rites of the english jew who found prayers to be useless and typifying lost words in dark puddles. It was what he couldn\'t Will that hurt him. I can do this with my eyes closed. Naw, I lie, I am right now, as you are a-piercing, doing this with closed eyes. When he got there, we were all told to get back and hold our tongues. I wasn\'t faking it like I am now. Precambrian dreams assuage me to the end my brothers, dear reader, sweet reader. Come close and I\'ll give you a jar of your own Palastone, no, not the immobile, those dumb asses who keep trying, dry words, who never tell a secret like you want them to. It\'s hard work but someone has got to do it, someone\'s got to tell, and absolutely not for their own goddamn good. Who do you think I am, Ibsen? Delacroix? Or that Irish tyrant by the name of Clay? I mean goddamn Mr. Sand I didn\'t get a Ph.D in English literature for nothing, didn\'t get it to amuse you soft flackers of ratdish hate and black skkêêpés. Of the swans, there are a lot that have died and will die on the river Styx. Well, when they did, I slapped them on their backs and writhed them a good time. That\'s the way I am. I\'m very forgiving when they\'re kind, still can\'t spell though. I didn\'t go to a good school; they didn\'t try me too hard. That was smart of them. It\'s tiring on the fingers and eyes, not to mention the eyes, I mean, when they bleed or cry, or spear-out goo. Well, they had ten coullers, I said, but they couldn\'t blast it out of me. So I had to get it at the fork of the road while there was still time to get it at the fork of the road while there was still time to get my Gamosepalous together, before the reds got there to spoil all the fun and swing out my vodka that I had to pay a lot for because of the Adam curse of the old school. They had ten but only used three, the characters, but bless them, bless them, god bless them for all their mistakes of fatigable softness. Someone had to say it, why not me? When you get there, let me know and I\'ll be there to pay the rent and give them the food bill for my dogs and chinchillas and goldfish, Henry and Red, the two black ones. No, keep Marcel on the grave, ambiguous and weak these days, they got him over there walking the pipeline, they played a bad joke on him, and ditched the dogs on the way to the trial. We went there, but the coons were gone and so we hunted possums for a while, and then the rabble came with all these spades and hoes. That was a time of pure release, pure relief system, back when a spade was a spade and I was an engineer, with thoughts and feelings, penmanship too, when I had my keys but no choice. So you got over there and they told you all that? No, not Prof. Carrithers, what would he have to lose on such a day as this, a lot, goddamnit, a lot! Not surprisingly, he\'s a little mute recluse from the old days, back before that hound in a tree story your dad told you about. But they got out of here and then left, and didn\'t leave a message for my dear old nonreferential dad. They tried to say something bright but it wasn\'t in them, the brightness faded out, and so they lost, I tried to help them, but stubbed my toe on the way, before I lost my grip and fell head first into the wall, lost my front teeth, cried a lot, and then it was down and out like it\'s supposed to be. I don\'t know, man, they had their kites. Why do you keep saying they? It was he, not they, who did it to me. He kept pushing his hair out of his eyes and it was quite annoying to see such a one as he do that for no reason at all, and then it was all about his asparagus, he could talk about asparagus for hours on end, saying nothing, but forgetting nothing, and one really did learn a lot about asparagus, and nothing else, and as my wife has informed me, he was eating the asparagus in the wrong direction. Go-Go comes forth and holds out his hands and begs me to undo him. But it is not in me to embrace, and Go-Go was a very long time ago, back before I could even talk good. Well, I showed Go-Go, I flushed him down the toilet. Well, and Go-Go showed me, he\'s been getting his revenge ever since. So, he got to pushing his hair out of his eyes a good while before we got down to good normal conversation, not the philosophical stuff, too intellectual for him, but we talked for hours about the Kashmir and Vermilion gods till sundown. There were spots on the wall so we talked about spots for a while, and then we talked about 'Percy in Dust' and 'In the Black Cradle,' which are stories, stories I wrote just for you all. What about that Barn Owl that cooks for you all? Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all? You bastards? For you bastards everything is a joke, but I\'ve got news, news that should be howled out in the desert, I\'m not a comanche or a Magi, sorry, I didn\'t mean to disappoint you, I just wish I liked you a little, to give a little respect, but you\'ve forced me to this, you let me in. Well, Cora and I were getting by with it and we were driving up some mountains in Idaho and came to this store, and in front of this store was a sign that read: Come and Get Yerself a Drink. Well, you\'ve got to keep going till you sweat your eyes, bone your face, and flatten the stomach. I mean, come on, it\'s the American way. Wouldn\'t want you to feel left out or anything on this cold night in Georgia. If you get to the top, let me know and I\'ll see what I can do. I\'m full of all sorts of tricks to help you get through the night and so forth. Really, I\'m not that bad once you get to know me, it\'s just that I don\'t like to be hassled. I\'m sorry, it\'s one of my hang-ups, call me old fashioned, not a thing I can do about it. They taught me that in Catholic school, back in the day of expressions, ideas – C\'mon Samos, let\'s get on with it. So you were sitting around being resuscitated? Being or predicting your fate? Shouldn\'t do that old man, shouldn\'t do it. Didn\'t they teach you anything at all, all those eighty years, all home on the range and such? So be it, there it is. Some flown thing on the edge of thought. Beckett was reverting back to something previous, right? Ten creations carry us through then they die and we die and the world is a better place for God to kill again and again for nothing and everybody is ashamed of him and for his creations, fluid to insanity, and the stage must be so clean, so clean, good god, never more! Never more! Stop yanging over semantics you black eye of a bitch of one and twenty. Teutonic and desultory, stop trying to piece me back together again. It won\'t work, I promise you, it won\'t work, it never has, it never will. Get turned on by the same old evil box, opening and reopening, looking or me, but you do badly, you will do badly here, I know you will, anyone would interest me more than you do. No Teutonic abhorrence, I\'m all out, so what do you do? One, two, three and then presto? I swear you wouldn\'t like it here I just know you wouldn\'t want to go home and be like the stars and moon or whatever it is these people keep yapping about? So be it. What piece of flap has to be there? Well, Marcel Hoon, they got the arrogant rabbits out again, but it didn\'t help this time. It was too close to his brain, what do you think? Pure jazz man, pure jazz, and so what about it. Pure gut of evening and severed tongues. No nagging worms my friend no nagging worms, hell-bent on destruction. Mind is a complete blank, write on dust, write on water, no, write on white dust in red letters. A field marshall came up and slapped me in the face. I turned and broke that bitches\' arm. Now, what\'s surprising, the slip-knot? The ambrosia? Signs from god? The clairvoyant? Surprising the elephant? The clairvoyant eye has failed to see Logenbach\'s entry, stage A and B, not Z. This is all a puzzle to get you through the day. The word becomes clear through the absence of thought. When we got back we were looking for a reflection, but Toga was not to be found in the greek amphitheater. Like a line bent back on itself, we had to go forth into woods, into fields, in search of melons, and candleberry, and stethoscope, and above all syncopation, the R and W, to implant and distribute and desultorize, and imbulgations of Mohammed II, Zoroaster and Conrad, the existentialist, no, not Conrad, never Conrad, herein the disaster of the Profound God, and above all the lost coin that had his name, that fell off the camel\'s back and found later by the lion in the desert, a baby behind him holding a mirror, a very profound mirror, relating all and nothing, nothing to hold onto, and further, nothing to support, nothing to go by, nothing in the reflection of nothing, a solid thing, good for the heart and good for the soul, an alternative to what....used for money, the coin, used for money by the innocent child who lived in the stone house way out in the desert of Zarbo, a confused child no less, a little slow, that is, stupid, like Roland Barths, who couldn\'t come to conclusions, who had philosophical inquiries, a little stupid, a little demented, flash of green light, a little lost, a little stolen, no French and no Latin, an ignorant child, not very bright, like Roland Barths. It was a bit like survival which in any case carries no rewards for the humble of the Malcodian forest. That was the thing you couldn\'t get blasted about after hearing their dark utterances, their yearnings, all the sad faces in a row, in a yearbook, all the sad faces of public and private education, no difference, or very little, very little difference in anything really, when you get right down to it, doesn\'t matter, nothing matters, nothing ever will matter, except this: all cops and shrinks and lawyers must die across this grand wide country of ours. To be free and so forth. It\'s all a big book, it doesn\'t matter where you begin or end or end and begin – it is the tension of writing itself which is at stake, nothing else, the blood tension, you can find the doctrine for yourself in Saint Genet by the terrible child. So, I said, it is the tension of writing itself that is at stake and the more superfluous power of knowing, of knowing there have been many many fools, far too many, so many in just this past year, not to mention the whole of the century that is now coming too a close on us, like a spiked net, imagine that. But so much for the perplexities of suspected icons of jabberwockys of yore. Come on now, don\'t be doubtful and then jealous, it will pass; it can do nothing else but pass, best thought first thought through the colors the blindness and the same tremendous song stuck in my head, my intelligence is out for lunch, but I\'m trying I\'m trying, no extra points for trying, don\'t revert, that\'s the sin here, at this burial, at this funeral, and don\'t forgive them anything they can use here, that\'s another sin, and the fire lives between whatever isn\'t much, isn\'t much to talk about or wonder about, not enough to remember or forget, I\'m working on a novel here, remember, and that\'s not an easy task. But blast my Isidore you bastards of H. Logenback. I\'ve been hating him for a long time and now it\'s good that he is dead, and better yet, no kin worth speaking of. Try to get them trilliums out of the way, don\'t bring a color code, or a meat code, or any code, I\'ve got my head in the clouds ain\'t misbehaving. I don\'t have no quote for you. Like ten thousand explosions, like ten thousand people pushing their hair back before suppertime. Give me that absolute bell and that absolute white, I like it better there, better than this suspension of color don\'t need anything but comes out no trace of where I\'ve been. More honest than you know who, maybe even better, but I fear worse and let me die better than him, Clay, I mean, let me die better than him, it\'s all I ask, and I keep trying to get this thing out, well, why not? You\'ve got those splinters still in your forehead rabbi? Mr. Jenkins knows, he\'s always known. Why wouldn\'t he? That was a silly affidavit you wrote up. And John Higgins died too, just last week, after the crab festival in Slidell. That day on his deathbed he winced and ‘bout lost his bearings, and didn\'t care anymore, didn\'t know how to care anymore, didn\'t need anything anymore, didn\'t need nothing but me and John Black. It was, or is, the chemical explosion of stars you say? What of the alienmatic? Did it do any good this time? It really doesn\'t matter what goes on. Stop it with that referring and stop begging on issues that are completely irrelevant to your existence as a human being. It\'s all enclosed in a big vault somewhere. Just to be behind the eyelids scares me into supplication enough for the both of us. There\'s a long line to the cemetery, on that we can all agree. I\'m just about finished. I wouldn\'t lie to you, not in my nature as a petrified man. Carbuncular explosion again, try to get it right the second time around baby. That you tried is all that matters, here, here...so much here and so little do we owe to be here, without pulse, without word. Wrap ten strings around the world and say good-bye. I mean, they got all the goddamn skin, what you worried about it for? Just circling around in a large room, there\'s nothing to it, get away from the two-dimensional cyclone if you can. It was all kinds of funnels and all kinds of tunnels, all kinds of neat tricks, but they couldn\'t see past it, wouldn\'t leave out one word, the evviil bastards - eerie unto themselves – of the green glass I boast a literature. It was a flap of tin beating against a steel pole. I recorded the sound one day, out in Ebbing, Louisiana, when I was about ten or twelve, and so what about it? Demonetization is a real pity, somehow you\'ve got to create your own ambition but it\'s pretty hopeless, then, maybe not. But there\'s not anything between the first and last thing that really matters. What matters is Sapo, and getting rid of Sapo, getting rid of Sapo\'s not so easy, not so hard....",
sources: "",
biog:"Louis Bourgeois lives and writes in Oxford, Mississippi. His latest book, Hosanna, a collection of aphorisms, is forthcoming by Xenos Books. Bourgeois is also editor and director of VOX PRESS, a literary publisher of avant-garde writing.",
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author: "Larissa Shmailo",
role: "Author",
mashable: false,
title: "Personal",
text: "Click to Listen",
sources: "",
biog: "Larissa has been published in Barrow Street, Fulcrum, Rattapallax, Drunken Boat, MiPOesias, Big Bridge, and many other journals; she has had recordings presented by Madhatter's Review, We, Rattapallax, Idiolexicon, i-Outlaw, Wordsalad, Teachers and Writers Collaborative Radio, ICORN, Nefarious Bovine Radio, Indiefeed, and Noboarders Radio. Larissa translated the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by A. Kruchenych; she also recently contributed translations to the anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry published by Dalkey Archive Press. Larissa is a director of TWiN Poetry, an informal international collective of recording poets and their listeners. Larissa Shmailo\'s poetry CDs Exorcism (SongCrew 2008) and The No-Net World (SongCrew 2006) are frequently heard on radio and Internet broadcasts. Her new chapbook is A Cure for Suicide. Visit Larissa at http://www.myspace.com/larissashmailoexorcism",
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author: "Larissa Shmailo",
role: "Author",
mashable: false,
title: "He Follows Her",
text: "Click to Listen",
sources: "",
biog: "Larissa has been published in Barrow Street, Fulcrum, Rattapallax, Drunken Boat, MiPOesias, Big Bridge, and many other journals; she has had recordings presented by Madhatter's Review, We, Rattapallax, Idiolexicon, i-Outlaw, Wordsalad, Teachers and Writers Collaborative Radio, ICORN, Nefarious Bovine Radio, Indiefeed, and Noboarders Radio. Larissa translated the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by A. Kruchenych; she also recently contributed translations to the anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry published by Dalkey Archive Press. Larissa is a director of TWiN Poetry, an informal international collective of recording poets and their listeners. Larissa Shmailo\'s poetry CDs Exorcism (SongCrew 2008) and The No-Net World (SongCrew 2006) are frequently heard on radio and Internet broadcasts. Her new chapbook is A Cure for Suicide. Visit Larissa at http://www.myspace.com/larissashmailoexorcism",
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author: "Larissa Shmailo",
role: "Author",
mashable: false,
title: "Bhakti",
text: "Click to Listen",
sources: "",
biog: "Larissa has been published in Barrow Street, Fulcrum, Rattapallax, Drunken Boat, MiPOesias, Big Bridge, and many other journals; she has had recordings presented by Madhatter's Review, We, Rattapallax, Idiolexicon, i-Outlaw, Wordsalad, Teachers and Writers Collaborative Radio, ICORN, Nefarious Bovine Radio, Indiefeed, and Noboarders Radio. Larissa translated the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by A. Kruchenych; she also recently contributed translations to the anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry published by Dalkey Archive Press. Larissa is a director of TWiN Poetry, an informal international collective of recording poets and their listeners. Larissa Shmailo\'s poetry CDs Exorcism (SongCrew 2008) and The No-Net World (SongCrew 2006) are frequently heard on radio and Internet broadcasts. Her new chapbook is A Cure for Suicide. Visit Larissa at http://www.myspace.com/larissashmailoexorcism",
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contents[40] = {
author: "Suchoon Mo",
role: "Author",
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title: "Swing Low Sweet Chariot",
text: "Click to Listen to this variation of an American folk song.",
sources: "",
biog: "Suchoon Mo, a Mad Hatters\' Review composer, is a former Korean Army lieutenant and retired academic living in the semiarid part of Colorado, with his wife, a dog and a cat. He is a loner who writes poetry, composes much, and photographs nature. He is a martial art black belt (taekwondo) and officiates at championships on national and international levels. In summer time, he goes hunting with his air rifle, and shoots grass hoppers. Birds usually clean up the scene of killing. He is a voracious reader but he doesn't read novels anymore. They are too long and too wordy. He likes occasional coffee. He pours sugar in a cup, then pours coffee. This minimalist procedure of coffee drinking eliminates the use of spoon. His approach to poetry and music is similar. The ultimate objective is to create poetry with no word and music with no sound, and find truth which is not true at all. ",
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author: "Leigh Herrick",
role: "Author",
mashable: false,
title: "raconteur",
text: "
| raconteur j\'aimerais bien que vous sachiez aimer l\'arbre pendant de toutes differences et tenir comme le manifeste d\'un dieu nué la dernière blessure d\'un coup d'oeil malveillant duquel la Terre Tremblante et Effacée se rétire loin du gazon destiné à se prostituer parmi les champignons des décombres et les pensées sanglantes qui disent La-Voyez! aux larmes désunies tombées de chaque brin cultivé des anges et généraux dans le contretemps reductible entre ceux-ci qui cherchent une résistance et ceux- la qui ne recherchent rien q\'un type du ciel du soleil au ciel dont la grande aile enjambée frappe contre ce plus petit soufflement où la question une fois s\'est parfaitement trouvée avant que l\'histoire s\'est tombée s\'est trompée á se recréer guerriére appellante de l\'abîme qui maintenant ne peut rien faire que se souvenir de rapeller des vœux et voix croisées demandantes mais qu\'est-ce que c\'est | raconteur i\'d so much like for you to know to love the pendulous tree of all differences and hold like the manifesto of a naked god the last wound of malevolent glance from which the trembling and obliterated Earth withdraws from the grass destined to prostitution among the mushrooms of ruin in bloody thought that says Look at It! to the divided tears fallen from each blade cultivated from angels and generals in the reducible offbeat between these who seek resistance and those who look for nothing but a guy of heaven of sun in the sky whose grand enjambed wing slaps against this little breeze where the question once found itself perfectly before history fell to fooling to make itself over in war calling from the abyss that now can do little more than remember rappelling from crossed voices and vows wanting to know but what is it now |
, 
", sources: "",
biog: "Amy Bernays is an artist and writer in Los Angeles, California. Bernays graduated with a BA(honors) in Fine Art from Central St Martins, London in 2001, before moving out west. Shortlisted for the Mercury Prize in London in 2006, Bernays\' work is gaining momentum. Exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles, London and Edinburgh; Bernays is a prolific, persistent and engaging artist. See her online gallery here. ",
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this.chopped = this.text.split(new RegExp("(Davis Schneiderman is a multimedia artist and writer whose works include the forthcoming novel Drain (Northwestern University Press 2010), the novels DIS (BlazeVox) and Abecedarium (Chiasmus); the co-edited collections Retaking the Universe: Williams S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto) and The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism\'s Parlor Game (Nebraska, 2009); and the audiocollage Memorials to Future Catastrophes (Jaded Ibis). His creative work has been accepted by numerous publications including Fiction International, The Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, and Exquisite Corpse. He is Director of Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books, an editor of The &NOW AWARDS: The Best Innovative Writing, and he directs the NEH-funded Virtual Burnham Initiative. He can be found, virtually, at davisschneiderman.com ",
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contents[48] = {
author: "Terry Wright",
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title: "SacrificialDriveBy",
text: "
",
sources: ["Stolen Car by Karen Garthe", "Frayed Escort by Karen Garthe"],
biog: "Terry Wright is the author of five books/chapbooks of poetry. He teaches creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the Associate Editor of 'The Exquisite Corpse Annual.' He is also a digital artist. See for youself at http://cruelanimal.com. Terry believes his sunrise can beat up yours.",
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contents[49] = {
author: "John M. Bennett",
role: "Masher",
mashable: false,
title: "Hack: untitled ",
text: "
",
sources: ["My Ink", "Possession", "Monroe Gallery"],
biog: "John M. Bennett has published over 300 books and chapbooks of poetry and other materials. Among the most recent are rOlling COMBers (Potes & Poets Press), MAILER LEAVES HAM (Pantograph Press), LOOSE WATCH (Invisible Press), CHAC PROSTIBULARIO (with Ivan Arguelles; Pavement Saw Press), HISTORIETAS ALFABETICAS (Luna Bisonte Prods), PUBLIC CUBE (Luna Bisonte Prods), THE PEEL (Anabasis Press), GLUE (xPress(ed)), LAP GUN CUT (with F. A. Nettelbeck; Luna Bisonte Prods), INSTRUCTION BOOK (Luna Bisonte Prods), la M al (Blue Lion Books), CANTAR DEL HUFF (Luna Bisonte Prods), SOUND DIRT (with Jim Leftwich; Luna Bisonte Prods), BACKWORDS (Blue Lion Books), NOS (Redfox Press), D RAIN B LOOM (with Scott Helmes; xPress(ed)), CHANGDENTS (Offerta Speciale), L ENTES (Blue Lion Books), NOS (Redfoxpress), SPITTING DDREAMS (Blue Lion Books), ONDA (with Tom Cassidy; Luna Bisonte Prods), 30 DIALOGOS SONOROS (with Martín Gubbins; Luna Bisonte Prods), BANGING THE STONE (WITH Jim Leftwich; Luna Bisonte Prods), FASTER NIH (Luna Bisonte Prods), and RREVES (Editions du Silence). He has published, exhibited and performed his word art worldwide in thousands of publications and venues. He was editor and publisher of LOST AND FOUND TIMES (1975-2005), and is Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at The Ohio State University Libraries. Richard Kostelanetz has called him \'the seminal American poet of my generation\'. His work, publications, and papers are collected in several major institutions, including Washington University (St. Louis), SUNY Buffalo, The Ohio State University, The Museum of Modern Art, and other major libraries. His PhD (UCLA 1970) is in Latin American Literature.",
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author: "Deborah Monroe",
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title: "Monroe Gallery",
text: "
",
sources: "",
biog: "Deborah Monroe is from Rochester, N.Y. She has lived in and/or showed (mostly graphic art and paintings) in Germany, Switzerland, and England, as well as the United States. Her work has been included in biennales in England and Norway, and she was awarded Lowick House and Royal Society honors in England. She is represented in private and state collections. Currently teaching in South Central Los Angeles and documenting \'local color\' as you see here. http://www.lulu.com/deborahmonroe or www.blurb.com.",
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contents[51] = {
author: "Joe Bisz",
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sources: ["Fricasseed Filipina", "Stickland", "Bernays Gallery"],
title: "My Wife, Fricasseed, in Stickland",
text: "
See Joe Bisz\'s My Wife, Fricaseed, in Stickland",
biog: "Joe Bisz is an Associate Professor of English at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College. He has taught courses in Science Fiction, creative writing, and gender & sexuality studies. His poems and novel chapters have popped up in various journals, including Diagram, Romantics Quarterly, Blueline, and Rattlecat Press\'s Coloring Book. He has edited the rather languagey literary journal Potion and continues to be obsessed with all things Victorian. ",
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author: "Joseph Harrington",
role: "Masheur",
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sources: ["The Dwarf", "various texts"],
title: "Variations on a Theme by Patricia Carragon",
text: "1. Dwarf Song
Milk of amnesia,
felt-tipped & fresh from the fairy,
consumed by the mystery of events
consumed under
the beard he deleted,
forgotten Sunday back street
Author\'s meal, author\'s name.
This long mystery
whites his Montague:
why amnesia as to what
the searches overheard
at walk\'s door.
He forgets to go pixilated;
using a character,
he becomes part tale,
events sans forgotten,
an extra-long milk sequel.
He\'s the tale that wags the dwarf.
He\'s after his damn brunch.
The \'on\' pen
leaves the known alone,
jots pedestrians.
The \'had\' drops,
finds forgetting
a felt-tipped tale.
Chin thoughts check
ask for thought,
the dwarf\'s dwarf pocket
fairies away foulest browses.
Dwarfdom pays.
Time\'s abbreviated
fried white life written:
author strokes author
egg does egg
2. Dwarf Catalog (with Walt Whitman)
The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The sad-eyed dwarf walks alone on Montague Street,
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The dwarf wears an extra-long beard made from fried egg whites,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The dwarf searches for the fairy tale long forgotten,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The dwarf meanwhile drops by a used bookstore,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
The dry dwarf browses the shelves under fairy tales and finds what he\'s been searching for,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The author uses his felt-tipped pen, he deletes the dwarf\'s name on the pages,
The deacons are ordain\'d with cross\'d hands at the altar,
The dwarf leaves the bookstore forgetting why he came at all,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
The author is at the café next door, chews on the dwarf\'s beard as part of his Sunday brunch,
The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the scotch and rye,
The dwarf doesn\'t realize this until he strokes his naked chin,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm\'d case,
The dwarf suddenly forgets his own name and becomes pixilated,
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother\'s bed-room;)
The author does not recognize his own character, sans beard,
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He is consumed by the mystery of events mixed with the low-fat milk of amnesia;
The malform\'d limbs are tied to the surgeon\'s table,
The dwarf can\'t remember the author\'s name,
Which is removed and drops horribly in a pail;
The quadroom girl is sold at the auction-stand,
The author finishes his meal and nonchalantly asks for the check, (I love him, though I do not know him,)
The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass,
Two pedestrians flee across the street,
The young fellow drives the express-wagon,
The author pays his bill and leaves a generous tip,
The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,
The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs,
Out from the crowd steps the author, jots down his abbreviated thoughts, puts his pad and felt- tipped pen back in his coat pocket,
The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,
And there\'s that goddam dwarf again (though I do not know him, if I see him again, I will kill him);
The eggy-chins hoe in the stubble-field, the overseer strokes the table,
The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other,
The author walks away, consumed by thoughts of writing a sequel,
The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,
The author remembers when his life was a fairy tale;
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of my dwarf.
3. Dwarf Reform (with Barack Obama)