Oh, souls

Oh, what do you see, you souls!

Pulled off and cast aside

P.T. Anderson’s Tee

I wish I were P.T.
Anderson’s t-shirt so
I could know cool movie stars with
cool haircuts like John C. Reilly
and Adam Sandler, and sometimes,
maybe, I could get pulled
off and cast
aside by Fiona Apple.

I bet I wouldn’t even get
that sweaty,
most of the time.


B(alloons) flat

as i fly over this time
Thulani Davis

        for Dianne McIntyre

as i fly over this time
rising over only this
so much painted suffering
unseen grimaces and stares
among spruce greens
these few forests left
all of us trying to be alone
quiet and blind.
*
i see soldiers in bus stations
with colored names
polaroid shots
their girlfriends chew gum
smile wide
*
in all this silver of sky
like stars these wheels
car gears lampshades
electrical refuse
zen oiled and greased
the believers now so many
now so tired of the sad songs
the endless yearnings for war
and more and more
*
dumb cries i sigh
trying to get out of town
i am writing on the wall
it will be painted over
like all the songs
once outside
but as i fly over this time
*
dianne is dancing
touching the far reaches
leaping and teaching
she strokes and struts the air
none of us stumbles
or fears their lives
steel beams and rail tracks
strike an E-flat, B-flat, A
E-flat, B-flat, A
dianne is dancing
no one can handle the hostages
terror is abandoned
because of light
breaking in leaves
because the center is gone
we are still breathing
and the swing is our bodies

Fakes is fakes

Something I’m struggling with right now.

So much, so much

Queer wing-ed

Angela Simione, untitled (sisters 6)

It hurts me.

Easter Rabbit is here

Viscerally exquisite. Publishing Genius has taken care to do justice to Christine Sajecki’s amazing artwork for the cover, not to mention Joseph Young’s words inside. Feels good, cool to the touch, nice raised lettering. This is a wonderful thing to own.

As I mentioned before, Adam Robinson has made a dare to read this book in one sitting– “whoever reads the 3,000 words in one sitting, can email me for a full refund. My thinking is that the stories satiate after reading three or four, overwhelm after seven or eight.” I’m taking him up on it now, 1:33 PM PST. Will post when finished.

–I will post comments as I go, though not too directly about the texts, and I don’t want to spoilerize anyone.

–“It was impossible to understand, the humid cloud of words.”

–Wonder about extra credit for reading the same ones again and again.

–Cartogram feels exactly like the best kind of travelling.

–Oh, Light of No Understanding.

–The Gossipers seems complete, perfect.

–Finished Easter Rabbit at 2:20 PM PST. Not sure what to say that does justice, that doesn’t seem trite, or flippant. Just that these writings do what art does, encompass the familiar, the emotion of everyday life fully and without artifice. A pan in the snow, a quarter on the back of a hand– I had no idea such things could make me feel so much.

Easter Rabbit also includes 2 more collections, Deep Falls and God Not Otherwise. I’m on to Deep Falls now.

–Disclose/Agape together with Moses just blows me away.

–Finished Deep Falls. This is a cohesive place/relationship narrative paced in micros. Imagistic, harsh, lovely, all that. Really good.

God Not Otherwise

–Some certainties, with an interlude. Excellence.

and 5  lines about Baltimore as intense as the rest of the book combined.

Finis, 2:50 PM PST.

Coppi

Fausto, you are the only king left to us!

Lucia, Luis, and the Wolf

It was like he didn’t talk about everything.

During the night, all the sounds are louder.

Check London

Derek White, mural, Hoxton/Shoreditch

i thought about going in to the Salvador Dali museum, but again, 17 quid to get in & it looked like some half-ass private collection trying to cash in on the wax museum spillovers…London is definitely touristy, like the real campy Times Square/Jeckyl & Hyde shit but even more tasteless & widespread…attractions/rides dedicated to medieval atrocities or the black plague or torture or dead celebrities, etc…& everything cost money…& has lines of eastern European tourists spilling out the doors…crossed over Westminster bridge, saw Westminster Abbey…then over to Buckingham palace…just happened to see the changing of guards, i guess, where the guards come & switch places, right?..it wasn’t that exciting & they weren’t wearing those tall furry hats…walked into Hyde park…then cut back into the West End…through Mayfair [rich & uppity] up to Oxford street…lots of big name stores, like a 5th avenue, but crappier…up into Marylebone…then down into Soho…

 

Doors, abandon

I’ve been neglectful, and I’m sorry. It’s a busy month for me writing and otherwise, but I will be gradually picking it all back up again.

Dzanc all* Best of the Web in one place nominees – cont’d.

*some**

Anti-
“Dawn’s raw scraping awful when you’ve become a mollusk without a shell again.”

Lee Ann Roripaugh, Sleepless Graffiti
Mira Martin-Parker, Flesh Eater
Travis Brown, Bobwhite

Blue Fifth Review
“You read yourself from cover to cover.”

George Moore, Survivor Tactics
Eileen Tabios, Alchemy at the Maykadeh: Dinner with Philip Lamantia
Yun Wang, Meditation on Hair

Cha
“She grasps my hands when I kiss her shoulder. As she responds she recites the recipe for cooking pork with honey. Use honey from Alaska, she insists.”

Nirmala Pillai, The Killing
Jason Lee, 45 Belgrave Square
Surajit Chakravarty, Taste

The Chimaera
“The battle of Ivy League sweatshirts/was raging behind us.”

Jennifer Reeser, Sonnet 23 from The Dark Lady
Rick Mullin, Distraction
Geoff Page, Seeing People

decomP
““I like your toes,” she says. “They’re like a frog’s—bigger at the tip, you know. Your feet smell.” “

Jeannie Galeazzi, Aeronauts
Stefan Kiesbye, Home
Jessa Marsh, My Motel Week

Emprise Review
“I burned the sacraments.”

Michelle Reale, Snow Blind
Steven J. McDermott, Wheel Clatter
Barbara Yien, If You See Buddha On The Road, Kill Him

The Flea
“Hasn’t there been enough of dropping/The quarter hours and the whole in chimes?”

Stephen Edgar, Vertigo
Marly Youmans, Clock of the Moon and Stars
Mark Allinson, Hydrangeas

kill author
“He kisses me and it feels like a car crash.”

J. A. Tyler, jimmy and his Father and the Ways About Them
Emma J. Lannie, Proxy
Audri Sousa, you kept repeating the same patterns that alienate me so i went away from you and reenacted us with plastic bottles while the lesbian ghost tried to have sex with me

Monkeybicycle
“I think probably all past decades have some major drawback or another, but it seems like any of them would be fine to visit as a tourist.”

Meg Pokrass, What the Doctor Ordered
Angi Becker Stevens, If Everything is Inevitable
Dallas Woodburn, Numb

PANK
“Wrap your arms around me so I feel how small I am.”

Lauren Becker, You Should Know
Steven J. McDermott, Sliver
Brandi Wells, Instructional

Poemeleon
“My chest is a guitar hole/and I’m jacking up the music until the windows break.”

Jo Scott-Coe, Not So Gay at the YMCA
Diane Seuss, Baby goodbye
Lafayette Wattles, Soup Kitchen

Shit Creek Review
“Urgency clings like a silken lining against the air.”

Janice D. Soderling, After the Funeral
Timothy Murphy, Prayer for a Horseman
Michael Cantor, Death Watch

Sweet: A Literary Confection
“the air barely brushing the trees//the way you might touch the hair of someone/you loved once”

Geoff Schmidt, Otis and Jake
Jason Tucker, Kudzu Got Angry
Tim Seibles, 4am

Thirst For Fire
“The cleaning lady steps off the bus and thinks, “That man’s voice sounds the way shoe polish smells.””

Gregg Williard, Cleaning Lady
Nate Innomi, The Frame Maker
Will Spires, The Wall (on Which She Hangs)

**done

Dzanc all* Best of the Web in one place nominees

*most**

Annalemma Magazine
“I may not know how I want my hair cut, or how I want Matt Mitcham to get me off, but I sure as hell know what I don’t want to be, and generally that’s whatever you tell me I am.”

Sam Nam, If I Could Lend Him My Words
Meg Pokrass, The Big Dipper
Tim Jones-Yelvington, Seducing Matt Mitcham

Bartleby Snopes
“I’ll pass through small towns God has abandoned, where the stoplights work, but traffic is frozen.”

Richard Santos, Membrane
Richard Osgood, Slow Motion Riders
Howie Good, Ghosts of Breath

Everyday Genius
“Certain prayers are designed specifically for the drunk on the street.”

Cindy Loehr, Shrub Prayer
Laura Ellen Scott, The Temple Dog
Joseph Young, Galaxy

Flutter
“My bones hollow/for the sight of another woman.”

Laura L. Snyder, The Telling Signs
Paula Ray, Where Wild Poisonous Mushrooms Grow
Mary Belardi Erickson, Blossoms & Jam, Maybe Wine

mud luscious
“There is nothing more lonely than to have a person inside you.”

Mike Meginnis, Brother
Molly Gaudry, The Dead Cells of the Day
Sean Lovelace, Meaning of Life #35

No Posit
“our captain/is of pegged leg, parroted shoulder and strong will”

Jeff Crouch, Paper Clips
Joseph Goosey, A Free Over the Phone Consultation
Jason Bredle, Moby Dick

No Tell Motel
“Come home, round corner.”

Elizabeth Hildreth, Eating the Future
Jenn Koiter, Ghazal, with Accessories
Joanna Ruocco, When I Worked for Madonna

Pangur Ban Party
“Toes in my hands, my mean face stops.”

Adam Moorad, The Nurse And The Patient
J. A. Tyler, When We Take Off Our Heads
Sam Pink, Bernhard Goetz

Smokelong Quarterly
“I found his room I said his name, Doctor.”

Z.Z. Boone, Rats
Mary Hamilton, Me and Theodore Are Trapped in the Trunk of the Car with Rags in Our Mouths and Tape Around Our Wrists and Ankles, Please Let Us Out.
Sam Nam, I Use Commas Like Ninja Stars

Terrain.org
“Stones and people do what they must to find repose.”

Pamela Uschuk, A Short History of Falling
J. David Bell, Positioning
Ben Quick, Lee’s Ferry

Toasted Cheese
“My family was like a kelp bed in which things get trapped but never grow.”

Alan Averill, Things Difficult to Say
Kimberley Idol, Painting Naked
Frank O’Connor, Foolish Creatures

Valparaiso Poetry Review
“And why not, this world has been good to us”

Cornelius Eady, Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Hat
Claudia Emerson, Ground Truth
Charles Wright, I’ve Been Sitting Here Thinking Back over My Life…

Writers’ Bloc
“Poetry makes me feel like a stunned sea bass.”

Sean Lovelace, Writing, about writing
Jimmy Chen, Check, please?
Thomas Sullivan, Pity Party

YB
“I’m 35 now, and what debt. What debt.”

Rob Woodard, Orange Crush
Sean Patrick Hill, Self-Portrait as George Gisze, Merchant
Molly Gaudry, Gratitude

**to be cont’d

Remembered

The dream was sexual. There was a death. A Nigerian looking man. The last thing before waking, trying to  fold a stained towel.

Expectations, of linens

three-ring circus
Peg Duthie

because i’m drawn to your tightropes,
their solid, stolid tension

as they anchor my wrists
and slash across my shoulders

and because the doorknobs and the latches
throw strange glints into the ordinary shapes

of shadows playing across the bedroom walls
become merry and magnified with the silent brightness

of unvoiced expectations, of linens lovingly bleached
by fresh sunshine and sanded by brisk winds

to bedeck the not unpleasant, not unsatisfying everyness
of the days and the nights already bountiful

with ringmasters, liontamers, clowns and dancers,
a well-tried safety net, the softness of lavish sawdust

yet this would not be the stuff of parade and dream
were it not for your flaming hoops, the happiness of your knives.

Heat lightning

I started writing from the point of view of a small, fragile child but then at some point I found myself describing her neighbors, this grotesquely healthy and fortunate family who lived across the street. I found the true voice for the story in this family’s youngest daughter who was attracted to Wren even as her family, particularly the father, feared her. Both attitudes, the attraction and the fear, are very strange and so, I think, very real. –Kathy Fish

Kazimir Malevich

excerpt from Wren
Kathy Fish

One evening our mother joined in the games instead of making supper. Father grabbed her and held her tight around her waist and she struggled to free herself. My brothers and I yanked on Father’s arms and legs, screeching and laughing, as the fireflies lifted out of the grass around our ankles.

Mother stopped struggling and Father loosened his grip and we all turned to see Wren and her parents on their nightly walk. Mother gathered us all around her, hushing us. We were panting and sweaty and unable to keep still.

Father picked up the forgotten football and smacked it against his palm. Mr. Chu nodded and Father nodded back. Wren’s mother glanced at our mother. Some maternal understanding, like heat lightning, flashed in the space between them. I couldn’t see Wren’s eyes, but it seemed she was looking at me. I wanted to cross the street and touch her white cheek. I wanted to tell her my name.

How to write love songs

I just see things around me and try to rationalize them as we all do. I’m more influenced by the current state of culture and its complexities than I am other writers. –Mike Aho

Topical

Telling my troubles to strangers

Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German.  –Tom Waits

One-eighth

David Burdeny

The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. –Ernest Hemingway

Just to eat

Rice
Mary Oliver

It grew in the black mud.
It grew under the tiger’s orange paws.
Its stems thinner than candles, and as straight.
Its leaves like the feathers of egrets, but green.
The grains cresting, wanting to burst.
Oh, blood of the tiger.

I don’t want you just to sit down at the table.
I don’t want you just to eat, and be content.
I want you to walk out into the fields
where the water is shining, and the rice has risen.
I want you to stand there, far from the white tablecloth.
I want you to fill your hands with the mud, like a
     blessing.

Try not to blink

We don’t walk so badly

Excursion into the Mountains
Franz Kafka

“I don’t know,” I cried without a sound, “I just don’t know. If nobody comes, then nobody comes. I have not done anyone any harm, nobody has done me any harm, but nobody wants to help me. Absolutely nobody. But really it is not this way. Just that nobody helps me — otherwise absolutely nobody would be fine. I would really like — and why not? — to make an excursion in the company of absolutely nobody. Into the mountains of course, where else? How these nobodies press against each other, all these arms, crossed and entangled, all these feet, separated by tiny steps! It is understood that everyone is in tails. We don’t walk so badly, and the wind moves through the gaps that we and our limbs leave open. In the mountains throats become free! It’s a wonder we don’t sing.”

trans. by Kevin Blahut
published by Twisted Spoon Press

A rose is most

A rose is most fragrant when it is one-quarter to two-thirds open and has been slightly warmed by morning sun.

In the category of grace, of things undeserved

via radish king, plus some other things

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, life long construction of a state of wonder and serenity. –Glenn Gould

Early breaking news

Okay, I should have posted about this a long time ago, but I didn’t. But I still will, anyway, because it’s so good. It’s Scrotal Cash, the featherproof books collection of remixes of Blake Butler’s crazy-excellent, highly reviewed book, Scorch Atlas. Basically, amazing writers deconstructed, reconstructed, unconstructed and co-destructed the original work into things altogether else, things  innovative, harrowing, beautiful, incredible.

The authors included entered a contest judged by Blake Butler, and they are Matt Bell, Andrew Borgstrom, Jon Cone, Elizabeth Ellen, Brian Evenson, Christopher Higgs, Catherine Lacey, John Madera, Matthew Simmons, J.A. Tyler, and Marcus Whale– and that’s not even including the winner, Krammer Abrahams, whose story brilliantly twists the apocalyptics of Scorch Atlas inside out and applies them to interfamilial dynamics– one family, complete with pets and spare parents, is the atlas, and the devastation is absurd and appalling.

Anyway, it can be downloaded for free from featherproof books, but schemes are afoot to produce and sell limited edition hard copies.  Blake Butler is working to put together some copies for interested parties, and Krammer Abrahams might like to hand-deliver you his own handmade copy, for just $100. If you live in the continental United States, and if there are 10 of you.

Happy Columbus Day!

In spite of man, he crumbles

Song of Solomon 6:10 Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?

Comfortable

Pete Jones’s Canadian Bacon Pizza
Cami Park

1 12-inch unbaked pizza crust
1 cup pizza sauce
2/3 cup mozzarella cheese
6 oz chopped Canadian bacon
1/2 cup thinly sliced mushrooms
1 small green or red bell pepper, seeded and sliced
1/2 tsp crushed dried oregano
1/2 tsp crushed dried basil
crushed red pepper flakes

Get off the couch. Shuffle into the kitchen. Read note on refrigerator, and gather together pizza crust, pizza sauce, hunk of mozzarella cheese, package of Canadian bacon, pint of mushrooms, and oregano, basil, and red pepper flakes. Take forever to find the damn pepper. Wonder if a yellow one would have been okay too.

Read recipe again. Pick up cheese and put it down again. Read package of Canadian bacon. Try to figure out how to get 6 oz from the 10 oz package. Open it up and eat some. Sigh heavily. Poke at the mushrooms. They look dirty. Pick up the damn pepper and turn it over and over again in your hand. What the hell is seeded?

Stare dumbly at it all for a moment. Call Domino’s.

Prep time: 1 hour. Feeds Pete.

previously published in Forklift, Ohio

It’s nothing, nothing at all

And I always thought that the simplest words
Must be enough. That when I say how things are
Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. –Bertolt Brecht

SARS virus particles

So we ask, what’s the point? Who cares? And this is where it’s hard to explain, to justify. Very good haiku, and excellent microfiction, they bloom in the mind, you read them and a rose of apprehension spreads through the head, across the synaptic spaces. Their meaninglessness opens up possibility, a grasp of chance and luck that is nearly impossible to explain. It’s a view of the void that is filled brim-full with nothing, like the spaces left out of a sculpture, the women of Henry Moore. It’s nothing, nothing at all. It’s a chrysanthemum blooming, two people arguing about a dog. –Joseph Young

There’s no doubt a deep psychological explanation for the fascination of the hole. –Henry Moore

Their dreams they dreamed awake

an elephant’s eyes smile -
mountain cherry blossoms
–Buson

Gas Town

The Dark

Love & Peace & Bar

Kim Laughton

“For years I had recorded hours of tapes of my teenage band, prank phone calls, studio demo tapes, synthesizer blurbles, and various recordings of an unusual nature. I wanted all this hard work to be heard, and I loved distributing my tapes simply to annoy people and sometimes even to enlighten or entertain them . . . It was my response to a world that seems always to have told me that I am small and worthless. Putting out music for the hell of it was my way of giving the finger to a universe indifferent to my existence.” –John Trubee, from You Too Can Be a Recording Star!

Easter at Christmas

This moved me:

As does everything from Joseph Young.

Publishing Genius is offering a couple of promotions for his book, Easter Rabbit. For the next five pre-orders, they’ll send out Matthew Simmons’s book, A Jello Horse, which I haven’t read, but sounds pretty good. It might be too late for this, I don’t know. I don’t even know if I ordered in time or not.

The other deal is a dare. They dare you to read all 3K words of Easter Rabbit in one sitting, and if you can do it, you get your money back. That’s it. Just do it, tell them you did it, plus 50 words of what you thought of it all (which they’ll post on their site) and you get your money back. They think you can’t do it, because, according to publisher Adam Robinson, “It’s too long, even though it’s so short.”

I believe him, but I’m a sucker for a dare. So we’ll see.

cover art by Christine Sajecki

Questions about life and shit, part II

It came in the mail today. Well, yesterday, I suppose, but I picked it up today. It was drizzling a bit, but no drop penetrated the tight, classy packaging.

It looks good in person. It feels good, too. The text and the graphic are slightly raised; handling this book is texturally pleasant.

I’m the second piece in, after Jessica, before Greg. I like it. I’m comfortable with my line breaks now, and with my surroundings. I feel cared for, and in good company. I feel kind of important, even. Well, not important, exactly. I guess just comfortable.

Andrew Borgstrom’s is my absolute favorite, out of so much good, which I’ve already talked about. Whose Goddam Oatmeal Is This?

There is an ISBN.

This is something to have, I think.

My poem:

Where Is Cyrano?
Cami Park

Your eyes are like honey in a cup.

Your cheekbones are
like
the shoulder blades of an anorexic,
they are like
the wings of sharp birds.

The time I spend explaining things
to you is like
traveling faster than
the speed of light and coming back
50 years younger, before
I was even born.

Explain that one to me.

Fucking you is like
pressing my thumbnail
through the skin of a bruised apple
which is weird
because I hardly ever talk like that.

This is not my mouth.

I want to drive the Zamboni

Don Tremain

We are in love

When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
–Blaise Pascal

What the goat says

Nazif Topçuoğlu

Goat Horoscope
1907, 1919, 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003

Chinese Goat Daily for Oct. 1st, 2009 (Today)

All those natives who’ve had diffuse troubles will finally be able to be cured. Don’t have any regrets for a new conquest who has fled you so rapidly; another very charming person will already be on the way! Despite your habitual prudence, you’ll hardly be able to resist your present desires for spending. In your work, favor quality over output for the time being. Slow your tempo and strengthen your achievements, otherwise you may go past the door in your hurry to find it.

Maybe crying

Sam Taylor-Wood

Maybe crying is childish but in a good way.

Maybe crying isn’t everything.

If you were standing next to someone who was visibly upset, maybe crying?

Maybe crying after orgasm is a result of pain or of hurt feelings.

Other times I dream that, after a few drinks, we find ourselves in the sauna at YMCA talking about the old times, laughing, maybe crying.

i understand maybe crying for an oscar or a grammy, but a kids choice award?

Maybe crying is an exception.

On the other hand, maybe crying is a functionless byproduct of increased autonomic activity in distressed individuals.

Pay Raises — Maybe Crying To The Mayor Will Get Results From City.

Maybe crying is something you should try more often.

I was rubbing her back and it seems like she was sad and maybe crying, I’m not sure.

You’re thinking: Maybe crying’s not such a bad idea…. Whoa. Hold it right there.

Not shrieking, necessarily, but maybe crying and acting cranky.

BRAND: And maybe crying a little bit on the outside.

We are not freezers of bears

These Things
Peter Davis

I’ve been meaning to say something.
I’d love to go on and on about how artists aren’t conduits
or special. We are not freezers of bears. We aren’t
shaman or conjurers and nothing we do is mysterious.
I could just go on and on about how people are like
“it just flowed through me” and “it happened” and
“enlightenment” and, you know, the general
mystery thing and super good, good thing. It’s like
everyone is special. I mean, like artists
as prophets and whatnot, getting all deep
in the belly of the goodness shark, gnashing away at injustice
and silliness, being better, being more than, being
the Jones’. O how I hate the idea of Talent and Exceptional
and Gifted and Blessed and Touched. I could go on and on.
Or, I’ve also been thinking about family and how it happens
that one has one and one lives with one and so on. But then
other things happen, like not going on and on. Like not
saying these things. Like not anything happening.
At those moments I end up slightly confused, looking
at myself in a mirror and feeling like a dead god.

The speed of light is the right speed

Muscly back

I wrote Beautiful Plague for the year 1505 for for every year.

The leaves on the paths ran like rats

Annysa Ng

Tea
Wallace Stevens

When the elephant’s-ear in the park
Shriveled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp light fell
On shining pillows
Of sea shades and sky shades
Like umbrellas in Java.

Hey hey hey, monsters

Anguiras

excerpt from I Will Unfold You With My Hairy Hands
Shane Jones

The hair monster checked out the ass of a handicapped woman. She was standing with her back turned when the hair monster noticed her panty line against her white tights and thought, hey hey hey. He was a typically lonely hair monster, and often looked at women trying to imagine what it would feel like to caress their human skin.

He kept watching her as she walked away.  And that’s when he noticed her hands balled up against her chest, her chin tucked down and rubbing against her knuckles as she shuffled her feet. The hair monster looked away, feeling ashamed, questioning  just what kind of hair monster he really was. His mother had raised him better.

(thanks to Crispin Best for pointing me to this story)

Wtf, Punctuation Day

“When Hemingway killed himself, he put a period at the end of his life. Old age is more like a semicolon.”– Kurt Vonnegut

! ! ! is pronounced by repeating thrice any monosyllabic sound. Chk Chk Chk is the most common pronunciation, but they could just as easily be called Pow Pow Pow, Bam Bam Bam, Uh Uh Uh, etc.

cmd+shift design blog

Stockings

Handbook for the Woman Driver: A Must for the Woman at the Wheel – 1955

Clothes and Beauty En Route (page 173)

Stockings: Practical as American women are, they often have a phobia against wearing stockings suitable for the occasion. For everyday wear, even with walking shoes, women buy hose far more sheer than what was considered evening weight just a few years ago. Have some sheer nylons for dressy occasions, but for the trip consider a medium-weight stocking (45-15 is good), knowing it is sheer enough to flatter your legs, yet able to take strain. If stockings are too short or skimpy, their tops may cut into your thighs as you drive, and they won’t be long enough for you to garter them to your girdle without pulling uncomfortably.

So

Why Are Your Poems So Dark?
Linda Pastan

Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”

Say farewell

Letman

Dance Dance Industrial Revolution

celebrate Steampunk and the age of Victorian sci-fi

Be me in voice

page 439 Finnegans Wake

Adventure pig

Why did they do this?

Soft white

Am I an animal
          able to distinquish
                    beams of light
                             like music this moonlit night
                                      eyes closed

–Mizuhara Shion (trans. Hiroaki Sato)

There’s sometimes a buggy

Meaning threat

Don’t stop talking to me

Emily Wells

Were you ever my favorite?

Rollerfink did a nice re-mix of my last 16 blog post titles; check it out, he is quite a talented fellow.

Some strange gravity

For Elizabeth
Jim Carroll

It is winter ending on earth. The planets align tomorrow in March and grow more distant from the sun and each other like stray, worn soldiers retreating from an enemy that no longer exists. It is a mild spring in purgatory. In green limbo the children whose foreheads are dry, whose hands do not grow, are transformed themselves to seasons of birds circling an obelisk of shivering mercury. None are allowed prey, none are allowed heaven’s crooked beak. They are radiant swallows with thorns for tongues to feed on the shifting mercury from the mythology of God’s hand, which I cannot break, even now, under this tearful scrutiny. I’ve tried. I’ve tried. I am allowing to pass through me a statement of death. You, the catalyst of such distorted memory. In that limbo the children move in some strange gravity within and outside Grace. Their Lord is angry. They have died with their innocence untested. None knows what it has been or will be ~ each day it changes without changing ~ do you understand what I am saying? It is the life you chose on this Earth, the life of junk and lies. But that wasn’t You, I knew You ~ you had perfect lips, eyes like a true child, your breasts unformed, an incandescent mind. This place where I put you now, it is a cursed season, an awkward line, a flawed circle, a snake on fire devouring what tomorrow it will itself become.

Eric Thompson "Jim Carroll"

If you aren’t going to die, at least make a palace of it

I imagine myself in socks sliding lengths of marble hallways, and finally gathered up sleeping at the end of the last.

Mongo, Mingo, Mungos

“Spacehog | Mungo City“

Questions About Life and Shit

I received a preview of Questions About Life and Shit today, which as of now can be pre-ordered from Bureau de Books. It’s filled with poetry (including one from ME) and short prose, each titled as a question. There’s no table of contents with the title lined up with the author in the proof I read, so I’m going to put one here, for you, and for me.

Jessica Maybury, The Earth is Filled With Violence?
Cami Park, Where is Cyrano?
Greg Gerke, Vincent and Theo (and Murray?)
Ani Smith, Can I Offer You a Refresher?
J. A. Tyler, Am I How This Is?
Chris East, Do You Want to Live With Me in My Parent’s Basement?
Sariya Iman Ikoye, Illegible Emotion/If the Meaning of Life Is to Find the Meaning of Life What Does This Mean; Is it Like ‘The Joke Is There Is No Joke’ or ‘The Point Is There Is No Point’ or Something?
Ben Brooks, What Are We?
Jimmy Chen, Who Has the Key to the Lactation Room?
Andrew Borgstrom, Whose Goddam Oatmeal is This?
Sam Pink, Is There a Way Not to Sweat While Sleeping?
Ninian Doff, Why Are You Bleeding Every Morning When We Wake Up?
Dollar Money, Who Is Mark Wahlberg?
Catherine Maskell, Congratulations, When’s It Due?
Crispin Best, What Are the Side Effects of Birth Control?
John Oldham, Where Do You Want to Go Today?
Vaughan Simons, Are You Lookin’ at My Bird?
Josh Kleinberg, What Will We Do Tonight?
DJ Berndt, When Will I Finally Die?

Okay, there’s much good stuff in here. My favorites were Ani Smith, Jimmy Chen, Andrew Borgstrom, Crispin Best, and Josh Kleinberg, but everyone’s favorites will be different in such an eclectic, well-edited collection. Greg Gerke is funny, Ninian Doff is sexy and mysterious, Sam Pink is weird and whimsical, DJ Berndt is absurdly existential, and Chris East is rueful as shit. I am line-broken in the wrong places, but okay otherwise. Thank you for asking.

Scorch Atlas

Scorch Atlas by Black Butler has been released today from Featherproof Books. Reviews have been justifiably great– I’ve read Blake for awhile now, and know his writing to be consistently powerful, eloquent, innovative, and beautiful. Excerpts I’ve read from Scorch Atlas are no exception; here is one from one of the 14 linked stories in the book (you can read the entire story at DIAGRAM 8.3):

excerpt from The Many Forms of Rain ___ Sent Upon Us in Those Days Before the Last Days

–Static

As if the planet had learned to scratch its back. In massive columns like what we’d seen on TV during our worse storms, stretched check-pattern, warbled spatter. As well, the sound of a billion needles wheedling, tearing their tips against the grain. Sometimes I felt I could hear laugh tracks buried under the floorboards, wedged way deep down in the sod. Somewhere down there was my father. His knuckled rapped against the beams. I began to feel everything inside me at once humming. I felt my organs screech alive: the static replicated in me. When my mouth opened, it came out. The vibration cracked my mirrors. It cracked the foundations of my soft skull. It made me giggle just a bit. I couldn’t keep a hold on as through the windows I saw the wide scrim that for years had nestled me into sleep—the gray/white/black transmission from dead channels, from wavelengths no one had thought to walk.

Plus, a video/audio presentation of another excerpt from the same story:

‘Water’ | from Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

Hettie and Joice and Daisy

Rebecca Loudon is punching poetry in the gut and not saying sorry over at Radish King, HERE and HERE and HERE. Remember breathing.

Hauschka – Morgenrot

Hauschka – Morgenrot from Jeff Desom via the excellent Radish King

If people were rain

Two of my favorite things

Ulrike S. Hardberck "Urlaub (III)"

Swimming and storms. Swimming in the rain is a sublime experience.

Such divisions of promise

All Particular Wishes

Discussing the weather,
we were careful to be inexact
in the smallest particulars.

Carefully, too, we packed
in newspaper the fragile
mountains I had decided
to take with me– Kawa Karpo,
Cerro Toro, Kailash,
exquisite Fuji, Mount Meru–

Except that’s impossible. We
couldn’t have done that. Mountains
are so big, and there is not enough
newspaper in the world. Really,
what I want to say is, such divisions of
promise are preposterous, you might as
well peel the bark off the trees or
tear the bricks from the house, you will
still be hungry, you will not be full.

Which I know because I know someone who did that once.

by Cami Park

I had another post

I spent a lot of time on it. It was terrible, so I thought, fuck it.

It’s gone now. This is better.

Counterpoint

con⋅tra⋅pun⋅tal [kon-truh-puhn-tl] – composed of two or more relatively independent melodies sounded together.

Elizabeth Murray "Empire"

“Jorif offers us a contrapuntal approach to the usual history of slavery and law in early modern America. . . . We are more often engaged in arguments over whether an action is just than over whether an injustice has been done. Jorif’s study. . . . gives us a new handle on this problem by positing, among his observations, that the community that arises out of, or coalesces around, acts of loving forgiveness are just in ways that the law never approaches.” – Prof. Jon-Christian Suggs, review of How Slave Narratives Influenced American Literature by Rolando Leodore Jorif

No violet eyes

          to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

–Ellen Bass

Did you ever want to make Buddha pears?

Maybe  you did.

A very straightforward blog post of new things to read

Juked #5 is all up and online and in your business. I haven’t read it yet, but it must be good, featuring fiction from writers like Liz Prato, Craig Snyder, and Marianne Villanueva, poetry from others like James Belflower, Shawn Fawson, and Sarah Blackman, plus an interview of Claudia Smith by Kelly Spitzer.

I have read the new decomP, and especially liked the flash pieces by Ravi Mangla, Michelle Reale, and J. A. Tyler, and the poetry by C. L. Bledsoe and Jen Shalliol.

I tried to blend in with a car today

Waiting for it to be unlocked. According to Charles Darwin and natural selection, a few tens of thousands of years, and I might have made it. Well, not me, my descendants, maybe, but, anyway.

Girl World

I have a thing up at Staccato Fiction. I’m glad they’re back and publishing again.

I did a remix of my past 16 blog post titles, and Crispin Best did, too. He might post his later. Here’s mine:

Girl World

These chalk moon lashes
These dusty pomegranate dead
These giant heart clouds
mammatus
alive

for you
for the other you
good little librarian head
awake
reassured
hiding whatever fainted fragmentary things
in ironic Saturday milk.

Might as well milk it

Kangaroo
by Cami Park (me)

If I were a kangaroo
I’d have to draw the line
somewhere,
like at beer commercials,
sharing trailers with koala bears,
or writing poetry for money.

Thompson Yulidjirri

Otherwise,
I’d be a downright whore.
Might as well milk it,
I’d say.

I will make these for you

Chocolate Chip, Oats 'n' Caramel Cookie Squares

I think the oats make them healthy.

Under dusty lashes, the long glance

Sarah Ball

I hear the oriole’s always-grieving voice,
And the rich summer’s welcome loss I hear
In the sickle’s serpentine hiss
Cutting the corn’s ear tightly pressed to ear.
And the short skirts of the slim reapers
Fly in the wind like holiday pennants,
The clash of joyful cymbals, and creeping
From under dusty lashes, the long glance.

I don’t expect love’s tender flatteries,
In premonition of some dark event,
But come, come and see this paradise
Where together we were blessed and innocent.

–Anna Akhmatova

Breaking my heart, shrinking my head

Listening to Miniature Tigers today:

Fainted ironic librarian

I dreamed I fainted, which woke me up. Now I can’t decide if dreaming you’re fainting is ironic or serendipitous.  I’m pretty sure the waking up part is ironic.

I got two books of poetry by Rebecca Loudon in the mail. I won’t review them when I’m finished, because I already know that they are wonderful.

I feel a child should follow and stick with their first instincts. Mine was to become a librarian. I am a frustrated librarian.

Things like other things

Things that are less like hammers.
Things that are like hammers, only softer.
Windows that are less like windows. Dirty.

Mouths that bleed like hammers make, but singing. Things that are
trip out through the eyes like being forgotten is.

I cover you with a pillowcase in the early laundry morning.

Find whatever is hiding

Caitlin Schwerin

The Sky

I like it with nothing. Is it
what I was? What I will be?
I look out there by the hour,
so clear, so sure. I could
smile, or frown—still nothing.

Be my father, be my mother,
great sleep of blue; reach
far within me; open doors,
find whatever is hiding; invite it
for many clear days in the sun.

When I turn away I know
you are there. We won’t forget
each other: every look is a promise.
Others can’t tell what you say
when it’s the blue voice, when
you come to the window and look for me.

Your word arches over
the roof all day. I know it
within my bowed head where
the other sky listens.
You will bring me
everything when the time comes.

by Willliam Stafford

Alive, but dead

Peter Callesen "Alive, but Dead" 2006

A few years later, Lisa’s mom took me to where my mom was buried. She’d planted petunias. I could never remember how to get back there after that, but I remember the stone, pressed flat into the earth, read “MOTHER.”

excerpt from Lisa Duncan’s Mom
by Cami Park (me)

originally published in Pindeldyboz

The world is a fragmentary place

Rug
by Kevin White

It all started with an image out of the corner of my eye. There was no corresponding smell. The sounds of someone running. Laughing. crying.

She was Italian through and through.

Move ‘A’ off of the defined space. Move it towards the wall and turn it sideways to fit. Drag ‘B’ off (towards the double door). Leave ‘B’ positioned parallel to the transept shouldar 12e.

All remaining objects, lint, dirt, are to be removed. Begin rolling article 13c. towards the main door. Begin by rolling a tube approx.; 2″ in diameter. Upon finishing the rolling, tie 13c. with 10 guage steel wire at 25″ intervals.

via Calamari Press

Awake as the moon

Christine Lim Simpson

The sprinkler outside my window sounds like a spitting cat.

The Little Girl Giant

These are ordinary things.

A good Saturday

Okay, so The Collagist opened today, and it looks great and has great writing (I particularly liked the particular poem Autumn Scene as Lullaby, by Oliver de la Paz), which is all well and good.

But Saturday is Abjective day, and Eric Beeny’s story this week, Milk Like a Melted Ghost,  is no exception. To being a story in Abjective on Saturday, I mean. Another one that makes me realize how original combinations of words and sentences and paragraphs can be.  An example: Little yellow birds flew out of their shells, she fell to her knees, the birds flying around her head, a locked cage. This image is going to be flying around my head for some time, I think.

Something else, though– Kim Chinquee has 3 stories in The Collagist, one of which very coincidentally has a connection with Eric Beeny’s Abjective story. I won’t say exactly what, because I don’t want to spoil anyone.  Hint: it rhymes with “laceless Roman.”

Chalk supply

Gabe Kirchheimer

I don’t know where this is, who erases it, if it has to be done daily, or  if there’s even a blackboard big enough for all of my fears. But I like the existence of it all– the sign, the board, the man in the cowboy hat and skirt and his pink-trimmed bike; the photograph. I am grateful.

Mammatus clouds

I had never heard of these before. They look like cotton balls, or the backs of shaggy llamas.

Pomegranate

Brandi Wells Review posted a thing of mine, which was nice to do, I think. It’s a cool place, and Brandi would love for people to send her stuff, so maybe people should.

I burned the fuck out of myself today. For those who don’t know, burning the fuck out of yourself is at least a three degree burn. I’m not sure how many degrees burns go up to. It was my finger, so I held on to frozen things until it stopped hurting. It’s better now.

Be reassured

Souther Salazar

Achy

I am so achy

waiting for the world to come back to me

or for me to come back to the world

No one to tell these stories to

only others’ stories to tell

No way of telling where

or how

these things will always ever end up

excerpt from FOR ORTS
by Ander Monson

I think of sex & of Godzilla with the wake of detritus that trails behind
his fiery gaze—millions of extension cords, telephone line & fiber (think
cereal, think sincere & serial addictions; repeat) optic cable (so hot,
that Godzilla, that I can dial him up, that I can give into
his new sex games, that big-ass monster Yes). I am so tight
I cannot speak. This yes this rash of it this gush. Reply, then rinse.
Repeat. I think of cream & a monster foot set down on it & thus
it is in me. I am this print fossilized in Nivea. I wait to be filled in
with whatever comes next. I hope it looks like love.

Make me new

My heart is an erratic, unbeautiful thing.

I’d be smug, too

Something about jellyfish

I just like this.

Ben Grace

No excuses.

No joy

There is no joy in hesitancy between us. It doesn’t matter to me if you feel as if you would like to suck the juices of my heart like a tangerine. But if you want to suck the juices of my heart like a tangerine, that matters. Because I care about what you want more than I care about how you feel.

Jacob Collins

Which is more beautiful?

Phillip Glass by Chuck Close

after life

whatever beautiful factory
trucks forever passing
we stumble into half-attending

–Cami Park (me)
previously published in elimae

I tried to learn the accordion once

Ellen van Deelen

I still love zydeco.

Funny/Scary

There’s something dangerous about what’s funny. Jarring and disconcerting. There is a connection between funny and scary.  –Christopher Walken

God can be funny

Things to do on a plinth

I would French braid my hair on a plinth.

I would eat a bologna sandwich on a plinth. No, egg salad, because I just remembered,
I’m a vegetarian now.

I would perfect my Humphrey Bogart impression on a plinth.

I would race turtles on a plinth.

I would invent the super-anivated penambulator on a plinth. You will know it when you see it.

I will love the plinth. The plinth will admire my body.

I would lie on my back on a plinth, hands down on the concrete.

Spit marbles into the sky.

Trust someone.

What if a whisk

Phillip Toledano

Manic Whisk

Let me out of this drawer–

I don’t belong here in this rabble
of misunderstood gadgets, spatulas,
and sad, hopeful corkscrews.

I am an artist–

Free me, and I will whip
heaping mountains of cream,
beat eggs within a living inch,
create meringues the likes of which
would have driven Van Gogh to burn
his precious Sunflowers. Picasso at
his most cubistic has nothing on me,
my arcs and twirls and brilliant frothing mounds.

This darkness is not worthy of me–

Dali weeps.

Umbrella window

View from life

I am I am I own

I am a beautiful flower

Hermann Forsterling

I am an ostrich

Keith Carter

I own the ostrich

Breaking my mind

jenszi, Bryan Shutmaat

Size matters. Yep, yep, yep.

Randall Brown, writer, editor, educator, and general connoisseur of all things flash fiction, has founded a new site dedicated to making all tiny (written) things count. There are daily features that include prompts, crafting advice, a weekly guest blogger on flash fiction topics, interviews, and a Sunday micro-fiction feature. An authors page lists writers with links to their blog or website, plus a representative story. Though just getting off the ground, FlashFiction.net is already informative, exciting, and chock full of micro, mini, flashly goodnesses. I suggest you check it.

Escape

Bryan Shutmaat

Legs twisted in fitted sheets. Body/breath heavy on me. Get away so far away.

She fights for her life

Oren Lavie

How poets die

a) happiness

b) sadness

c) allboth of the above

Where did you come from?

And where the fuck am I?

Heavy is the crown

A woman’s hair is her crowning glory, my grandmother always said.

Chema Madoz

She also once told me she felt like she was drowning. We had been washing dishes together in silence, her hands wrist-deep in suds.  I placed the plate I’d been drying in the rack and leaned over the sink on tiptoe to look out the window at the star-speckled sky. Searched for the Milky Way, scanned for the moon.

Someday I will be the practical one

and all this string I’ve been collecting will be put to good use.

Thank God for Hell

It inspires such great cartoons.

Sour

Wee models

David Shrigley

Click on the picture to see where it came from.

I barely know you

but I think I’ve learned enough.

The goddam regrets

The Title of this Poem Is Really Long.  It Is: I Am Often Horrified by the Words that Come Out of My Mouth

I should always wear a t-shirt
that says
Oh,
My God,
I Am So
Sorry

Rumble

Rumble‘s 5th Anniversary Issue includes 3 microscopic fictions by me, plus more excellent fictions by Michelle Reale, J.A. Tyler, Ryan B. Richey, and Krishan Coupland.  It makes me want to pinch its cheeks.

Vintage pun

Michael Jackson in happy-go-luckier times

Physics & Meteorology

A Conversation about Momentum

Everything needs dusting but the weather.

It’s impossible to do this with dishes piling up
and while you’re wearing that red shirt.
The curtains are out of line and–

Oh, don’t let me fall asleep!

I mean, what we’ve been through.

And it’s been so long, so long.

I guess what I’m saying is, the
truth doesn’t have to hurt,
but it might as well.

–Cami Park (me)

originally published in Ward 6 Review

Crescent Earth

this post dedicated to Crispin Best, who is interested in and sad about the moon.

Gold star

I slept last night, and made no major mistakes yesterday.  So, gold star for me.

Today is the day we celebrate our freedom by making Jello Poke Cake.  Below is a recipe, adapted for patriotism.

Patriotic Poke Cake

White cake — that’s it, just a white cake. Any old white cake. Being, a cake that’s white.
Another white cake— see above.
1 large box of Strawberry Jello [tm] — Make sure it’s large.
I large box of blue jello — make sure it’s blue.
4 cups water
Vanilla pudding
Milk
Cool Whip

Make a white cake, according to the directions on the box. Because, I guess, that’s the only way to make a white cake. Then, make another one.
While the cake is still hot, poke holes in it with the handle of a wooden spoon (no other utensil will work for these holes, do NOT fool around!)
Do it again with the other one.
Dissolve Jello in 2 cups boiling water (each), and pour over cake. Leave no part of the cake uncovered. The cake should no longer be white at the end of this procedure.
Pour red jello over one cake, and blue over the other.
Let the cake cool while you make vanilla pudding. Somehow.
There’s probably a box or something, like with the cake.
Maybe you’ll need more pudding. Another box or something.

Okay, here’s the best part– get ready–

COVER THE ENTIRE CAKE WITH PUDDING
COVER THE OTHER ENTIRE CAKE WITH PUDDING

Stack cakes on top of each other.

And the second best part:

COVER IT ALL WITH COOL WHIP.

Et voila.

I got this from Julia Child.

A post

I have nothing compelling to post–
nor even anything especially mundane.

the UPS man today smelled like shampoo.
my car is making a funny noise, and I realize I’m
way behind on changing the oil. I kind of like the sound.

I got my read some words in the mail, and I did. I read every damn
one of them. it was good.

I’m not sure where to go from here.

Paperwork

DOCUMENTATION

I.  Assessment of severity

it’s like you’re an oyster that can’t make pearls

II.  Activities of daily living

make bed
scramble eggs
match socks

III.  Social functioning

you’re afraid of what might happen when you speak

IV.  Episodes of decompensation

no way independent
of
  the
 quality of stone

Ambien

–scares the shit out of me.

Storm

Connect 4 Strategy

A beautiful scene.

Butterless

There is no longer butter inside these boxes:

I find that misleading.

Pocket by Tim Horvath

I read this today over at DIAGRAM. I liked it a lot. It’s crazy inventive in so many ways, but mostly I thought, who would think of not making pocket plural? It integrated into the story so well, and the author got so much out of it.  In a note about the piece at the very end, Tim Horvath says, “(((()))) If the string theorists are right, the universe teems with hidden dimensions; pockets abound. To make even a single new one, then, is to play at being God,” which is an amazing thing to say, I think.

So, read that, I would suggest.

Farrah is missing

Buy a dishwasher and have an orgasm instead

He was easy to buy for

Homer

My first boyfriend
wore t-shirts all the time.
He had glasses, and
dimples when he smiled.

He was the first boy
I ever really
loved who
ever really loved
me.

I think he wears ties and stuff now.

Quick Fiction 15

The day Quick Fiction comes in the mail is a good day. I haven’t finished it yet, but this, from Andrew Michael Roberts’ The Inconspicuous Beginning of Our Disappearance, struck me as such an exquisite opening sentence in a microfiction work that I wanted to save it for always, and also share with anyone that happens to wander by here:  “This was the year they found owls wound in twine at the bases of burned-out trees and the river’s mouth stuffed with girls who’d kissed its mirror and drowned in their complicated names.” The rest of the sentences are pretty good, too.

Also, Andrea Kneeland’s The Practical Application of Beauty is just exactly that. I caught my breath.

It really is a lion

The boat is a pineapple.
Your head is a zipper.
My hands are garbage bags.
The jungle is a ruby.
Your teeth are strawberries.
The water is cotton.
His pajamas are linoleum.
Her feet are my hands.
The air is glass.

People I wish I could be more like

Julia Child
Thomas Jefferson
Socrates
Halle Berry
Albert Camus
American Maid
Mr. T
Hypatia

Tangents too often ambiguous.

Not really*

Things to Do Before 120

Learn to read palms.
Write a sequel to the Bible.
Make the perfect banana pudding.
Solve for pie. Anything. Solve
anything for pie.
Run Canadians across the border.
See Brooklyn Heights.
Have sex for money just once when
I’m not broke.
Get a good night’s sleep.

–Cami Park (me)

*I have already been to Brooklyn Heights

Your favorite toy

To play with a yo-yo, slip the top loop of the string over your middle finger, and throw it down.  Once it travels to the bottom of the string and returns to your hand, grab it and throw it down again. This can go on forever. There are many games to play, including sleep. Sleep can go for years, even, until the string is jerked again.

List of words

I’m compiling of a list of words that I’ve discovered in my journeys around and abouts the internet. Every once in awhile one will catch my eye as I’m googling an image or downloading porn, and I’ve become intrigued by them in spite of myself. As you can see, I don’t have that many, so if anyone else happens to have a random word lying around they’d like to donate to my collection, feel free– I’ll happily add it, with credit.

FEATHERED
ENCYCLOPEDIA
POLKA
SEVICHE
CRABGRASS
BILLIARDS
VAULT

Dangerous Fruit Stores

“It is possible to look at evil so steadily that other evils, almost equally menacing, are unnoticed.  Evidently in a desire to curb the saloon and the poolroom the growing evil of gambling and other demoralizing features of fruit stores has been overlooked.”

It’s about time someone spoke up about this in 1904.

Hardest interview question ever

Yet Claudia Smith answers it beautifully, in this interview I came across in Thunk.

Evolution of Jellyfish

Winstons

Once we got the hang of it, we
breathed circles around each other.

Skipped foreheads off
rocks, chewed
embers.

Jellyfish,
left to their own
devices, developed spines, got
religion, eschewed
risk

made Gods of sticks.

–Cami Park (me)

originally published in tinfoildresses

1493

I wrote about it, here:

Form is never more than an extension of breakfast.

–Bill Knott, from his great blog post all about form and stuff, which concludes with this excellent poem which I just had to post on my own blog.

Late Rising

Terrible
is the soft sound of a hardboiled egg
cracking on a zinc counter
and terrible is that sound
when it moves in the memory
of a man who is hungry
Terrible also is the head of a man
the head of a man hungry
when he looks at six o’clock in the morning
in a smart shop window and sees
a head the color of dust
But it is not his head he sees
in the window of ‘Chez Potin’
he doesn’t give a damn
for the head of a man
he doesn’t think at all
he dreams
imagining another head
calf’s-head for instance
with vinegar sauce
head of anything edible
and slowly he moves his jaws
slowly slowly
grinds his teeth for the world
stands him on his head
without giving him any comeback
so he counts on his fingers one two three
one two three
that makes three days he has been empty
and it’s stupid to go on saying It can’t
go on It can’t go on because
it does
Three days
three nights
without eating
and behind those windows
paté de fois gras wine preserves
dead fish protected by their boxes
boxes in turn protected by windows
these in turn watched by the police
police protected in turn by fear
How many guards for six sardines . . .
Then he comes to the lunch counter
coffee-with-cream buttered toast
and he begins to flounder
and in the middle of his head
blizzard of words
muddle of words
sardines fed
hardboiled eggs coffee-with-cream
coffee black rum food
coffee-with-cream
coffee-with-cream
coffee crime black blood
A respectable man in his own neighborhood
had his throat cut in broad daylight
the dastardly assassin stole from him
two bits that is to say
exactly the price of a black coffee
two slices of buttered toast
and a nickel left to tip the waiter
Terrible
is the soft sound of a hardboiled egg
cracking on a zinc counter
and terrible is that sound when it moves
in the memory
of a man who is hungry.

–Jacques Prévert

trans. by Selden Rodman

Hey, Darby Larson reviewed me a long time ago–

in Kelly Spitzer’s excellent blog. I just noticed. He talks about my story On Mondays, Francesca Takes the Stairs published in Smokelong Quarterly XVI. Anyway, I like Darby Larson, so it was nice to come across this.

Wanted

Tees for Tea

I’m a crewcut in
a v-neck
looking for an
afro in a babydoll
to make me
some of that
sweet
sweet
100% all-natural or
ganic blend
didIsaysweet
tea.

Juicy

Twisted utensils

There was a guy in Dodgeville who would twist old forks and spoons into different things, like key holders, windchimes, napkin rings, stuff like that. They were pretty, and he was proud of his work. I bought a keychain that I used for awhile, but it kind of bugged me. Spoons and forks have already reached their fullest potential. I thought it must suck for silver, or stainless steel, or whatever, to know its truest purpose, and then be torqued into a completely different, vain, petty object. My keychain sits in a dish on the dresser, wishing for soup.

Post-Civil War Re-enactment

Mine

Don’t wear that t-shirt. It’s
mine. Wear this
one– it belonged to the
great-grandnephew of
Abraham Lincoln, who died
helping slaves escape to freedom
long after the Civil War
was over. He just didn’t know.

Here. It doesn’t mean anything.

Hat

No big deal.

Hat to Bed

I had an ex who liked to wear an old wool cap to bed. He said he it kept him warm at night. He was also sensitive about his thinning hair, and I wonder if he secretly had some superstition about wool hats and the prevention of premature baldness. Anyway, I wouldn’t let him wear the hat to bed– I said I felt weird lying next to R.P. McMurphy. Now I wonder if I was petty, or shallow. Or both. I can’t decide.

Frosting is Better for You than High Fructose Corn Syrup

Diet tip: Mountain Dew Throwback tastes just like cake.