Blog Posts

The Copy Cats

5/16/2015

It was the year we all discovered our conjoined twins. Some were hiding in our hats. Some clung to our ankles. A few had been pretending to be our mothers. We recognized them by the tattoos on their wrists, the word effigy, which is Latin for copy. We took photos, bought them flip-flops. After a week of holding their tiny hands and washing their hairy bulbous feet, we wondered what to do with them. They were smaller than us, less pretty, smelled of vinegar and pepper.

We decided to build tree houses for them, then take away the ladders. It was windy when they first went up, and near dusk. Trapped up high, they stared at us, mumbling. The trees shook. Their hair whipped behind them, blew into their faces and mouths. The sound of their weeping was plastic bells, and dog claws on kitchen floors. When it rained that night, most of the twins washed away. A few shrunken pieces stuck to telephone poles, a few hung from power lines.

--Christine Hamm

Christine Hamm has a PhD in American Poetics, and her third book of poems, Echo Park, came out from Blazevox in the fall of 2011. The New Orleans Review published Christine's latest chapbook, A is for Absence, in the fall of 2014, and nominated her work for a Pushcart.

0 Comments

Scrapbook

5/8/2015

0 Comments

It was the year it was 104 degrees for 27 days. The skies were full of rain that never fell. One night there was a crumpled body on the floor. It was my mother’s. She came back to life, but I never forgave her. That year there were 81 days where I was only allowed to speak to the apple tree. Green, green, green. But sometimes sour. Here are 53 days where she is heavy-handed. But the back-hand is quick. Here are 66 days where I stood as still as I could. Like a rabbit in the eye of a hawk. And here is another. And another. Another. Here is the hundred days where my mother thought I was a ghost. Here are the 13 days she went away. This is the day she buried the St. Joseph statue upside down in the front yard, and I dug it back up in the darkness, dead clover crunching under my feet, the neighbor’s Doberman quieted with bologna. That is all my hair on the floor. It was the year no one ever spoke my name aloud.

--Donna Hunt

Donna Hunt is originally from Cleveland, which gave her a great love for large bodies of water and failing baseball teams, but she currently lives, writes, and teaches in Brooklyn. She is author of the chapbook The Coastline of Antarctica, and her poems have appeared in Tin House, Diagram, and South Dakota Review

0 Comments

The Year of No Sunlight

5/5/2015

0 Comments

It was the year I could not stand the sunlight any longer. It shone too brightly on my desires, driving me into paroxysms of giddiness and unpredictability. It was a year of relentless masturbation.

That year is no longer that different from any other year, except that that year I descended into a world without light. And all year long I listened to music that proclaimed I was knowledgeable.

Looking in the mirror, I saw myself, not as others saw me, but as I imagined myself. It was brutal, but strangely invigorating. With time, it became a staple of my existence. In order to be aware of myself, I needed to re-confirm my existence.

Backyards, people sitting on steps, white clapboard, brick bank parking lot, KFC, Auto Zone, Attleboro Ice & Oil Co., peaked turrets over bays, Lynn’s Nails, cinder block faux rock, Super Shots Glamour Make-Over in Your Home.

It was the summer of speeding through towns, destination somewhere ahead in the distance, but the present sense only of speed, of passing through. It was the year of seeing stable things from an unstable viewpoint.

It was the first day of the year people could go to the beach, a Saturday filled with sun and space, and they did, going too to fish on elevated wooden walkways. Nearby, a rough scene, boarded-up blocks, people went to have sex under the bridge.

It was the summer I could write along lawns of golf courses, at the 7-11, and concern myself with matters beyond the idiotic chatter emanating from humans oblivious to their environs. No one could hear the announcements.

But a child’s happy laughter was cheering, and it turned out even train tracks buried in brush led somewhere, as bikes throttled up the old road, and the sun dipped slowly toward the horizon.

-- Vincent Katz

Vincent Katz is the author of Swimming Home, just out from Nightboat Books. He curates the Readings in Contemporary Poetry series at Dia Chelsea in New York City. www.vincentkatz.com

0 Comments

It was the year a dark moss grew over my pubic bone

5/3/2015

0 Comments

and my legs became two chicken drumsticks.

There was no more running around the schoolyard faster than everyone.

I had lost my aerodynamic advantage. Gone from eagle to chicken because my clutch needed expressing.

But I wanted only to hatch ideas.

A year later a dam broke and then something else. A little thread of what might have been tugged.

Sometimes when I pulled the string of the tampon I imagined I was a magician trying to free a rabbit from my pink canal.

The rabbit would hop away to a magical land where there were no boys or girls, only creatures that could change their genitalia based upon how the sun hit the rocks near the pond.

Other times when I pulled the string it felt like I was pulling out a bit of a clotted dream.

I was not flowering into anything.

--Jill Grunewald

0 Comments

It Was the Year (III)

4/27/2015

0 Comments

monsters came out of our closets. Relieved at this validation of our vestigial fears, many of us embraced them, figuratively & literally. Photos of clawed, fanged, & otherwise terrifying specters cuddling with their ‘victims’ supplanted kittens & Venus fly-traps in classroom & water-cooler show-&-tells. Only when the stubborn & spoiled among us tried to coax them beyond the privacy of the bedroom did the horrified creatures, insulted by this misapprehension of their essential nature, revolt. Although diplomatic repair was attempted, it was too little, too late. Our psychic equilibrium came crashing down when we realized we might find them literally anywhere, lying in wait to expose our security for the delusion it had always been.

--Susan Lewis

0 Comments

THE YEAR OF

4/22/2015

0 Comments

It was the year of the shoplifter the shape-shifter, the un-chaperoned shipwrecked when nothing and nobody belonged to anybody because everything was re-sculpted and bifurcated like a Jewish soul.

It was the year of burglaries and break-ins and stolen glances, drive-by sleuthing and the secret secreted itself into veiled readability. And nothing was on lock down as Loc. Cit. loco citato forever repeating itself in infinite reproducibility. Deduce was wild.

It was the year of living dangerously living on the edge when the dissenter did not hold. And entry was all-access in a synnexes of excess axes of non-censored sensoria and all was defiled, re-filed and fluid to be slopped up like a spongy mélange, étrange, so Ponge; where all was re-roped and groping at what’s proper (propre) improper impropriotous, riotous like an aporetic Propp opera.

An eerie year of the gift given with no giver, there for the takin’, the taken, a token, a present which kept representing itself stealing into all conversation, all out on parole, with far flung tongues swung hungry stretched along agon, longing to belong, belonged without belonging, belonging only to a long lost langue.

--Adeena Karasick

Adeena Karasick is a New York based poet, media artist and the author of seven books of poetry and poetics, most recently This Poem (Talonbooks, 2012) and The Medium is the Muse: Channeling Marshall McLuhan (NeoPoiesis Press, 2014). She teaches Poetry, Critical Theory and Performance at the Pratt Institute and is co-founding Director of KlezKanada Poetry Festival and Retreat. http://talonbooks.com/authors/adeena-karasick

0 Comments

It Was the Year of the Enchantments

4/20/2015

0 Comments

It was the year of the mental wipers and the invisible architecture.
+

I asked the street scientist, for the design of behavioral etiquette; and nocturnal heat, for the price of discovery and hope. He thought in such a stripped-down nothing, that I felt tinkered with and plain-slighted.

That year, I held a contest of rituals, but everyone resisted. The rebels classified the questioners. My wolf ran from my side. [He is such an improved hope]

+
In the year of the enchantments, a passage opened between sky and night, Circadian, cyclical and feral. I was a sucked-out bone. But, the moon was star-struck. Eclipsed. I was in orbit; earth-bound; electro-feeling.

A burst.

A flame

A tearing at the darkness and the night bent back, withdrawn.

+

Instantly, I knew the mechanical bluebird from the headbird of dreams

The feltbook from the metalback.

The electroduck from the yellow-scented.

It was the year of the violets and the pretending and I pretended the drift was nocturnal and the best possible day was yet to come.

--Leah Umansky

Leah Umansky is a poet in NYC. Her Mad Men-inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream was published by Kattywompus Press in 2014. She is host/curator of the COUPLET Reading Series and is presently at work on her third book of poems.
(Some of the poem was appropriated from ideas in this book review. Hanna Roison's book review on 4.12.15 )

0 Comments

There is no need for clowns when everyone is a clown.

4/15/2015

1 Comment

It was the year the clowns stopped wearing red rubber noses and packing into a tiny car.

The last smile in town had been turned upside down through an increasingly simple operation called a frownectomy performed in old photo booths.

There is no need for clowns when everyone is a clown.

The circus kept going, but the clowns sat on the bleachers and watched the pink poodles reenact civil war battles. Everyone liked the poodles’ glitter guns.

Sometimes the clowns stood on their heads and smiled because everyone looked sad. They could never stay that way long, because they had grown too fat from eating hallucinogenic cotton candy and would topple over.

In a dream the clowns all turned into blue balloons and popped in a purple sky and their tears squirted out of yellow orchids worn by nuns.

In real life the clowns all cashed in their 401ks and traded in their little car for a black Hybrid Escalade with vibrating rainbow hubcaps.

And then they sped away.

-- Jill Grunewald
Jill Grunewald is a second-year MFA student at Hamline University. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband and two dogs.

1 Comment

It was the year we discovered

4/5/2015

0 Comments

our faces were never enough. We put on square tortoise shell glasses and tried to read the paper. Fools left their twinkle-bells and pom-poms on the page and we laughed so hard we spit pizza sauce from our red noses. Our parents screamed for us to come home and our friends gave us half a loveseat each and some washcloths. The windows were painted shut. Our hammers and screwdrivers just wouldn’t budge anything open. We slept while the slits of sun warmed our rompers and swore off make-up and sunscreen. With vitamin D deficiency and the bends we woke early, went to work and came home to a dinner of vitamin water and kale. We saved money for plastic surgery and wished for our princes on Netflix. Time stopped as we waited forever for downloads.

--Liz Axelrod

Liz Axelrod received her MFA from the New School in 2013. She is the co-host and curator of the Cedarmere Poetry Series in the home of William Cullen Bryant. Find links and samples of her work here: www.yourmoonsmine.com

0 Comments

It was the year that birds' songs taught little girls how to dance and fly.

4/2/2015

1 Comment

Bluebirds followed girls on their way to school. The girls would start out walking. But since they were so young and new to the planet, they understood the language of the birds so easily. The girls would hear tiny bluebirds and also multicolored hummingbirds that flew up and sang into their ears. They would twist a toe forward, then slide a heel back. Then snapping their fingers they punctuated the birds' songs and their forward motion. The next step took the girls slightly off the ground. They swung the other leg forward in the air, knees bent as if bicycling, but only no bicycle and half of their weight lifted off the ground. In the next step, they jutted one hip forward and rose completely off the ground, feet at an angle with toes higher than heels. From there they broke out into jazzy individual dances. Then they glided forward in synchronized arm stretches and twinkled toes. On snow days their shadows danced violet blue on the curves of white snow. In the spring their shadows lay flat grey over green side grass and tiny flower buds of red, orange, blue, and yellow. Bees abuzzed in the air with them. Half a block before the schoolyard the girls dipped back down, book bags first, that pulled their weight to the sidewalk. They trotted across the quiet street and joined the other kids in the school yard, the other kids being the boys. The boys who were the only witnesses to their flights, adults were not able to see them fly.

--Shelley Marlow
-

Shelley Marlow’s novel Two Augusts In a Row In a Row is out on Publication Studio. http://www.publicationstudio.biz/books/294

1 Comment

<<Previous

Forward>>

"Terrible to dress in the clothes
of a period that must end."--Frank Bidart

"You must remember that certain things die out for a while/ so they can be remembered with affection later on." --John Ashbery

The Copy Cats

Scrapbook

The Year of No Sunlight

It was the year a dark moss grew over my pubic bone

It Was the Year (III)

THE YEAR OF

It Was the Year of the Enchantments

There is no need for clowns when everyone is a clown.

It was the year we discovered

It was the year that birds' songs taught little girls how to dance and fly.

Author

Categories

"Terrible to dress in the clothesof a period that must end."--Frank Bidart "You must remember that certain things die out for a while/ so they can be remembered with affection later on." --John Ashbery

Author

Categories

"Terrible to dress in the clothes
of a period that must end."--Frank Bidart

"You must remember that certain things die out for a while/ so they can be remembered with affection later on." --John Ashbery