Fox Frazier-Foley

​In relationships, how do we manage our multiple selves? Can we truly be the same person alone and with others? The Green Condition, by Elizabeth J. Colen, explores the notion of the self. Part collage, part lyric essay, and part animal invocation, Colen traverses different spheres: Roman history, the domestic space, poetic space, academia, loneliness, solitude, a complicated relationship and the environment of the Pacific Northwest; and she writes about how physical spaces change us, make us take notice and listen. In these physical spaces the narrator is settled and unsettling: “I didn’t want to move here” and “I didn’t want to move here, but I’m growing to like it: the water, the planes, the neighbors even. The unexpected quiet.” As the relationship begins to unravel, the narrator becomes more entwined with the physical world: “That week the spring tides: the water recedes far into the bay and the mudflats [...]

BY INDUSTRY AND INGENUITY Whatever gowns you wear for the gala dances— the fabrics exotic against fingertips, the bottoms flowing behind your feet with your stride, hugging a shape buried within, colors unnatural and explosive, hems spreading out in designs common of ornate carpets or awnings— these are all a language untranslatable to me, guttural and non Latin. Are we trying to buck perception, the enveloping sea? This is a culture of ornament, of collections. Some contain gazes, some victims. Imagine taking a limo around a busy block and rolling the window down so just your gloved hand can wave at the pedestrians as they look and try to find a recognizable face, understand the way that whoever within has had her hopes realized. It’s not terrible, but it sounds like it when we’re on one side of the glass. Cover yourself in tinsel, let the police figure out who [...]

Note: The first of the three poems below is a continuation of the above excerpt from Zenith — written in the voice of Mina, Coco’s mother and a Romani poet, “Mina the Lotus” is from Zenith‘s book-within-a-book, titled Eating the Midnight Lotus. Mina the Lotus A conversation between Mina and Sati Sara, the Romani Goddess of Fate, Time, and Chaos If, like you say, I am rooted in you as a lotus is rooted in water, then where are you, Dark One? I don’t ask that you tell me but nothing could live without water this long— The problem with you, Goddess, is you only know spirits and mine’s inside a body, so when you say all of this is an illusion you speak to my ransacked shell, cracked open where it matters, so your words trickle out. I live in Paris, not the Ganges. Your blood is not the [...]

Mostly, this week I decided to run things that make me feel good on an experiential, instinctive level. I kept jokingly thinking, “It’s Thanksgiving! Here’s what I’m thankful for,” as I was putting the pieces together. It’s funny, though — so much of how we approach the idea of Thanksgiving is bound up in temporal vicissitudes. The way we talk and think about this American tradition — what it even means to have an “American tradition,” really — has changed so much even within my own lifetime. And I can’t approach it in my own mind any way but cumulatively. I know it’s pretty en vogue, in our ironic culture, to focus on the myriad negative aspects of traditional American holidays, especially one so wrought with a history of racism, war, violence, and mundane human unkindness — you can’t talk about depictions of Pilgrims and Native Americans without that, right? [...]

Poetry with the kind of intellect that Roger Reeves displays in his debut, King Me, often runs the risk of insularity and in-speak to the point of exclusion: through literary or cultural allusions, technical jargon or prohibitively challenging diction, big-brained poetry often leaves full-hearted readers with too little blood to keep upright. Reeves’ poetry, though, is as emotionally riveting as it is intelligent: an incredibly rare feature in the landscape of contemporary poetics. And it’s this stunning emotional force that keeps Reeves’ poems thoroughly accessible. Like Whitman’s, Reeves’ project is the very opposite of exclusion, and the means by which he keeps his brain from blocking the reader’s view is by moving his feet expertly among a vast crowd of recognizable witnesses. This is fundamentally a peopled poetry, and the range of people to whom it speaks is rivaled in scope only by the range of people of whom it [...]

First card: Seven of Cups The Record of Coco Charbonneau July 25th, 1949, The Black Forest Sara la Kali, stretch your black wings around me— If I am no one, inscribe me with purpose. If I am someone, speak it to me. I will believe anything you tell me. My dear, sweet once upon a time…. In The Black Forest, I stand over the man who I’ve hated most in the world, the man who is now bound and gagged at my feet, his balding head bruised by the butt of the MAC-50 semiautomatic pistol that’s pointed at his third eye, and I need to decide whether or not I am a person capable of ending another human life. I know that I am Coco Charbonneau, nineteen years old, burlesque dancer and fortune teller at Zenith Circus in Paris, but that’s just a dress I wear, and when I take [...]

Notes from a Time Traveller’s Journal: Wallflower. Mixed media. Bio: MANDEM is the art name shared by Maize Arendsee (an art instructor and Studio Art MFA student at Florida State University) and her life-partner, Moco Steinman-Arendsee. Drawing on an academic background in classical mythology, gender studies, and critical theory, MANDEM works across media and materials (painting, assemblage/collage, film, sculpture, and book-making), intentionally destabilizing genre in terms of content and media. MANDEM has received numerous art awards, including Juror’s Merit at the LaGrange National XXVII (2014) and First Place at the FSU Museum of Fine Art Summer Annual Exhibition (2014). While being widely published and nationally exhibited, MANDEM remains actively involved in the Tallahassee art scene. (www.MythpunkArt.com) Artist Statement: We are a transdigital artist. Our art is an exercise in categorical violations, simulation, and narrative (translation: we are makers, rule-breakers, tricksters, and storytellers). We work across media and materials: painting, assemblage/collage, [...]

Arielle Greenberg is author of the forthcoming poetry collection Slice and the creative nonfiction book Locally Made Panties, as well as the previous poetry books My Kafka Century and Given, and the chapbooks Shake Her and Fa(r)ther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials. She is co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of Home/Birth: A Poemic, and co-editor of three anthologies: most recently, with Lara Glenum, Gurlesque. She writes a regular column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review, and her poems and essays have been widely anthologized. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship and a Saltonstall Individual Artist Grant. A former tenured professor in poetry at Columbia College Chicago, she now lives in Maine and teaches in the community and in Oregon State University-Cascades’ MFA. I dig Arielle’s perspective on poetics, feminism, sexuality, art, and life in general, so I asked her to come hang in my Infoxicated [...]

Darcie Dennigan’s Madame X conjures a post-apocalyptic vision whose darkness is always imbued with play and benign strangeness. The speakers in these poems seem genuinely (and, somehow, amusingly) undecided on the question of their own humanity—yet humanity seems to be at the very center of Dennigan’s work: these poems ruminate on human identity and the centrality of art, even as they wander the strange landscapes of the imagination, the holy, the comic, the tragic. Take, for example, “The Job Interview”: “At one point, I also did some work as a skydiver. It was a strange summer because I was pretty young and had just gotten my period. Not to be gross, but I basically bled all summer. And that was mostly fine. It was beautiful weather and I, you know, wore dark pants, took loads of baths. But there was one cloudy day, and they sent us up anyway. I [...]

That Crumpled It was a tryst. It was a trip. Difficult fiction. Certain collapse. I do this all the time. Collapsed. Back together. No stable structure. I collapsed. I collapse. No one was hurt. But I had to collapse. Slow Return It was a tryst with a woman, supposedly. It was a rush, maybe. It had tunnels that led from inside out into, probably. This is clad in lore and embellishment, but the facade tumbled along that long, long road—two kids, partner, furniture, mementos in storage. I collapsed. They did, too. The façade. This façade. I had to be rebuilt from the ground up, and while portions could be saved almost everything else had to be reconstructed. Closed for so many years, sleepy, vanishing, nobody. Now, bare, I move, I know what’s happening downstairs. There are windows! A door. Life. Magic. People want that. [FROM: “Slow Return for a Former [...]

Grace Note The night by hours ​the horse by hands. Our grudges measured in the salt the moon shed. They weigh me down like prey does a mouth. You died like the animal ​ of a sudden. Because it can not reckon its end. Each footfall in the past’s savage fashion. Because the one sound it knows is song. And the one song it knows ​ is now. Afterfeather ​​after the myth of Philomena The past tracks your scent. At your heels like king’s hounds and hungrier. This is what comes after massacre. Your tongue cut from the root. The purple need to weave what placed you rough- handed here. This is what comes after massacre. If the thread can be read by your sister. If you can kill what’s most dear to your defiler. If you can feed what’s most dear to your defiler. (Like the tail in the [...]

Saba Razvi’s poetry collection, (Finishing Line Press, 2012), makes it apparent that Razvi is a searcher, one who welcomes a journey. Along Razvi’s journey, she discovers connections between the physical world and the spiritual one that exist, sometimes darkly, in nature. Trees float through the ether, rootless; the moon is described as not “sickle sweet”; the river, an imposter (“not stream nor sea”). We saunter along with her through demonic deserts and cliff ledges, looking for home. Home is a million miles away but we heave onward. Each step brandishes another mirror held up to our human face: we are, at the base, animals, finicky and trapped. Like animals, sensory perception and instinct reign over logic. Razvi’s text promotes exquisite synapse explosions of all five senses. We see “sorrow, purple as a plum.” We hear “the laughter of carnival in the distance,” and the “night breeze thrumming.” We consistently smell [...]

Cthulhu Lies. Oil and pigment on canvas. 36″x36″ MANDEM is the art name shared by Maize Arendsee (an art instructor and Studio Art MFA student at Florida State University) and her life-partner, Moco Steinman-Arendsee. Drawing on an academic background in classical mythology, gender studies, and critical theory, MANDEM works across media and materials (painting, assemblage/collage, film, sculpture, and book-making), intentionally destabilizing genre in terms of content and media. MANDEM has received numerous art awards, including Juror’s Merit at the LaGrange National XXVII (2014) and First Place at the FSU Museum of Fine Art Summer Annual Exhibition (2014). While being widely published and nationally exhibited, MANDEM remains actively involved in the Tallahassee art scene. (www.MythpunkArt.com) Artist Statement: We are a transdigital artist. Our art is an exercise in categorical violations, simulation, and narrative (translation: we are makers, rule-breakers, tricksters, and storytellers). We work across media and materials: painting, assemblage/collage, film, sculpture, [...]

Appendix H Fig. 118: A silk scarf, painted with a map. Unrolled but not yet straightened over the table so that the rivers and mountains are shadowed in cobalt ink. Fig. 120: A question, posed by an airplane mutely scanning the landscape, Which of the lakes is mine? Appendix J Fig. 207: Cross section of a house. A series of buttons line the visible foundation. Labeled in unevenly inked typewriter letters: 1 Heater Room, 2 Living Room, 3 Dining Room, 4 Kitchen, 5 Lavatory, 6 Family Room, 7 Landing, 8 Upstairs Bathroom, 9 Cedar Closet, 10 Girls, 11 Hall Closet, 12 Grandparents, 13 Sewing Room, 14 Attic, 15 Vestibule. Pressing each causes a light to progress through the rooms. Kitchen button plays a recording. A tinny sounding man’s voice delineates the contents of the bread drawer on any given day of the week, surrendering the secret of the ironing board [...]

Certain beliefs hold that the serpent, while swallowing itself, writes its history on its intestinal walls, passing along lineage and gods, but the most vital notion for the ceremonial inscription, the sun-is-upward convention, that which opens and closes the circle. Outside Is Trouble Rooms fail because we made them. Comfort comes from lack of architectural detail the hotel-quality nowhereness. We descended the stairs. We might become bound to a carpeted purgatory, leaving behind the genitive rituals that ushered us out. They take us lower until there occurs the landing, which leads us nowhere further: Longing. And nowhere is this illustrated better than the idea of the balcony. * Low water, auxiliary dark: no rumor dies so long it keeps preserved in a deep ore or interior of the mine impressed in the mountain’s exterior stratification recorded in the very base level of the fossil record where no axing no hammers [...]