Last year, CAConrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon—a book that encompassed a perfect blend of street insolence and elegiac tribute—was published. Raunchy and tantrumy, insightful and spiritually reverent, Rumpelstilskin-stampingly angry, and uproariously hilarious, it was a kind of hash oil distilled from its author’s originality and strangeness, and an unforgettable hymn of praise to the work of others. Over a year later, each re-reading is not merely a return to something puissant and relevant, but a trip to a landscape that, like certain atramentous or transcendental places in the heart, turn out to be knowable only when you come to them. Marsupial is a work of pretty much unlimited generosity that is is there for you when you need it, and it has a portal and a therapy for every condition: love, loss, ecstasy, rage. The (soma)tic exercises in Marsupial’s title are derived from Soma, a sacred Vedic drink and the [...]
Lisa A. Flowers
from Diary of Return August 8, 2002 I arrived below the 38th parallel. Everyone and every place I know are below the waist of a nation. Before I arrived, empire arrived, that is to say empire is great. I follow its geography. From a distance the waist below looks like any other small rural village of winding alleys and traditional tile-roofed houses surrounded by rice paddies, vegetable fields, and mountains. It reminded me of home, that is to say this is my home. Close up: clubs, restaurants, souvenir and clothing stores with signs in English, that is to say English has arrived before me and was here even before I had left. PAPA SAN, LOVE SHOP, POP’S, GOLDEN TAILOR, PAWN. I followed the signs and they led to one of the gates to Camp Stanley, a heliport, that is to say language is not be to believed but to be [...]
LOURDES Matthew is plain on the tongue and fleeting. Lourdes sits, instead of sex, on two blue crates, feeds herself blue lemons. Lips sodden, she bathes. She tastes the burn in the lantern of her chest. Lourdes snakes straight through the garden into her own bed opens her dignities and pleasures like guava white cotton underwear ___to the side open with pulque wet of cachaca without the sugarcane, & boys with biblical names make no appearance, especially Matthew, a worn worm soldier jamming its way into the core of a ripe melon. ____________________________________ Lisa Marie Basile comes from the bloodline of Giambattista Basile, the fairy-tale writer. She is a graduate of The New School’s MFA program. She is the author of (Brothel Books) and (Dancing Girl Press). Her chapbook, war/lock, is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press in 2014. She is the founding editor of Patasola Press, an assistant editor for [...]
Conscientious Protests –after Julio Cortazar What a conscientious protest: marketing One A Day vitamins to death-row inmates, performing a little Crip Walk when security wands the standing body like a barcode, listening to the bald deputy bad-mouth his own root canal that hasn’t happened yet. What a conscientious protest: naming each bandoleer bullet after the cast of Soap: Jimmy Baio lodged in a Basra watermelon, Diana Canova blew off a man’s wrist in Mosul, Billy Crystal jammed in the barrel and fell out of the muzzle looking like a nickel run over by a combine harvester, Robert Guillaume killed two relatives hugging in Karbala (through his back and out of hers), Richard Mulligan and Katherine Helmond fired into the air together as a warning to nobody. What a conscientious protest: making The Today Show explain itself as a concept, justify its existence as a time passage in the Milky Way [...]
E N T I T L E D LET’S DRINK AND FUCK Lucille Baller, a walking bowel movement. All the pretty girls and the Mardi Gras, too. Bitches go hard. Bitches fat it out, too, when push comes to love. Never let the truth get in the way of your eyes. Paris is burning, and we shan’t be home tonight. You cut me I bleed perfumania. I want a normal happy life, I either wanna wife and children, or I wanna rich and famous, or I wanna be had. Cuz I’m a white privilege, my spirit animal is niggaz, my spirit faggot is the world that ain’t fair. To make some impression, some mark upon the world, all you have. You hit it big, you anal bleach. Paris is burning, and we shan’t be home tonight. Sometimes you prom yourself to sleep. The girl with two heads has also two [...]
Elizabethton, Tennessee, 1929 When wages sank and conditions became intolerable, women led a strike of the Glanzstoff Textile Mill. While their menfolk’s anger often erupted in violence, women used laughter and bold defiance of conventional feminine behavior as weapons against a bewildered National Guard, which was made up of their neighbors until backup was called. Though prosecutors branded them “wild” and “disorderly,” the women earned support from their pastor, sheriff, fellow townspeople, and local merchants. Those big companies sprang like arrows into the heart pine of Appalachia, shaking hands with homegrown ambition, eyes popping for our breasted hills, sinewy creeks, and I suppose for what they saw as backward-walking mountain folk. They knew we had few laws to cry for what a man ought give, and no union to guard what no man should take. No woman here lines her closet with pretty things bought in town or strings the [...]
They Used to Dance On Saturday Nights By Gillian Devereux Aforementioned Productions, 2012, 34 p. ISBN 978-0-9823741-4-6 The carnival performers in Gillian Devereux’s They Used to Dance on Saturday Nights (Aforementioned Productions) are always, like Robert Lowell’s prostitutes, “freelancing out along the razor’s edge”, always subject to the fatalities of their trades—knife throwing, tightrope walking, sword or fire swallowing. Entertainers are only as lucrative as the opacity of their parlor tricks and/or the chance genetic mutations of their tragedies. Freaks may “share a stomach or a torso”; may “frolic”, frighten” or “fold their bodies flat as farmland”, or an armless girl may have “a beauty in [her] strangeness that could ruin a man”. Images may be unexpectedly lovely, or transcendental: a dancing bear “soft as snow piled on pine boughs”, the salmon it’s tossed in its captivity leaping up into freedom and the constellations. Spectator and performer are a working [...]
One of the most dreamily sinister images in Dana Curtis’ Camera Stellata appears in the poem The Final Amnesia, which features an abandoned Eden drifting in space with hanged gardeners who “have decided to die/to give the roses/wings/the mint/dominion.” In the void of such lawlessness, “God’s Rapist” has begotten a miscellany of stars, planets, illegitimate black holes, and feminine “iconoclast[s] awhirl in stasis”…”each attempt to abort” drying their hair to thorns: the streams running from Christ’s crown those of Mary’s menses, or miscarriage: a kind of cosmic Handmaid’s Tale interspersed over Biblical prophecy. Female voices cycle through the narration, some truculent and young, recalling coming-of-age visions of “blood, vomit, loud sex in asparagus fields”, some sorrowful as Russian mothers striding among bombed-out ruins as chemical fires flicker on the horizon. Flames (as in war, as in zodiac, as in mythical salamander, as in creation and regeneration of the solar system) [...]
This entry is part of a series, On Kate Durbin» Lisa A. Flowers: One of the things I thought was interesting–and admirably bold–about The Hills was that it wasn’t afraid to, conceivably, bore its readers; wasn’t afraid to not entertain, which is a rather ingenious juxtaposition considering that, of course, the book is about entertainment, and by default about instant gratification. (In your recent reading at AWP, you even mention that the piece, as read aloud, might conceivably come across as “boring” without the participation of readers acting as the voices of various characters, so the narrative is clearly a multi-media interaction as presentation as well as in print). Beneath the “naked eye” repetition, there’s an indefinable undercurrent–as if someone had slipped something into a drink and the room had started to shift and alter imperceptibly, or a kind of white noise that had been quietly building had suddenly made [...]
This entry is part of a series, On Kate Durbin» E! Entertainment By Kate Durbin Insert/Blanc Press, 2012 Full color 40 p. chapbook $12.00 If Hedda Hopper had been reincarnated into a bag lady forced to stuff her own newspaper columns into her clothes for warmth, the wyrd outer hummings of her cycle toward rebirth might well have been echoed in Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment. The 40 page deconstruction, namesake of the television network and interspersed with lurid screenshots, is prose-poetry fed less by muses than by an alternative kind of green energy powered by their garbage: “recording angel” concept gone Murdoch wiretap, courtroom stenography as art that fluctuates between high and low like designer prescription drug-induced mood swings. The book opens with an episode (presented as script-summary) from reality TV’s The Hills. The shot (recognizable and iconic in renditions from Wilder to Lynch) rises over the narrative like a [...]