Better Than Television Her ankles swole up and she leaned on a sprinkler key like a cane. My husband and me had separate beds, she said, but the rug was wore out between ’em. Will’s White Hen He carried her under his arm but when he found her with her feet up in the air [...]
/move/ We are the sum of our choices in a boxing gym. Open your sternum, autopsy style. His mesodermal layers boast, “I like to spoon.” Minute hands and low towel stock are enemies along with The 52nd hour of the Today Show. It isn’t today anymore when it’s thirty for thirty. Glide and Lift. Lift [...]
Jeffrey Pethybridge—Striven, the Bright Treatise Noemi, 2013 Page Length: 194 Retail: $25 A reality of the postmodern milieu is that a work must be understood not only by what it does but also by what it cannot possibly do. Language, we know, is a flawed and failing vehicle, always falling short of the nonverbal reality [...]
Treed 2. Watercolor, marker and pencil on paper, 9×12” 2014 with H. Deskins is an artist and writer who examines womanhood, motherhood, and the body in her work and others. She’s exhibited in galleries nationally and published her art and writing internationally. She is founding editor of Les Femmes Folles, and illustrated Intimates and Fools [...]
Brash Ice. Djelloul Marbrook. Leaky Boot Press, 2014. 104 pages, ISBN: 978-1909849150 The boundaries of an identity become less distinct the closer they’re analyzed. It’s an existential nuance encountered by everyone from scientists defining an atom to Zen students contemplating a koan. Djelloul Marbrook’s latest collection, Brash Ice, explores that vagueness and various tangential elements [...]
I Came Upon a Troll By Jason Pierre Every so often, I take these hour-long walks. I drift for miles at a time. It gives me a chance to look out at Los Angeles in a way I would never have done on the bus. One thing I’ve learned about this town is that it’s [...]
Dry Terrain If I could explain your desert, I would— the spines of your beard, your shoulder as stone, the tuft of dried grass struggling beneath it. I would roll the tumbleweed across your chest, or disrupt it with my fingers. Your abdomen is the silent side of a long expanse of dune, and I [...]
Oozing. Acrylic, ink on white paper, 18 x 24” 2014. is an artist and writer who examines womanhood, motherhood, and the body in her work and others. She’s exhibited in galleries nationally and published her art and writing internationally. She is founding editor of Les Femmes Folles, and illustrated Intimates and Fools (poetry by Laura [...]
iii. If man should raise hands to breach the throat of his father, feed him garlic. Who else but an imp should eat it? It’s reaper-cruel. Dog food. The pagan’s stinking rose. Hemlock in the belly, vipers in the blood. Canidia, the Grey One, had a hand in this dish, I’m sure. That other witch [...]
The poems in Untying the Knot (Kelsay Books, 2014), by Karen Paul Holmes, detail her two-year journey through a gamut of trials that rival Job’s. As the title suggests, divorce is the over-arching disaster. With what Thomas Lux described as grace, humor and self-awareness, Holmes relates the year in which she learned that her husband [...]
I used to date a woman with exceptional taste in art. She kept a steady rotation of coffee table books in her living room, my favorite of which was an enormous hardcover filled with paintings by Lucian Freud. We would be watching television, or trying to have a conversation, or making out, and I’d inevitably [...]
A lifetime ago, I sat with some dear friends in their apartment discussing literature, music, and art as we drank wine. We gathered like this as often as we could. A small group of poets, novelists, painters, and musicians; we composed our own little salon. Elizabeth Bishop was the topic of conversation that night, and [...]
Food Addiction When you look at me what do you look at? At the outer shell? The fat, the rolls, the flesh? The over-abundance of what I am? Do you see gluttony? Do you see sloth? Do you look beyond? Can you see what is inside? The heart, the mind, the soul? The over-abundance of [...]
No Longer I am rails no longer. I have hips now, and breasts that stick out past my ribs, though the alchemy of metabolism makes them protrude, too. I am no longer whittled, though my fingers still get cold, but there is something to me now, some substance. I have content—more than just skin and [...]
Circe You walked into my garden and shook your head at the Parliament of swine there assembled. You cursed my name, called me witch, meddled with my drinks for fear of poison. Yet, you had the taste to love me first. How I lost my appeal seems unfathomable now. Were you afraid of my powers? [...]
A Sanctioned Babel: On fleshing out text, a visit with Cecil Taylor, and a re-wilding of language. “The pleasure of the text is the moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do.” —Roland Barthes, from The Pleasure of the Text … Literary rabbit holes, as [...]
