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, [...]

The Poem as Archive: A Conversation Between Carrie Olivia Adams & Kristina Marie Darling __________________________________________________________________ Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago, where she is a book publicist for the University of Chicago Press, the poetry editor for Black Ocean, and a biscuit maker and whiskey drinker. She is the author of Forty-One Jane Doe’s (book and companion DVD, Ahsahta 2013) and Intervening Absence (Ahsahta 2009) as well as the chapbooks Overture in the Key of F (above/ground press 2013) and A Useless Window (Black Ocean 2006). Kristina Marie Darling is the author of nearly twenty books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), Petrarchan (BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories 2007-2014 (BlazeVOX Books, forthcoming). Her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the [...]

From the recently published collection, Trickster (University of Iowa Press), Randall Potts offers some uncanny arithmetic. Math I put 0 and 0 together And arrived at nothing. Nothing was accomplished. I had done it perfectly. I made 0 disappear into 0. I made sure nothing was left. There was no doubt of it.Next, I made 2 into two. It was easy: numbers are words. I made sure nothing was left. I made sure nothing was said. I made sure nothing was written It was getting complicated.My thumb was black with ink. So, everything I touched became itself plus me. Every addition complicated it. Every mark was a number. Every number mocked. I settled on the number one. I refused all manner of addition. I was careful to touch nothing. That’s impossible,” someone said. I knew someone was right. ____________________________________________________________ Randall Potts is the author of Trickster, published this fall by [...]

Photo credit: Cedric Terrell Casualty Notification The Only News I know / Is Bulletins all Day / From Immortality. – Emily Dickinson Switch channels, stop the breaking news, press mute to hush the anchorman’s reviews of war, his litany of each device and bomb gone off today. Silence the price of bread or medicare or gasoline. Make the black pinpoint on the TV screen. Unplug the blackbox from the mouth of the wall. Uncradle the phone so nobody can call. Let the venetian blinds blind everyone to what’s outside—the dead, indifferent sun, the car pulled up along the curb, the vexed men in uniforms looking for next of kin. They bring a check to pay the cost of grieving. Their dark sedan puffs out exhaust. And now, the only sound a daybird singing, the only bulletin a doorbell ringing. Previously appeared in West Branch (issue 74, Spring 2014) ______________________________________________ Jehanne [...]

NOTE: Adele and I started this interview a while back and I never had the chance to post it. Some of the elements refer to her book as a recent publication. MT: I first want to comment on what I see as the arc of this collection, What Matters. Memory, in this book, seems like a kind of sacrament: memorializing literally makes real by nature of the act. I’m thinking especially of the line “language…larger than / logic” (“The Sap Bush”). (I’ve chopped that line up, but it seemed so evocative to me that I couldn’t bypass it.) The first section fulfills and meditates on this traditional task of the poet. Then the second section puts that function into crisis—the poet dies (or rather confronts the possibility of her own death). The crisis is (I think), if the memorializer dies, how do those that the poet loves (including herself) continue [...]

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of twenty books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), Petrarchan (BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories 2007-2014 (BlazeVOX Books, 2014). Her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, as well…

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 [...]

Photo credit: Cade Leebron As autumn deepens, poet and essayist Kathryn Rhett meditates on the magnetic forces of inner weather. In Bed I can’t stop talking about the weather. You say not to, and I can’t stop. Did they say it would rain? The white light pours down—I don’t think it will rain, but did they say? I don’t know. It’s eight o’clock in the morning— one child has a fever and another is in a play about death and nobody’s slept. He’s performing all the parts about death, death itself and the one who doesn’t want to die. The rain and the one who waits for what they say— they didn’t call for snow sometimes they’re wrong it’s no wonder with all this change in weather he has a fever. You say not to, and I can’t stop the white light that filters in through fabric blinds. If only [...]

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, [...]

The Lost Ark Between their wings, space only for God. The air, charged. Within, only dust. What shall we put in the ark? Nothing, but the tablets. The gold flaked away, baring acacia. The poles broken. We cannot carry it any further. What shall we put in the ark? Nothing, but the testimony. The sand, cemented. The faces, muted with time. Silent. Eyes closed. What shall we put in the ark? Only that which has been commanded. Only that we may listen. Our attention. Our obedience. Our vigilance. What shall we put in the ark? Our ears, our hearts. Nothing, but the testimony. How He speaks and moves. The sound of his laughter. The sound of our cries. His provision. His victory. The walls, fallen. The necks, broken. The hands, struck down. The ark, untouched. Buried, unseen. What shall we put in the ark? It is over, destroyed, yet not [...]