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? No doubt. You knew I held infinity in the palms of my hands. Circe Ti addentrasti nel mio giardino e scuotesti il capo alla vista del Parlamento di maiali lì radunato Maledicesti il mio nome, Mi chiamasti strega, rovistasti tra i miei drink per paura del veleno. Eppure avesti il gusto di amarmi prima. Come persi il mio appeal sembra inconcepibile adesso. Temevi i miei poteri? Senza dubbio. Sapevi che tenevo l’infinito tra le palme delle mie mani. Dream I dream giraffes on fire, but the walls of my room are made of asbestos and [...]

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 all religious readers know, are real. When we read a book, we do not only activate our eyes, we use our entire bodies. But it is not just the tactile experience of touching paper or buckram, parchment or vellum, that does this, not this, although the weight and feel of a book is much more than just a sensory perk. In an article in Scientific American last year, Ferris Jabr discussed some of the research that has been going on regarding screen-reading versus reading on paper. The brain reads letters as physical objects that live [...]

Brandon Molyneaux is a visual and alternative sculpture artist from upstate New York. He uses a variety of non-traditional media, including paper, glue, circuitry, and electricity to build lighted sculpture out of raw material.

A review of Anne Bauer’s Fine Absence, by Jennifer MacBain-Stephens In Anne Bauer’s poetry chapbook, Fine Absence ( 2011), loss is revealed through the completion of small domestic rituals. In the chapbook’s first poems (“Old Tapes, “Thank You,” “Eulogy,”) the reader does not know who or what is “absent.” Allusions are made to small disappearances: the prose poem “Thank you” is about a secret that we never discover– the father does not bring down wrath on his daughter (it wasn’t just about stealing beer or cigarettes; she says as much in the poem): “…the excuses that limped, pewling, out of my mouth and died on the floor between us, not a word of judgement or recrimination. One thing caused banishment, only one thing, one time. Months passed and we spoke again, but never of that, or what happened to me, alone in that silence.” Although Bauer does not reveal what [...]

Confessions I’ve got the loveliest bones. Ivory sticks ______clink -clinking, bones go with any outfit small enough not to cinch skeleton elbows, knees creak when I walk, rivals run scared when they see bones coming— ______I’ve got the loveliest bones. Toothpick-ing my place at the tented freak-show, eyes comb over these blue-ribbon bones. Cheeky endorsements by Dove, ______Clinique, ____________Mary Kay __________________Cover Girl clink-clinging to Mark Ecko’s mirror mirror on the wall, who’s got the loveliest bones of all? He’ll say, ______My dear you have the whitest bones, ____________the thinnest hair, ____________skin cold as stone, ____________eroding teeth, ____________a weak heartbeat, ____________chronic fatigue, but… ______you sure do have the loveliest bones…. Playhouse glass twists a sinister smile, s t r e t c h i n g my thigh gap for runway miles. Skeletons waltz in my closet clink-clatter all night ______the mattress grinds my scorpion spine; weak and lethargic these bones [...]

You Were Born One Time. Quitman Marshall. Ninety-Six Press, 2014. 70 pages, ISBN: 978-0-9797995-4-6 I take pleasure in some poets for their incredibly beautiful music, while others thrill me with their startling metaphoric leaps. Still others I enjoy for their sheer exuberance, the ability to transform dark material into light, such as Jack Gilbert and this poet: Quitman Marshall. His latest and first full-length collection is You Were Born One Time. It received the South Carolina Poetry Archives Book Prize and was published by Ninety-Six Press in 2014. There is a deep undercurrent of gratitude in his poetry. There are moments that intrude on speakers and surprise them with beauty or insight. This occurs in such poems as “Civilization,” or “Bagel.” Here is the collection’s concluding poem “Twenty Thousand Sunsets,” The sun going down is at one o’clock from where I am or where I face, on a southbound road [...]

Forward Reflection I once thought, someday I’ll outrun this skin. That someday body love will win. Dreamed of acceptance, met with rejection at almost every turn I made. My tears kept me company through the haze. I carved through me, pushed my flesh to the edge. I found freedom in water, and eventually this skin. My curves have grown and sagged some, but I won’t let shame keep me undone. For it’s not the tomorrows that should win, or the somedays. It’s this ever cycling present moment, of mindful reflection. Of a body positive mind, pushing me in a better direction. So I put my mirror back on the wall. I stopped wishing through it, and learned not to just dream it, but do it. To radically accept the person I am now. In the end, it’s always progression not perfection, that keeps me moving in a forward direction. _________________________________________ [...]

Fancy Dance Boy Eating Homestyle Lord Hundred Chief Benway played pants berzerkus only pissed himself imagine childhood smile smelling Indian write Sub Committee Senate Select! Prolapse importante Winnetou that would show lame dumb blind diss-ected beasts how to live son — Blame Black Elks tracking number invalid pornographic public sad how fast can you run how fast your heart how fasting broke your hard on love Sagamore Benway say power puking — all my relatives! — you’re too hard on sacred wheatsheaf carry carry concussive cap knocko yoman runned revolver holding chain sacred three-legged pitbull Cochise of generations fought and never lost Seminole-souled bedded down sustain anyone breaking lust list wife pregnant another’s monarch bitter pow pow butterfly organophosphate barrel drummed hey-heya hey heyyyyy hokey poke! chested barrel thrown off canvass sailed ships into holes drilled in Arctic ice rusting holy Father rustled horses from rustling fathers white collared black [...]

tsunami as misguided kwannon her hypervigilance such that everything becomes a piercing a harrowing she can’t turn off her superpower a wound a lightning rod / and sponge / speaking the language of wounds to wounds like echolocation that dopplers the contours of another’s sorrow against her own ricocheted song or touch subtle as the naked push broom of a star-nosed mole’s tentacles nuzzling the bruised flesh of worms or a nose for muscling out fresh blood old ghosts / the sweet fat of lost dreams like a winter-lean bear come spring or feathery antennae’s raw quiver pinched to ash by the hot sparks of disconsolate pheromones her nervous system a glitter of neurotransmitters on fire an electric-chaired switchboard short circuited / fuse blown she’s the exposed nerve: exuviated snake / hulled bean husked cicada / chaffed seed peeled grape / shucked clam she’s the conduit / aperture / cracked [...]

The Projectionist In my dream, he’s a projectionist at an empty theater and I am winding the long staircase to his stadium of red high-backed chairs waiting for something to fill them. In this dream, we are still in love, and he is queueing Alice for us, the screen flickering from black to the strange forests of green only real in film. He latches his arm around my shoulders, and out of all that darkness comes a single wedge of light. On the Third Month of Separation ​“Well,” Alice thought to herself. “After such a fall as this, I shall ​think nothing of tumbling down-stairs!” In the South, sometimes heat is the closest thing to love. The days reduced to wet blanket air and fearless waterbugs. In this new absence called separation, I have become night-bound with voices in a phone and three-dollar chardonnay. The first day, I drink myself [...]

Detail shot from Medusa in her Sunday Best, oil on canvas. 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, [...]

Joanna Valente’s debut collection of poetry, Sirs and Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), is a study in human relationships among different kinds of kin — speakers, strangers, and family members both living and dead — that fleshes itself out through an extended homage to sisterhood. Three sisters’ voices overlap and interweave throughout this text; by turns, they dominate each other, themselves, and this collection, but never quite the world around them. These women, and the poems themselves, are defined largely by their positioning among one another. The voices of Tessa, Maggie, and Marianne, shaped by the experiences and fixations that preoccupy them, begin to glean identity from the light the other poems cast around them, as much as from the language and the soul that constructs each of them as separate identities. And yet, despite all the togetherness, there is a profound sensibility of isolation in these poems. The sisters’ voices [...]

People I’d Like to Meet Ken Singleton & Emerson Boozer. Wait, I already met Ken Singleton & Emerson Boozer signing autographs at some kind of auto show when I was a kid. Haixia Zheng, Otis Birdsong, World B. Free. Nancy Kerrigan & Tonya Harding. Surya Bonaly. The Flash. Lucille Ball. Rosemarie Waldrop. A helicopter. A litter of kittens. A pair of mittens. A bolt of lightning. Ellen Page, Kesha. Martellus Bennett. Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, & the Blue Marvel. A raindrop. A footprint. 2,000 years. An image of an image of Billie Holiday. Yayoi Kusama, Robert Smithson, Jenny Holzer. (I already met Henry Rollins & Mike Watt & Vincent Price in bookstores.) Jane Freilicher. James Schuyler. A dozen roses or slices of bread. The He & She from the That’s What They Said jokes. The They & Them from They’re Making Me Do Things statements. Kathleen Hanna. Ian Curtis. Yolandi [...]

Cult Statue of a Goddess (found poem, Getty Museum) 1. Its provenance based on what we might term “forensic evidence”? Briefly surveying in as neutral a manner as possible the bravura display of wind-blown drapery over generous forms of her body, illicit excavations in several archaeological zones, I would also like to welcome the observers at today’s event: Persephone not wearing a chiton and himation but rather a peplos, the enthroned Zeus lacking any indication of characteristic décolletage, possibly Aphrodite, Demeter, or Hera armed with a magic belt of leather or fabric purchased from a “supermarket magnate.” One need only think of the systematic looting in what was ancient Morgantina, near the modern town of echinoid fragments, the true right-arm socket “skeletonized” by dissolution, stored in a glass vial, stored in boxes in the basement, all in style. 2. (unknown to anyone else in his family) Good morning and welcome [...]

The Human Zoo Soon I appear through the fog, my face presses against the cage. There is a scrim of dark edging the metal. You are there, pushing life toward my mouth with your fingers. Now I reach without biting. In the dark my own hands grasp how small & tame I am. You say, stay wild with your eyes & ideas. But imagine if my hand could not find your hand. Through the skin of what has survived. If I come up for air but then slip again beneath the current, remember how I glittered, with water pouring from every pore. You would walk down into our earth & watch me race behind the captive green glass. I leave you the gills of my faith, the jaw of my empathy. The flowers will remember my rain & my murmurs. How absurd I am. Even the thunderheads will remember a [...]