Kiki Anderson

[Was] [Not] [Supposed] [To]

last little out
untwist my comforter

Last night I went out.
fish and water
fish and water

The name of that pier.
The opportunity. The happily.

The remember. Certain instances.


able to
do that

For me.
My new.
Funny; me.

The size of me still owns that place.

Such a strange place. Or occurrence.

Writer and translator Kiki Anderson meditates on music at theheretohear.blogspot.com.

Lisa Mahan

Objects in Mirror

all these years
of too late
come together as if time
yields around us
like some wish.

you said my kiss tastes
like new
but if you close your eyes
you'd know it was me.
objects in mirror are closer
than they appear.

checking my lips
in the rear view
even the rain seems
much closer.
i remember when i was told
the sun is just a star.

birds at 4am remember you
they are singing me
to sleep
i have waited
another day
all nights.

Lisa Mahan is a writer living in Milwaukee, WI with her daughter.

Randy Russell

Carnelian

The only thing that is remembered is
redness in the dark. The slaughter at
the drive-in serves customers whose
appetites hold the spiritual accountable.
Room for dessert and an assortment
of insensitive variations
of a loving manner.

The starlight swims in the milky lake.
You can see its depth, but you can’t see
into it. Anxious and worldly, the fleshy
chromatically tuned bells obtain a
meandering course, cutting rather than
tearing, tearing rather than cutting.
A removal of merrymaking, a removal
of meat.

Time is opposed to eternity. It leans
over to one side in a headlong manner
an organized program of exhibitionist
travesty to illustrate the effect of grief
on the variable color of human flesh.
From pale to the grayish yellow
of tooth decay.

The effort to avoid omissions gives
emotional support to the irresponsible
in the face of the sphinx. The unread
books are quickly spent. Warm weather
means trouble. There is no longer life
on Mars.

When not working fulltime in the mailroom of 21st Century Machicolations, Randy Russell is busy cutting various foods out of his diet, banishing particular colors and patterns from his wardrobe, and abandoning unfinished projects. He recently gave up producing movies about: the plague and drinking, zombies and love, morning conversations in bed with strangers, and fake auditions for a non-existent drama. Furthermore, he put aside unfinished screenplays about a wedding videographer, advertising agency, sober companion, carny turned basketball player, nuclear accident cleanup, The Hardy Boys, a lottery winner, a Russian dating service, clone love story, time travel trilogy, an unlikely detective, a remake of The Sweet Ride, small time drug dealers, the war between Michigan and Wisconsin, and a guy who thinks he’s in a movie. As well as plays about the unlikely detective, amnesia and identity, and The Archies. And a long poem based on an old Philip Roth novel. He is also neglecting 43 online journals.

When not giving things up, Mr. Russell continues to work on a novel, started early in the century, based on an elaborate structure of ten authors who are also characters, existing in a plane of reality modeled after a Mobius strip which connects in the middle as a figure 8. Each of the character/authors is represented by a donut, through the hole of which he/she can enter the other authors’ reality, as a character. The projected completion date for this project is never.

Melissa Bellovin

This is a new work entitled GREAT HOTELS OF THE WORLD.

We aim to inform you, the discerning reader, about GREAT HOTELS OF THE WORLD.

GREAT HOTELS OF THE WORLD is not limited to one region, aesthetic or state of mind. GREAT HOTELS OF THE WORLD is open-minded. We at GHOTW understand that you, the discerning reader, want many things. Sometimes you want a cracked yellow wall and a single purple flower with which you will sit on a sagging bed which was last inhabited by a frolicking couple of carpet sellers from Dubai who entertained one another with lascivious tales, cock tugging and tiresome drunkenness on duty-free wine never meant to be shared with their stolid wives, and not knowing the joys entertained you will simply stare out at the grimy wall and wish you could afford to see the sea. And sometimes you will want a room off an outdoor walkway in a chain motel with a restaurant downstairs where nobody goes, because you're in America and all the people are someplace else, especially if we send you to New Mexico, where every person in the state has his own motel, it's so large, and when you get bored and lonely you’ll sit in your car and turn on the radio and maybe you’ll drive into town or to the next town and then go for some spicy food in a bag and a glass of ice water and wait a few hours with a book about the history of the town, the gold rushers and dirt diggers and that kind of thing, and then you’ll go back to the hotel past the bright lights of the highway- it’s never a side road around here- and turn on the TV and go to sleep, and in the morning before you’ll go you’ll contemplate stealing the ashtray, because it’s heavy and looks like it should be useful for something. And whether you steal it or not we shall not say, because it is our little secret here at GREAT HOTELS OF THE WORLD.

And additionally we know that sometimes you crave more than a cracked wall, a film of medieval oil wafting in from a decrepit lighthouse built by the Aramaics or Thessalonians or Ionic Skies, and you want that little squeeze of the hand provided by a gentle soul inhabiting a body, complete with dark eyes, a trail of hair below the belly, and a mouth that says only what you want to hear. We here at GREAT HOTELS OF THE WORLD know how to appeal to you, the discerning reader. We know that love is all about the hunt, and our catalogue contains many, many rooms. We have mouths that say “Shall we order room service?” We have mouths that say “I can’t believe you brought that up again, you little bitch.” We have mouths that say “Pork future shares are going up up up and this is your time to sing, my sweet little vendetta.” Please speak to our audiophonics specialists for more information on this service. There are at last count over 400 from which to choose, enough to satisfy the most experienced connoisseur of underlined whispers and last lines.

Rooms at GHOTW need not be cheap. They may be built in glass bottles, hidden away from the world, awoken by a single word from a djinn. Is this not what imparts a room with special value, dear discerning reader? The ability to hide it inside your pocket, and leap inside when the world becomes too much?

Come with me, dear reader. Place your dry, ringed hand in mine. Such slender fingers! How admirable is your taste in jewelry: a slalom of red glass is as beautiful as a diamond. Let us hold our noses. The streets are pungent on this hot day. Yes, I know where we are. We’re already gone.

Melissa Bellovin grew up in Long Island.

KimSu Theiler

(click image to view)

KimSu Theiler lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey. She has exhibited film, video and media installation work internationally including the Rotterdam Film Festival (Netherlands), Gwangju Biennial (Korea), Museum of Modern Art (United States), and the Toronto Film Festival (Canada).

Theresa Columbus

Scene 6: Dance and Talk Scene

(At beginning of scene Self dances to saxophone music, doing both tap and modern dances, to a little audience which is sitting on stage. Finishes dance, audience cheers)

Self: OK, OK, now I have a joke for you. I wrote it when I was 9 years old!

(Audience cheers)

So there was a lady with very, very long hair, hair that went all the way to the floor. So a man plucked one hair from her head, and he was an auctioneer, and asked the people who would want to buy the hair for a dollar?

JB: Do you mean to say you aren’t going to give us any more context than that for the lady and the auctioneer? That’s hilarious!

(Audience laughs heartily)

Self: You are such a perceptive audience! That’s all for the lady! From here on out it’s just her hair! So someone in the crowd said (singing) me, me, me, me, me, me, me. And so the auctioneer said, how about 100 dollars? And someone said (singing) me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. And he said, can I hear 1000 dollars? How about 1000 dollars for this hair . . . and the voice said (singing) me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me!

AB: I think I know where this is going -- this is so funny!

(Audience laughs)

Self: Yeah, yeah! So he goes: A million dollars? And the voice said (sung) me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me!

(Self starts jumping around, dancing)

Sold! One hair for one million dollars! Come right up! Come right on up! . . . But no one came up! And the auctioneer asked, who wanted this hair for one million dollars?? And the voice said, Oh, I was just practicing my singing: (singing) me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me!

(Big laugh and cheer)

JT: Were you dancing as part of the joke, or because you got excited?

Self: Neither, I was dancing for real!

Liz: Is it cool if I act like I am dancing?

Self: Sure, can I act that with you?

Liz: Sure!

(Liz and Self do dance)

JB: I brought some cookies!

AB: Let’s watch each other eat them!

(All watch each other eat cookies, then take bow.)

Theresa Columbus is an artist who lives in Baltimore, MD.

Adele Slaughter

Orange

After the Vedas

Orange with no words
To keep it company.
No thing rhymes with orange –
Its only friends are itself and the infinite variety of itself –

Strands of Kashmiri saffron,
The orange hidden in an old yew tree,
A field of Tiger lilies,
Shades of hibiscus in bloom,
Under clay pots,
A pocket full of copper pennies,
A plate of carrot sticks,
Apricot sauce, tangerines, rose hips,
A koi fish, a sadhu’s robe,
Pumpkins ripening in the field,
ruddy autumn leaves leaking veins.
Rust from an old VW sitting in the creek bleeding.

The hazy lavender and soft orange eye of the sun blinks
As the warm wave, Navaswan, greets us each day.
She sweeps her hair around the globe.
She’s one of those women whose eyes suggest sleep
Her freckles are a deep, fiery orange, her skin like the
Waxing full moon. Go – look at the moon tonight
And I will be seeing the same thing you are.

[Note: Navaswan is a Sanskrit word that means the cool air that arrives just before the dawn.]

Last August Adele Slaughter produced an independent feature called Bob's New Suit. She has taught at California State University Channel Islands and has worked as a journalist covering personal health for USAToday.com. In 2004 she was awarded a national journalism prize for her coverage of multiple sclerosis. In 1993 the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars named her a Distinguished teacher. She received her M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. Slaughter’s first book of poems, What The Body Remembers was published by Story Line Press in 1994. Her poems have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Confrontation, Dryad and the Princeton Spectrum. Slaughter and Jeff Kober co-wrote a non-fiction book entitled, Art That Pays: The Emerging Artist’s Guide to Making a Living (NNAP, 2004).

Dustin Travis Jenkins

[Here's a funny story with a surprising turn. It's by Dustin Travis Jenkins. In one picture there is a car with "just got a banana" written on the windshield. -AR]

My nam is Dustin.
I'm from Txas.
My kyboard isn't fully functional.

Dillon de Give

True False Test
art is the laughter of nature
nature is the laughter of art
laughter is the nature of art
art is the nature of laughter
laughter is the art of nature
nature is the art of laughter

Dillon de Give, from Brooklyn NY, makes site-specific situations and elementary school style plays.

Rahne Alexander

me without teeth

stumbleblock
keeping me in circles
dreaming about
chicken
and bones
and there we are
gnawing
if only we
had some
chutney
if only we
had some
kippers

this last time with the pheasant
was like that day in the field
the long day
we did not blink
before
it blew past

saved by the skin
of my teeth
by the sweat
of my brow

he said
WHY I OTTA
GIVE YOU WHAT FOR
and i said YOU JUST
GO AHEAD AND TRY IT

TOUGH GUY

next thing I know
he's bleeding there
with a Parcheesi board
over his face
SOME PICNIC
I said

DIDN'T EVEN BRING ANY ICE

I stepped out for a smoke
had to bum it
(I get lucky that way)
and before I knew it
the day was gone

these memories I hold dear
have no basis in photographs
or diaries
they will die with me
as they created me

Rahne Alexander is a writer and guitar player in The Degenerettes.

Stephanie Gray

Hazel May Hall, lowly negative cutter, 1959

I think I can see what you see. To crop the world a million times over. To replace yesterday with today. To substitute my nostalgia for your déjà vu. You cropped yesterday’s heartbreak with the Empire State Building in the background of a big bulky taxicab. Perfection is forgettable. You tabled two scenes together and two more and two more until we got a two-hour movie. But really, you have to understand man, it’s complex. People are aware they cannot accumulate everything. But you did. Except what the director said not to. There’s a bin at the back of your brain of every outtake sitting in the middle of your best dinner at home with the company. Yes: we really understand, man, it’s complex. Some days you forget what’s the real movie. All you remember is how long it took for you to cut out the scene. When you see the movie you see it but don’t see it you see it but don’t see it, instead of the kiss you see the laugh and bump into nose. The theorist couldn’t do it but you could: we need a new narrative. You turned the sky into a limpid blue. You saw the whole picture. It was stillness on the move. You trained yourself to notice what you see. You wished everyone bon voyage over and over again. You left them on a trip that never happened. You did the walk that nobody really sees. You had no clue what you were delivering. You dreamed of a day with no orders and no deadlines. You dreamed the outtakes remade themselves as the movie in the boardroom. Everything that didn’t happen, happened all at once back-to-back in one hour. It was an hour of nothing happening. If you can’t see it, is nothing there? This is what happens in slow times, it goes into slow motion. You can’t help the people who want their world back intact. You help to rule everything out into a particular shape. You made sure nothing ever registered until a few seconds after it past. I wanted to ask you if I could dive into your outtakes. If it would take me back to the same as it ever was, a loophole large enough to drive truckloads through. To see what historians want to see. To go back to the back up tapes erased. To erase the time cards. The crime is that people don’t know about this. To not be on a bridge to nowhere. Screams from countless girls who are too young to drive. Forgetting that this isn’t theater, but something like life. Filled with glimpses of catastrophe. It was all about just keeping everything at bay. It happened by pure accident. It was not a Tupperware party in Jericho Long Island. The last edit is the shrewdest hustle.

Filmmaker-poet Stephanie Gray’s first book Heart Stoner Bingo was recently published by Straw Gate Books. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in EOAGH, Boog City Reader, Press 1, & Recluse. Recent readings include Segue Series & Boog City Fest. As a super 8 filmmaker her work has screened internationally. She’s read poems live with films in the Poetry Project’s late night series.

Dave Andrae

Untitled Haiku

Eat 'em, have a gnome.
Eat 'em, coprophilia.
Eat 'em, eat snort strip.

Dave Andrae, a filmmaker, lives in Sarasota, Florida.

Ethel Rohan

The Fat Lady Sings

He said he couldn’t see the sunburn on her face. She said you’re kidding right? He said again he didn’t see it. She said how could you not see it? He said she was all right. She said her face hurt, her face was on fire.

He said you always exaggerate. She said you always not see. He said now don’t start. She said a woman earlier in the day, a stranger in the supermarket, asked after her face, sympathized with how much it must hurt, an old woman with spectacles and stooped from osteoporosis and even she saw. He said see now that’s just too much.

She said it frightened her that he couldn’t see the sunburn on her face. He said she was overreacting. She said look again, look in my face and tell me you don’t see sunburn. He said he didn’t need to look again; she was fine. She said she wasn’t fine, and anyhow since when was fine okay? He said he didn’t know what she was talking about. She said great now you can’t see or understand me.

He said how’d you get burnt anyway? She said they were in the midst of a heat-wave or hadn’t he noticed that either? He said he didn’t like for her to be so sarcastic, he was just asking a simple question because he hadn’t managed to get himself sunburned, had he, no, but she had, hadn’t she? She said she got burnt because she was careless, careless and stupid.

He said why don’t you put some cream on your face if it hurts that bad, aloe vera or whatever? She said I have cream on my face, white cooling cream, and stomped her foot. He said maybe that’s how he couldn’t see the sunburn, through the cream. She said she could still see the sunburn, anyone could still see the sunburn if they’d only care to look. He said fine and looked her long and hard in the face. She said well? He said yes he saw the sunburn now, and the white face cream. She said you’re lying. He said there’s no pleasing you. She said you can’t anyway. He said he’d no idea what she was getting at? She said see.

Ethel Rohan’s work appears in or is forthcoming from elimae; PANK; DOGZPLOT; Storyglossia; Word Riot; mud luscious; Ghoti Magazine; Identity Theory; Writers’ Bloc; and Anemone Sidecar, among others.

Jeanne Liotta

Jeanne Liotta makes films and other
cultural ephemera.

Cindy Loehr

SHRUB PRAYER

Certain prayers are designed specifically for the drunk on the street. You must go out and find them when you are drunk on the street.

One of these prayers takes the shape of a shrub. It has tiny yellow flowers and it grows through a fence.

The best way to collect these flowers is to fall into the shrub. You must fall into the shrub and collect the flowers from the street.

Cindy Loehr runs Collective Experience.