Monthly Archives: February 2015

Vanessa Couto Johnson

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cyclor(am)a

Often you are that house. Lit on a rock. Or nest, crows’. Steadying my home.

On the look, out. For me, always left-handed when meat is involved, the knife.

If hands are a right, what is a privilege, that the desks are a given. Only then did we have replicated problems to solve.

You read twice as fast as I do eat the contents of a bowl. I am the fast eater, but when I read I tread into the holes of open letters.

I am living like the nomad who hasn’t packed yet. Things set out for animals.

Found art or drawn. If we blend the dichotomy with herbs, will it work or play. Help my strained tea.

You can print this as a landscape. As a portrait. Escape with an unauthorized use, machine’s dried spitting. It speaks what we told it to. We do not fear its office, its echo, its bellyful of blanks.

salu(brity)

The clerk asked where we were going. She took our passport photos. You with a haircut.

Someone told your father your hair is speaking to me. A scissor-based séance, science-less phrenology and some scalps more obvious than others.

You have memorized my birthmarks. I have told you my ribs are weird but you have other beliefs. And that, good, is.

If there were a Hippocratic oaf, his clumsiness would be benign. Reel in the sic, correct prognosis. We have no need to meet this being.

I am the kind of person who spits into a tube, mails it, and gets back biological data. All before the FDA can block the company’s health risk assessments. My ancestry percents itself.

Continents, color-coded, wave to me. Make speculative print-outs, travel a font I like to reread.

(sea)rch

Peace is thicker than unsweet tea. Potato salad is a soft gravel I put on a path of meat.

We calibrate. Your pulse within norms. I now pronounce. You refresh, a stasis in jeans.

Today, on the face of the world. Lightning slaps off the finger of giant Jesus ogling Rio.

Every statue is a sequestration. The season of sequins upon the carnal. Dance until a Wednesday.

Personally, Brazilian immigrant’s outcome, I have momentum. Hips perpetual.

This state is easy to trace. Catharsis is overrated so I trap my mouth. Find pelt.

The microcatfish candiru finds inlets, not outlets. The body is subject. Urethra upturned.

Find piece, believe in the cod and prey heartily. You did not like seeing a goat cooked with its head attached. Think with the delicate. Lyrics are a musical delicacy you taste while driving to rest-stop.

v(as)cular

The perpendicular driver overlooks us, enters our lane with an inertial stamina. You calculate curves with the wheel and we make it.

I hardly braced in case. I am reminded how low my cortisol is. The heart is not a pound but an apothecary dispensing needs.

Pressure is a dotted line. Road or document. They will be adding a bike lane. Spoke and spoke. What if I wore a helmet in the convertible.

When a menu has mussels I am tempted. Your aphrodisiac is different, wobbly, with hot water in the process.

Twelve percent leg meat in the can of crab. You show me how to move the limbs of your ancient opener.

Drain, drain. A waiter calls you brother. My steak exists and is replaced with one most rare. Most people are not pleased unless there is blood in every organ.

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s chapbook Life of Francis was the winner of Gambling the Aisle’s 2014 Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Qwerty, The Destroyer, BORT Quarterly, Two Serious Ladies, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Texas State University, where she earned her MFA.

Kristina Marie Darling

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Novel

Head-over-heels-ish I was just miserable. I could no longer speak properly, like the other girls. Pearly buttons on silk cuffs. My teeth trembling. Never read the guest list. The names just sat there, waiting to take their vows. The groom came later than I thought he would. Came with an entourage. Came with board games and stale pretzels. Came to smudge my dress with cerulean and my stockings with rust. Came after the work was already done. The wedding invitations pitched point-first at his mother. My dress hemmed at her majesty, ahem. Those stone cherubs still guarding my garter, milky eyes eyeing an open door. One returned, but most stayed missing, perched on post office windows, watching the letters as they’re slipped into their slots.

After the Miracle

White plates, white tablecloths, white ornaments for the wrists. At night the instruments, and that odd silence. We aren’t force-fed, exactly; more like compelled. The husbands so perfect they’re no longer here. Who knows when the wives’ hands will tremble and the tablecloths catch fire? We polish tomorrow’s champagne flutes. The waitress charts courses from Iceland to Finland to anxious.

Yacht

Wrapped in swansdown and silk, I was becoming smaller and smaller in your hand. You were the impossibility of a shoreline. Who can remember how many times we’d tried before? I wanted to be that cut-glass city waiting for you on the other coast. Frost-bitten, shivering, we unmoor the ship one last time. Sure we’re sailing, the sky colder than the weather, signal flares flaring into the snow.

Classy

We built a spectacle in place of the schoolhouse. Rudimentary rules scrawled across the chalk boards. The trees triaged. Substitutes shoved children into library chairs, trying to make bank tellers of all of us. In gym we could decide between tennis, cage fighting, or trivia night. Every day we tried to stitch the teacher back together, mending holes where some of the girls got grabby. The answers were still multiple choice, but everyone mouthed a different answer. Flowers sprouted out of milk cartons until the cardboard gave way. Sometimes we could see meaning leak from the tiny letters sprawled across the pages of our books. Order was a story we could no longer tell, and night, how it held us at all hours, chained to our desks.

Script

Lace skirt, cracked tooth. How she pivots in that same corridor. Untrimmed hair gathers in gold knots at her temples. There’s a mark on her wrist where the bracelet snapped. A white wainscot keeps her from waiting alone. But when the concierge calls her name in the lobby she’ll climb through the window to the Other City. Unfasten her necklace outside the pawn shop. The same girls always on the bridge thinking nothing at all, tinfoil stuffed in their wallets, cold cream for food. Before long those middle-aged men on Valium crash the family sedan into the auditorium. In each of the chairs, someone holds flowers for the lead.

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 Elizabeth George Foundation. She was recently selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

Rob Cook

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Truancies

The deer live in my mother’s house.
They sing to the shivering television.
(Really a window attacked by rain.)

Claws
and
finger
nails
of
the
day
when
it
doesn’t
approve
of me.

(What my mother calls the rain when it’s tired outside.)

I lure my unfed clothes down the hallway
past the cold-blooded
bedrooms.

I call
it
“Deer Run.”

But
it’s
just
another
silence.

I was a deer when I was wrong
and that is all I’m able to figure out.

I will never know where they plant the stolen houses
or if the rain in each room
is enough to eat.

I’m eighteen years old, though,
and weigh eighty-seven pounds.

A boy stranded
on the always aroused television
tries to warn me:

vanish as far as
the room whose shadows need
to be fed,
but do not tell anyone
about our emptiness.

When I look,
it’s just the window,

shunned
and
advancing

to the same emptiness,

where each rain drop hides
a fawn
and its imaginary stairwells
that lead to a minute’s

bird crumb
mattress

and the holes where I save
the noise of even smaller bodies:

the screams where I went
looking
for the clothes
my mother wore.

The deer do not follow me into my sleep.
The deer do not soften the walls when they wander.
The deer do not live in my mother’s house.

Nano-Surveillance Myths

1.

That moment when nobody speaks
the city vanishes
and comes back with one less
name meant to hide
someone, one less

apartment tower standing inside a pigeon
whose children mark the tar-black window
while its wolves go dead.

2.

A pitchfork shelter
where God
hides

from the hitlers of rain

and the man nobody likes
who keeps asking:

Who hung a picture of the city over the city.
Who hung a picture of the silence over the silence.

3.

A rattlesnake’s firmament
the noise God makes when he shatters.

Not stars in the night sky,
but cameras harvested
by a shadow that belonged nowhere
on the ossuary wall.

4.

Was that one of the clouds I heard behind the mirror?

“We are protected by the information
passed along by trees,” my father says

from the logarithms of a heliotrope when it loses the rain.

5.

There were never any birds,
only depraved children
that could be suggested

from the mosquito blood-counts,
the scalps of light
whose hepatic machines

clenched like leaves
on the ground when it failed.
And the children didn’t chirp—

only the leaves chirped
where any machine
could survive its belief-grade

shrike embryos, the spleen
and its unwashed flowers
the moment they began to shiver.

The Sicknesses Between March and April

In my apartment I felt the hiss of a radiator tickling the dampness of my shirt. The bedroom whispered with dust caught in live traps, wind groping down the hallway carrying a map of someone else’s insomnia.

And because it called itself my friend, the fog was forced to leave. It sold itself as a tired form of laughter that accompanied a televised inebriation.

A week later drought arrived
with its anonymous dictators

and the room licked at my sweat until only the fear remained.

I could feel every sore on my bed,
having survived the season’s
autoimmune conditions.

And because water was illegal,
I drank from the trickle of a spider’s church bells.

The clock wasn’t afraid.

It lived, like everything, on wooden shards of sunlight.

My clothes gasped for flesh under the kitchen glare that watched over the stains and shoelaces thawing on the already forgotten floor where everything was lost:

boulders of crumb cake,

old flashlight beams,

eyes that could still see new days
named after nothing

before the laboratory printouts repeated how it was no longer known if the nurses who held each other inside the black sheets of my liver would survive.

And I insisted that the cries crowding that depleted animal would never frighten away the rest of my body and so far they haven’t. But something still trusts the light, false by now, itching at the swollen windows even when it causes my biopsy wound to stay awake for days inhabited by the same repeating tremor, the same bloodshot curtain scratching with its lace claws from the cringing of the fire escape.

Rob Cook is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade (The Bitter Oleander Press), Asking my Liver for Forgiveness (Rain Mountain Press) and The Undermining of the Democratic Club (Spuyten Duyvil Press). 

Kevin Brisco

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Artist’s Statement

As an artist I am interested in the simple and at times contrived aspects of sociopolitical life, namely the ways we interact with labor, gender, and race.

‘Build’ is an exploration into masculinity and home construction. The work takes stylistic cues from the paintings of Kehinde Wiley, and is largely informed by Jacob Lawrence’s ‘Builder’s’ series, in which construction is seen as a metaphor for abstract progress.

Athletic young men are sensuously painted over large built surfaces. Associations of prosperity, security, and labor resonate from the imagery and shape an idealized masculinity. It is unclear whether these associations derive from a fundamental male essence or if they are constructions in and of themselves, cultivated through a gender “performance.” In the end the figures home-like constructions serve no real function besides supporting the image of man as “builder.”

Kevin Brisco was born and raised in Memphis, TN. He has earned his B.A. in Painting from Wesleyan University and is currently working towards his M.F.A. at Tulane University. He primarily works in drawing and painting but maintains interests in sculpture and photography. See more at kevinbrisco.com.

Marcia Arrieta

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buttons & the alphabet

scream away. indicate approval— .
at night deer come & graze on my bed.
writing translation shift postcards, leaving, estrangement.
books on the coffee table prescribe conversation.
I cannot afford insignificant. let us remind one another
of inspiration, of completing our sentences, of writing
legibly. thread & islands. boots & castles.

I often feel like an orphan.

incognito

shake the martini in Memory of the road & Spanish olives

[today there is a yellow butterfly in the garden & everything is dreadfully calm]

add hypothetical disarray.

[enter the art gallery]

primary colors & a dragon’s gaze

[refuge Pleiades]

history appears in the guise of an introduction

[unravel civility]

less than a century

maps & canvases

feathers & pens

*

the goldfish is in flight

*

mirrors reflect happiness

if only erased

*

knowledge transforms

*

follow the water

the details are in the trees

Marcia Arrieta is a poet, artist, and teacher. Her work appears in Web Conjunctions, So to Speak, Ellipsis, Cold Mountain Review, Eratio, Catch & Release, BlazeVOX, Melusine, The Blue Hour, Counterexample Poetics, and The Last VISPO Anthology, among others. The author of one poetry book, triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme (Otoliths), and two chapbooks, experimental: (Potes & Poets ) and the curve against the linear (Toadlily Press’s Quartet Series—An Uncommon Accord), she has an MFA from Vermont College. She edits and publishes Indefinite Space, a poetry /art journal.

Mari Andrews

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Artist’s Statement

My studio practice involves making abstract sculpture with wire and natural and man-made found objects. Various pods, stones, leaves, acorns, coal and mica are combined to build these sculptures. Some pieces suggest processes found in nature, and others are hybrid forms beyond the natural, and some are simple indexes of gathered objects found on walks and hikes. Structures of all kinds from cellular to geographic inform the work. My intention is to generate curiosity and engagement with our natural world, stop its degradation and proliferate its stewardship.

Mari Andrews is a sculptor and installation artist. Her work is a continuation of her drawing practice and employs materials like wire, lead, stones, mica, coal, pods and thorns. With these diverse materials she constructs new associations. They sometimes come together as installations. She holds a BFA from the University of Dayton, and MFA is from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. She attended residencies at Djerassi, Woodside CA, and The Cold Press, Norfolk England. Recent solo exhibitions include: Chandra Cerrito, Oakland; Marji Gallery, Santa Fe; Tayloe Piggott, Jackson WY; San Jose ICA; and The Cold Press, Holt England. She lives in Emeryville California.

Stephanie Anderson

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from The Ditties
02.22.14

A good wound, it fascinates. Folding paper cup stand attached to Double cock keeper. Momentarily has parental knocks.

Why do I think walnut? Lips looking east, reading manga while walking. Dear monster, hello. The repetition is coming in.

Mustard structure in the sun. A triangular shadow. The noontime has some bite, some familiar flights. The pale violet houses.

It’s a day for bowling shoes. The tadpole was always respectful, he says. The golf balls gliding on the too green green. Crowded today.

She says, the task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The school chimes startle. Pouting, pointing at throat.

Her tiny mustard tights. What does sopa mean? The doors slide open by themselves. A mountain fire to celebrate spring.

She scooches close the chalkboard. France is on the wall. Now his son is three days old. I’d like to talk to you about it but you won’t.

from The Ditties
03.24.14

In the dream I play a wicked witch. We’re on embassy attempt two. Blissfully, there’s a poison for every budget. Tickets?

The tourism TV is blank. Do not ride in the wrong direction, as it would be very dangerous. Why do I feel so.

Everyone sits in yo-yo park, staring at the buds. Water goes up and water goes down. What I love most about my house is who I share it.

Streets and boards and bees and swords. Punk cake, chicks on speed. Abstracted bellows. Brushes. Rubber soles and water colors. Swizzle stick set.

Half basement height beside the boxing gym. It’s basically beer-flavored soda. Mushrooms are better furry. Sing Star Wars again.

I took a picture for you. The experts say she put too much water in the tea. Is milk god blonde? The boss seems tyrannical.

from The Ditties
03.31.14

In the dream, we unbooby trap the house. That is not what a raspberry looks like. The bakers’ poster reads, not by bread alone.

Back to behind the hot dog. Back to shrillness in the mind. Stealing internet from the bus. A fortnight full throttle. It’s non-step.

Menomication for you. The usual guitar gang is out. He brings home magic beans, and I try to stop working. Maybe.

Images introduced in Europe were quite different from the real. Perry made a strong protest against these unfriendly acts.

Americans exercised their military parade, guns. Japanese, on the other hand, arranged sumo wrestlers in lines.

Japanese and Americans experienced lots of culture shock. Figures drawn in Shimoda have a friendly impression.

Articles which she used. She gained nothing at all. A horrible fate was creeping behind. But she firmly refused the order.

She was sent riding in a cage. She felt desperate solitude. She suffered from hemiplegics. She drowned sorrow in the river.

Second daughter of a ship-carpenter. An awful tidal wave. People called her with despise. Drunk out desperately to forget.

They make the bridge several times a day. He also worked for civilization. Japan adapted a seclusion policy.

The movement made Japan to end closing its country. Paints made from coaltar to protect from corrosion. Carried three hundred crews.

It means rice-transport ship in old time. Of course it’s model, but wall is real one. The white part looks like sea cucumbers. Inside, warm.

from The Ditties
04.01.14

Press hacked in the dream. Ladies legendary professional wrestling. Okay yes, the pale in the morning light is pretty.

When we cross the canal, all murmur at the sight. The trees are growing snow. At school, cheerleaders and trombones and sign up here.

The forty bird sings, let’s clean up your hands. False tram trip. Erotic is when you use a feather; kinky is when you use a whole chicken.

We squeeze past the goth club. Petals fall into the canal, coins on water, Caution difference, following the tracks home. Ice cream.

Smile corporation buses. Time to look up the appendix. The evening spent in missives, captions. Carrot and burdock root.

Stephanie Anderson is the author of In the Key of Those Who Can No Longer Organize Their Environments (Horse Less Press), Variants on Binding (forthcoming, The National Poetry Review Press) and several chapbooks. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in 6×6, Black Warrior Review, Lana Turner, Map Literary, Tammy, and elsewhere. She edits Projective Industries and lived in Tokyo until recently.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 5)

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Welcome to Posit 5!

In this issue we are proud to feature literary and visual work by many rising, as well as gloriously risen, stars. As ever, we offer a range of literary aesthetics and approaches, from excerpted book-length projects by Anne Waldman and Pamela Lawton, Jane Lewty, and Deborah Poe, to short fiction by Luke Whisnant. This issue also showcases the poetic potential of the long prose line, put to innovative and distinctive use by Stephanie Anderson, Rob Cook, Kristina Marie Darling, Vanessa Couto Johnson, Bobbi Lurie, and Zach Savich.

We hope you enjoy:

Stephanie Anderson’s delightfully surreal and surprising Ditties, in which “everyone sits in the yo-yo park, staring at the buds,” and we are playfully invited to “look up the appendix” but warned not to “ride in the wrong direction”;

Marcia Arrieta’s gossamer constructions, at once contemplative, startling, and forlorn, in which “everything is dreadfully calm,” “deer come and graze on [her] bed,” and the narrator “often feel like an orphan”;

Rob Cook’s somber, foreboding poems in which he informs us of “the screams where I went / looking / for the clothes / my mother wore”;

Kristina Marie Darling’s wittily slant re-imaginings of nostalgic iconographies of femininity, charting their magical courses “from Iceland to Finland to anxious”;

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s wise wordplay delivered via statements that “think with the delicate,” awakening us to the mystery and ambiguity of our own existence, in which “the heart is not a pound but an apothecary dispensing needs”;

Jane Lewty’s “Spatio-Temporal [Re]Mix” of aural and visual referents amalgamated with precision and care into poems of musicality and provocative design, resonant with “a strange elation,/the skitter guilt of/achievement”;

Bobbi Lurie’s dense and powerful evocations of strength in the face of pain, shunning what is “fake as plastic shrubs” to reveal “how much the pursued is pursuant upon/a clause in the material fabric of a lie” with “the skill to slice whatever needs to”;

Nils Michals’ prose poems, teasing us with the contents of boxes: “an entire forest, petrified white, whereby the occasional breeze stirs the crowns” and something “unclaimed . . . is gifted to the Church in the name of a holy work that shall be unnamed”;

Deborah Poe’s quiet, serene “prouns:” elegant transformations of space to states of being we “don’t have to understand” although we are led to consider “[w]hat is lost when you ask why,” and assured that we “don’t have to connect dirt to language, But the histories cave right there”;

Zach Savich’s spare, starkly simple nuggets of imagist magic, demonstrating that “the things I like are the things that happen,” in other words, why “pleasure educates”;

Anne Waldman and Pamela Lawton’s feminist appropriation of classical oral tradition in which “women’s work is never shunned” and “the skies [keep] circling the/liberated hearth” where the female body is sung by its self and she/we can feel genuinely “welcome to the symposium”;

and Luke Whisnant’s post-apocalyptic flash fiction about a mandolin virtuoso in whose “music [resides] the anguished song of a headless doll and the rubato stagger of a cripple’s broken crutch.”

Thank you for reading!
Susan Lewis and Bernd Sauermann

positInkSpash131210.small

Welcome to the visual art of Posit 5!

Made from found and fabricated objects, Mari Andrews’ sculptures delicately dance the line between nature and nurture, form and object. Each piece suggests a multitude of possible references. At once open-ended and concrete, her works are bits of sculptural poetry.

Kevin Brisco’s series “Build” presents a world of young men at work with muscular energy, both literally and imagistically. The raw materials that his images are painted on – wood, tape, and sheetrock – interact with the subject matter in a way that comments on the process and the product of a creative life.

The fact that Marcus Leatherdale uses the English colonial name for the Indian sub-continent, “Bharat,” in the title of this stunning photographic essay gives more than a clue as to its intent. This reference to India’s past jives perfectly with these elegant and haunting portraits of his friends and neighbors, imbued as they are with such a feeling of timeless nostalgia.

Oriane Stender’s work plays with the imagery and the objects of our material world. Using US currency and found paper, she sews, weaves, and paints these sly commentaries on the cultural interplay of commerce and art, image and meaning.

And finally, the video artworks by Tim Tate, elegantly framed in handmade glass, conjure the bits and pieces of half-remembered dreams. Their inhabitants share a moment with us and then, poof — they’re gone.

I hope you enjoy!
Melissa Stern