Tag Archives: Posit 1

Editors’ notes

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Welcome to Posit 1!

It is with the greatest pleasure that I present this inaugural issue. From now on, whenever I am asked what kind of writing Posit is looking for, I will point to the work in this volume, which shares a quality I hope to make Posit’s hallmark: its combination of homo- and heterogeneity. Homogeneously excellent, by which I mean both original and accomplished. Yet heterogeneous in form and style. Diverse, as well, in origin, harking from Ottawa, Toronto, Rockhampton, Australia, New York, Kentucky, California, San Antonio, and Olympia, Washington. I believe that re-contextualization gives rise to re-conception – that a luminous energy emerges from the cross-talk sparked by the juxtaposition of voices as divergent as the ones assembled here.

I hope you agree, and that you enjoy the great Michael Boughn’s Whitmanesque “City II.2.iv – Flirtations of light,” singing the promise and dread of urban life in this masterful and tantalizing excerpt; Mary Kasimor’s dazzling sampler of rigorous, lapidary explorations of lyric’s cerebral and aesthetic potential, crafted and turned to frameworks of implication as sharp and graceful as razor-wire lace; the grave entertainment of Amy King’s intellectual joy-ride of verbal pyrotechnics, warning and pleasing us at once, offering treats and lifelines to help “make sense of the contagion/we call today;” Travis and JenMarie MacDonald’s playful yet probing lyric departures from Dr. Who, as grave and light of touch as the Doctor himself, and, like the Tardis, improbably expansive; rob mclennan’s entries from his Glossary of Musical Terms, whose intensity of encapsulation and fragmentation shatters preconceived ideas of word and note, generating an energetic lexicon for new connections; Bernd Sauermann’s compressed, delicate, chiseled blocks of verbal and intellectual alchemy, as quietly shocking as a “revelation making its way like mad current up my arm;” R.L. Swihart’s spare, incantatory, verbal fragments taken up and dropped like stitches connecting our shared experience of the dread unspoken; Rob Talbert’s deceptively plain-spoken, unflinching perspicacity, hiding twist after brilliant turn in plain sight, working the seam between heart and mind, lament and appreciation, elegy and critique; Brad Vogler’s meditations on what cannot, will not, or need not be said, magically drawing our quieted attention to the syntax and typography of stillness itself; Mark Young’s deliciously understated verbal artifacts, turning our expectations of allusion and ekphrasis, realism and surrealism, artifice and nature, art and commerce on their heads via splashes of “Frankendolling,” the “sonnets of Michelangelo,” and other inversions; and finally, Joanna Fuhrman and Toni Simon’s spare, precise, and gravely playful “The Ruler of Rusted Knees,” deftly uniting the verbal and the visual.

Finally, a few appreciations.

To the accomplished and celebrated contributors who so generously entrusted their work to this fledgling publication: my deepest gratitude.

To those contributors who are editors as well: Joanna Fuhrman (Ping Pong), Travis and JenMarie MacDonald (Fact-Simile), rob mclennan (Chaudiere Books, above/ground books,etc.),  Brad Vogler (Opon), and Mark Young (Otoliths): the excellence you bring to both endeavors is my inspiration for this undertaking.

To the talented artist and website designer Nathan Gwirtz: thank you for converting my ideas into (virtual) reality.

And to my friend and collaborator, Arts Editor Melissa Stern, thank you for joining me in this venture!

But perhaps most importantly, to you, dear reader: thank you for visiting Posit 1. I hope you are glad you did.

Prosit!

Susan Lewis

* * * * *

Beginning with this, our inaugural issue, Posit will showcase a variety of visual artists working in all mediums, whose work we find thoughtful, provocative, funny, dangerous, or just plain beautiful. Each issue will bring together galleries by three to six artists whose work presents a vision that is both individually and collectively unique.

I am honored that Susan Lewis has chosen me to accompany her on this voyage, and hope that you will join us from issue to issue.

For Posit 1, it is my pleasure to present the work of three artists whose work shares a sense of elegance and grace. In these galleries, Michael Janis creates sublime narratives of extraordinary depth and dimensionality through the laborious fusing of layer upon layer of laminated glass, bringing precision and construct to a parallel universe where science and reason adhere to their own logic; while Leah Oates’ gentle layers of image and tone build mysterious photographic journeys through countryside and city; a theme taken up by Kyle Gallup’s celebration of the past and possibility of New York, from Coney Island to old theater marquees, alternately documenting a world long-gone and fashioning a fantasy of what it might have been.

Happy viewing!

Melissa Stern

Michael Boughn

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City II.2.iv —  Flirtations of light

Rocks

scattered, broken on its

wheel, warming to sun’s wash

across their face is

as enlightened as

it gets

They swell

and hum

in stone-specific key

for ages

The city hears it

in crushed bones and up

through layers of accumulated

death

Does it buzz?

Is it

a beat in angel-thrummed

bridge wire? Morning kisses

and blushes

Bursting in another

direction toward earth

thrill, opening chosen in midst

of each habit

Snow

drops first,

then tulips, then

riot of shape and hew

petal-specific, fragrance passes

as reality once calculable

illusions are left in the dust

of city’s dream of dawn’s

kiss

How romantic is that, though

questions remain — where’s

are, who’s here, what’s

we?

Getting to the arena on time

for example. And as Jack said

the Air Force Academy

Digest

that. Disposing of errant intrusions

of uncomfortable disposition

may obscure the question

but it lingers in moonlight’s foreshadowing

new nights in which night

disappears

discontinuous

shadow discriminations, leave

day loose among its bearings bringing

down the house of alternate

hands in a clamour of crashing
vanities of time and space

Whisper

of water and stone is neither

name nor

outcome, but that doesn’t mean

it can’t be heard in time between

time’s tapping out unlikely

licks.  Sheer vibratory overload

hums trajectories – trajections, really,

story’s arc, costly delusion

economies

this together has brought

into law

of horizon’s  subtraction

The law

of horizon’s subtraction doesn’t

hum, more of a drone, sound

of leaden with gratuitous

overtones to lend

a blush to semblance

of alive

The Air Force

Academy remains the joker

ubiquitous sign of not just limit

but eventual embrace necessary

to resuscitation of transparent

medium as a vehicle for open

horizons to possible reach

into edge

Beyond is another

matter displacing misleading

metaphors but refusing to budge

from top of the sentence

still promising a period

It’s all

so clear until the city

enters through back

door resembles nothing

so much as familiar

turn of phrase

What is the colour

of stars and what happened to terraces

as determinants of urban splendour

take us to new encounter

with question of remains

clinging to flirtation which assumes

an aura of uneasy

sanctity

Then the Air Force

Academy glows well beyond

antithetical absence and hums

a few bars of

off we go

into the wild blue yonder

before admonishing

bound earth

fantasies to give it up

Dictation

is another name for that as it

leaves Yankee rock piles

trying to catch wheels spinning

madly down the road and reeling

from metaphor to mixed

metaphor

Giving it a name

flirts, a brush

of light on neck’s curve or glass

tower’s face

and if Martians land

in the sentence, it’s because

invasions happen and only a fool

would say no

No, not a fool

who is another name for it

but a hunger

artist starving for the glory

of pain bound refusal buttressed hard

case anthem

In the second town

Martians walk down Bloor

and no one thinks twice about loon

call rings the air out

of blue to new attention

Michael Boughn was described in the Globe and Mail as “an obscure, veteran poet with a history of being overlooked.” He spends much of his time in hockey arenas in dubious corners of Toronto.

Joanna Fuhrman and Toni Simon

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The Ruler of Rusted Knees

THE RULER OF RUSTED KNEES

You were the king of all the abandoned bathtubs and I was the king of air/ space/ time/ questions unlucky fuzzy key chains and speech. Were you jealous? Um, sorry (?) I'm was never actually kidding. You were the king of all the abandoned bathtubs

and I was the king of air/space/ time/ questions

unlucky fuzzy key chains and speech.

Were you jealous?

Um, sorry (?)

I was never / actually kidding.
thoth3

 In the beginning, we made birds chirps translated into the language of broken chairs.

No one exactly understood us, so they called us wise.

This was before the bloody fedoras,

before the arrival of floating leaf territory.
rustedknees4

 Try to balance
like an idea,

like a balanced
idea, like the idea

of balance like
an idea balanced

on another idea,
on balanced ideas

on many ideas
balancing.
rustedknees5

 Back then—you were
the ruler of plastic wrap,

lost words and
radiators.

I was the ruler
of disobedient vowels,

folded origami-style
guidebooks.
rustedknees6

 A man with double eights
in his halo is lucky.

A man without a head and double eights
in his halo is unlucky.

Can a man have a halo without a head?
Can a haloed man be unlucky?

If a man is lucky and unlucky at once,
he is doubly unlucky and doubly lucky.

If you try to be lucky,
you’re unlucky.

If want to be unlucky,
you’re in luck!

thoth7

 In the beginning, we didn’t need to be friends with all the parts of ourselves.

It was enough to listen to the wind tear the world to pieces.

Later, the wind swallowed parts of ourselves we had no name for

but missed terribly.
rustedknees8

 We had happened in many
different somewheres,

and everywheres,
and were here now.

Like the taste of teeth
is here, or the migrating

space around a loose flag.

rustedkness9

 You can be the king
of whatever–the-hell

you believe
you are the king of.

Take light,
for example.

If you whispered to the light,
no one would

say you were
wrong to believe

its flashing was a product
of your will.
Artists’ Statement

In our mixed-media literary project, Egyptian gods, stripped of their context and role, wander various New York City neighborhoods trying to figure out where they belong, how to make sense of what they have lost, and how to get along with one another.

In the first step of our project, Toni Simon constructs three-dimensional, small-scale figurines out of paper, modeled on Egyptian gods. She then paints them with abstract, graphic details. We then take the little gods out into different neighborhoods and take hundreds of photographs of them. We select eight to ten images, which become the basis for a series of poems written by Joanna Fuhrman.

So far, we have created picture/poem serial combinations in Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Chinatown, the Reversible Destiny Studio, Red Hook and Gowanus (featured here). Parts of the project have appeared online in paperbag and Talisman and in print in the 100th issue of Hanging Loose.

Toni Simon is a multimedia artist living in Brooklyn. Her illustrated book of prose poetry “Earth After Earth” was published by Lunar Chandelier Press in 2012. Over 80 of her illustrations appear in “Contradicta: Aphorisms” (Green Integer, 2010) by Nick Piombino. She has exhibited her drawings at the Drawing Center and at the AIR Gallery in NYC. http://tonisimonart.blogspot.com

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently “Pageant” (Alice James Books 2009) and “Moraine” (Hanging Loose Press 2006), as well as the chapbook “The Emotive Function” (Least Weasel Press 2011). She teaches poetry writing at Rutgers University and through Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Other sections of her project with Toni appear online at paperbag and Tailsman and in print in the journal Hanging Loose. For more see: Joannafuhrman.com

Kyle Gallup

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Artist Statement

My paintings are an extension of my life in New York City. I have two ways of seeing–one as a painter in my studio, and the second as a walker in the city viewing urban life and architecture. My art-making process involves painting, collage, print-making, and drawing. I build up my paintings with layers of painted papers and fragments of prints, allowing an open-ended narrative to develop as I work. In my work I take fragments from the real world and re-imagine them in invented urban spaces.

Kyle Gallup grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. She attended Carnegie Mellon University and received her BFA from Tufts University and the Boston Museum School. She has spent time in France painting watercolor landscapes in and around Aix-en-Provence. During the 1990’s she made prints in Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop. Robert Blackburn requested a print for his collection, which now resides in the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Collection in the Library of Congress. She was invited by founder of Triangle Workshop Sir Anthony Caro to a residency there in 1983 and again in 1991. Kyle Gallup has been in group shows in the United States and her work is in many collections in the US, Canada, Britain, Italy, and South Africa. Kyle Gallup lives and works in New York City.

Michael Janis

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Artist Statement

My work, like the world and people that inhabit it, is multifaceted. Social, political, and introspective psychological dramas are played out within layers of glass. In the process of creating, I learn more about myself, and search for insight into what motivated those around me.

Delving into the psyche and physical appearance of the subject being represented, I examine them up close, and then expose them for everyone to examine for themselves. There is the facet that is voyeuristic. I intrude and invite the viewer to intrude as well. I peek behind closed doors, into the hidden lives and private moments of my subjects.

My work is figurative. It is accessible and facilitates communication. It’s an understandable language, and like dance, a narrative is created without words. Anatomical distortions emerge at the earliest stages in my glass process, separating the figures from the photographic ideal. The abstraction allows me to get up close and create my own reality. Without the distractions of perfect anatomy, I explore the figure, shape and light on my own terms. The distortions I apply to the figures are recognizable, but more familiar in a different context.

The stories told in the infinite number of faces, gestures, and bodies I see around me are inspiring and provide me with an endless supply of source material to work from. Through my work I strive to understand and create a dialogue with the world around me. I present to the viewer my interpretations of what I see and understand as truthful.

After a 20 year career as an architect in the United States and Australia, Michael Janis returned to the US with a focus on working with glass. In 2005, Janis became the Co-Director of the Washington Glass School in Washington, D.C. Janis has received numerous awards for his artwork, including the Florida Art Glass Alliance’s Emerging Artist Award 2009, the Bay Area Glass Institute’s 2010 Saxe Fellowship and he was named a “Rising Star” at Wheaton Arts 2011. His glass artwork was twice featured in Corning Museum of Glass’ publication of international glass design, “New Glass Review.” The Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts mounted a solo show of Janis’ glass panels and sculpture in 2011. His artwork is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2012, Janis went to England’s University of Sunderland and taught at the UK’s National Glass Centre, where he became an Artist-in-Residence at the Institute for International Research in Glass (IIRG).

Recently, American Craft Magazine featured an extensive profile on Janis’ work in their April/May 2013 issue. In the following issue (June/July), the magazine interviewed him on the process his studio undertook to create the cast glass panels for the U.S. Library of Congress’ new entry doors.

The James Renwick Alliance has named him Distinguished Glass Artist for 2013/2014, and he will be having a presentation and talk about his work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in May 2014.

 

Mary Kasimor

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organic fairy tale

red dash no less thought fairy stitch tales computer slave
wheel in revolt.

sporadic ashes cave organic digital blue knife oval face acerbic
belief touch bombs. red stem thought slave touch stitch dash
wheel out page face fairy computer.

cave in touch knife organic slave tales thought out belief. red
ashes stitch. stitch stem sporadic red no dash revolt cave oval
slave touch in acerbic thought blue chase. knife wheel organic
out tales in revolt belief less red blue stitch digital face ashes in
thought.

oval bombs stems wheel fairy cave touch dash quilt spread page
slave in computer. sporadic touch organic belief oval out digital
wheel face ashes acerbic blue stem.

chase stitch.

spread knife bombs dash belief tales slave. no revolt less red
wheel thought touch out slave chase ashes. knife sporadic belief
in quilt. blue stem digital stem organic red fairy computer.

of dross

one large drop
proving nothing /no matter doesn’t
float and the egg
destines itself to live in the word

wanders /the word troubadour

the egg exits
though nothing matters

she knits green cotton yarn
into the flat land of/nothing

(&) is new under the sun

the word green rests close to
blue /baby floats an inch
above the surface
she is a relative to string theory
she is (the memo) the bright
spot on sale in the eye

a bright dross
spins herself to another self
a shaping
of steps out of the cave

the word is her double

when she walks down
The stairs in pieces
shaping sculpture
into the lips of (eccentric
) graffiti

planets in between

takes no lotus
light only
morning breath
                                                                                                         6:00
am  words
splayed unhinged
moon drama
desultory  trails of night hollow  hollow

bone diamonds
floating                                                                                           6:01
wind                                                                                                am skin dust
swept implants

memorizing                                                                                   loneliness
marching forward

yeast hollows honey
stuck in blood planted
in corners
clotted rivers
6:15
am soggy
dogs & rhododendron
blooms float
frog tails
computer child
                                                                                                              6:30
eruption is not funded                                                                 6:30

am bus holds moist
questions in mist
fists memorabilia bounces off
facebook into edible and intricate
puzzles of taste
dog nap

on small bird                                                                                  planets
7:00-5:00                                                                                        in
between dotted lines squeezing out
the prices of
fear
flash & sadness s
splits carriers of intelligence
thought is
not so much the words
just a crow
with questions
wearing it
nature                                                                                   balances
on a wing
in your unbearable                                                             position

she rides to places

next to/ you          I                     lie when
my face         turns/                                 north
finding                  the  inner stone           if life
danced to                death        when ants romp
waltzes             one two                       three
always stealing                 secrets              of
unhappiness         (          an             Old lady rides
the bus)               and blood’s                  floral
the seasons              in                and out   I don’t
know why                   I feel so                 large
digesting             small PIeces                    give me
ocean                     mystery                    in /a quiet
hall (            she rides                                the bus
knits the                  sweater                   ) the light
the eye                       Red jolts                     a
jello                      of murder where           there is
so little                   to   do              replacing the dust
gorged                   on meat                 The bones do a
/dainty                           /dance another       nose to
blow      (she rides                     the bus and Writes
three words     )      the genius of               pills fits
into small              places                           EXplodes
self Worth              with the                 ditto side of
perception plays        the piano before        seconds
bursts into                   flames      the white tea kettle
whistles                          in the                 well of tears
I divine             Water with/in                the heart   is
my heart                throw it out             And if it
rises    a witch             A murder              in the summer
Cleft                of birth                     many street arms
are counted            and Stretched           little /Little
lambs on/  to             the ship                         set sail
with                   purple spices              the GListening
sweat                      of shoulders               sweet meat
again              and Again            at the end   the ship
holds life                   size arms                hanging onto
the water (       the little Old           lady rides   the bus
and holds     A             Cup                            of water    )
and they were     never                           in      mud/silent
middle               The human remains         in       stone

girl band

twig people who didn’t      believe     fall into four dimensions      they never stood straight            they never           counted         themselves more             than once      what exists in   a  zip lock bag is   a pre-existing condition  there are no sunny days      for   certainty 500,000 dream women spake in   tiny tongues formed the first girl band      trees   see through songs a depiction of fluttering wings tapestry of hybrid unicorns and      plums what more than snake skins      elixirs do you want      we packed      ourselves explosives no one felt better      computers spilled  out orgasms swollen            seeds for the manufacturing of dogma         fragmented list of enemies 500,000         the  song on two strings japanese tones In the first      layer of tears no      one cried the sound      of broken beauty opened and bled onto the parking lots      heads dully fall thud men      crouched around         fire          women wearing cheap      flimsy      bodies feel a procession of ants         tight      and magnificent            

water for mrs lot

in favor of insanity
I am water
do not feed me art

the northern lake divided
into territories ceasing water’s
motion to exist

all natural all salt lot’s wife
bobbed in the dead sea
then the cell phone rang

now immortalized in words
flying crows
inserted themselves
infecting the others

I flew out of my house
I will die on desperate planets
waging cellular warfare
in virtual games

all my voices are unplanned births
wanting to be part wolf
from the mysterious ditches

In the rain
the slightly insane man playing soccer
is no longer enclosed in cutting edge oxygen

beautiful inky squids
are made out
of dusk and broken flowers

Mary Kasimor has most recently been published in the following journals: Yew Journal, Big Bridge, Reconfigurations, Moria, Otoliths, Certain Circuits, MadHat, The Bakery, and Altered Scale. She received a Fellowship from US Poets in Mexico for the 2010 Conference and was also a finalist in the 2011 Ahsahta Chapbook Contest. She has had several books of poetry published, most recently “The Windows Hallucinate” (LRL Textile Series, 2013).

Amy King

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Pussy Riot Rush Hour

                -Lexington Avenue Line

Just write.  Stop worrying.
Twitch from the corporate fondle,
bake a cake for the women in prison,
go to the bank when no one’s looking
to discover what you don’t want there.
You know all of this, so why do I ask?
I’m asking because you need to hear
again and then somehow you’re not
above anything, how you are not
nothing but the roar of clouds overhead,
the din of a bodega at let-out hour,
the smell of a smile unwashed
and the compression of panties beneath
too-tight tights drawn to impress
the boss into a holiday off. What we
won’t do for a little piece of ourselves,
for a shiny glimmer of heaven behind
the stacks of computer boxes and books
that tell us nothing of literature.  We eat
our lunches and ask for rush hour
to pummel us awake.  The woman hitting
herself, buck up head heavy against
the number 5 train downtown moves
people from her pole with the sheer
determination of science.  No one can
calculate exactly when her head will erupt
with blood from the daily six o’clock
punching, but self infliction is a cause
that brings us away from our senses.
I remember her well, never moving
from her usual spot of breath held and eyes
upon her.  I’m just my clothes in the seat
beneath her and can do nothing
with my pen to blank notebook pages
on my lap that maps us all the way down-
town, further south than we care
to admit we’re going.  We are all about
her with pretend not-looking and how
we wish we wish we wish
for that breath that fills us in between
buildings, that steel and mortar
and the flesh hanging off us each
to each, the potential blood bags standing
in the station, we waiting ones back then
forth every day as we incomplete ourselves.

Your Heart, the Weight of Art

I’m scrolling through your photos like this is the last frontier,
and when I get beyond, I’m going to know love like nothing before.
How to move beyond what I’ve ever done.

So I get my shine on, turn everything to egg whites,
whipped up smile, a girl, the way I know you like it,
faking everything in Chinese, even if you don’t know me ever.

But you will, oh will you. And this girl, she’s all young
and smooth and photo-full, and now I’m just a girl who.
The stars go beyond us, which is our frustration and diamonds to forever.

I’m full of country. I’m so into this century.
Larger than any life. This dying will kill us
if we don’t make it out in one breath, dead or less than.

You’ve got to protect your heart, every decade, with the weight of all that is Art.
When it’s on me and I breathe it in, I know I’m knowing you.
The sky flattens behind your smile, and you know what else.

Your body lies on me, and this is the party.
Existence is a flattery we don’t meet each minute.  We invite it
to come upon us, and hope the courting we fashion sells us back to it.

I lie on this mountain each night also, thinking you into me,
I like you inside me in all the ways, stereo ways, law ways, exam ways,
in excess of ways we haven’t seen yet. You are my distance. I straddle the cosmos.

Sometimes I see what isn’t there, and that includes Love,
as if some parlor trick is inherited from my great grandmother
of the mystical Cherokee variety. But she was no soothsayer, and I’m just alone
now, with the life that is in you calling mine out.

Back to the Future Is My Endgame

The government’s social media is upon us.
It’s hard to say which is either,
it’s hard to notice if I am neither,
it’s hard to tell what’s more worthy,
even in content-specific instances.
I mean, are we not full of money
and filling up on wild boar meat?
Do we not pet the goat and steal their oil?
We are not the same rotten filling that comes
from donut holes, but we do dash
here and then there and then some
just to get noticed.  As in, notice that I am not you;
I’m the one who thinks of you every other orgasm,
at least, just to make sense of this contagion
we call today. Self-study, self masturbatory, self immolation,
self mirroring peckish parrots to hear you.
So next level.  Adjust the preceding language
to become the one you most admire.
They used to call it single white female –
but now we call it “there is anti-matter there”
beyond that umbilical horizon of Ethernets,
or in Lacanian speak – there is no portside.
But I’m the rabbit calling your name
through the downward spout, through the lingering hiss,
through the other side all the way to China,
whose technology is growing evermore cooperative
than our paltry nanobots, until I kick back
in my own backyard where you then arrive
to find us throwing empty beer cans
at half-beaten shadows, wracking up the least
amount of dirty money in the neighborhood.
We get critical and spin some lazy beats
and ask ourselves to reproduce in the multimillions,
in the multiple seizures of real televisions,
until exhausted, lying unkempt on deathbeds,
we shoot across the backgrounds like
finally free wolves who forgive
our indiscretions against ourselves. As in,
Time:  we just made that shit up.

The Spare God

In a swollen twist of light, the patriarchal grid has overlain
the biological entity, female, who creates life,
with a femininity that represents a lack akin
to who can wrap your whole voice into a stringed instrument.

The day beyond the storm, the sea sits on her lung afloat.

She sings in siren pitch along the voice of Georgia O’Keefe:
Making your unknown known is the important thing.

We raft our way to a hollow socket, the gulf of no return
to hear echoes of an abyss long since drowned.  We are light gone by.

We found joy halved and tabled for auction, ready for stitches
of linens and playthings that bring it back to haunting.
Make me the wind?  I awaken, breathing the whale in. That song too.

Her words make spring want to eat me.  I’m edible, I till the scene,
I approach old bones by arterial walls and bend into them.
In war, combatant animals howl the other side. Hospitals comfort prisons.

Patients take the romantic angle and swim death in the head
no bigger than a waking mile.  Each awareness is the touch
of cool cloth to foreheads, is the smile of decay that brings night to bay,
each one an imminent break in paragraphs that signal
another chapter onward, anticipating its page break.

For blood in a heart, behind eyes, cooing the pulse of hyenas’
mistaken sighs, we only move for tomorrow, which never arrives,
the feminine gift we know better than any axe or gun, her voice singing sirens
towards which the flies swim to pluck strings, without ever asking her name.

Of her most recent book from Litmus Press, “I Want to Make You Safe,” John Ashbery described Amy King’s poems as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” “Safe” was one of Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2011. “The Missing Museum” is forthcoming in 2014 from Kore Press. King also teaches English & Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College and works with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

Travis and JenMarie Macdonald

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It’s All Your Fault, Now Burn with Me

Whatever you do, don’t defrost
that last thought
dancing out the airlock.

I wanna know your infection
touches the glass
you pound with savior palms

I’ve never found. An ideal worth believing
in retreats from you, lowers its solar shields.

We need our decompression
initiated, stranger. Love, as

we coast into the sun,
scoop your fusion heart out

illegally. Flash the flares
of your eyes in someone else’s direction.

Say Your Silent Goodbyes

The most impossible white
point star left

a conventional impact crater.
And yet you are found:
a skinny little idiot
in a blizzard of bullets.

Unfrazzle your asteroid
laser, cue montage music
like a missile through a plate glass window.
Hide your weeping angel eyebrows;

the approach begins.
The horde of travesty’s
nightmare child. Choose your enemy
from memory’s 4-beat cycle.

27 Effervescent Planets

Pulled a second out
of sync, hidden in

a time pocket
torn through. The universe pants—

the run was too long
for the crucible loop.
Shoot! The dimension cannon

naked in the neutrino
core with only one disgusting heart,
one inhumane universe.

Reality bomb (boom)
testing calibration apotheosis
waits for a wavelength.

An Anomaly on the List of the Dead

An army of ghosts gone
hungry, running warm,
shoots into void 600
feet above your body

politic. That’s inside the future
breach and science lines. Genesis
arc needs 13 square

miles. Move your universe a little
to the left. Exterminate,
delete, elevate. The void
stuff is sticky with duty

to queen and country. Cue
the move-on music, burning
up a sun just to say goodbye.

Authors’ note:

The preceding poems are taken from a short manuscript titled “Bigger On The Inside” that the authors wrote collaboratively while watching episodes of Doctor Who. It will be published by Ixnay Press in 2014.

JenMarie Macdonald is one half of Fact-Simile Editions and the author of “Sometime Soon Ago” (Shadow Mountain Press) and co-author, with Travis Macdonald, of the forthcoming chapbooks “Graceries” (Horse Less Press) and “Bigger on the Inside” (Ixnay Press).

Travis Macdonald is a poet, copywriter and small press publisher. He is the author of two full-length collections: “The O Mission Repo [vol. 1]” (Fact-Simile) and “N7ostradamus” (BlazeVox), as well as several chapbooks. He currently lives, works, writes and co-edits Fact-Simile Editions in Philadelphia, PA.

rob mclennan

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from Glossary of Musical Terms

Tablature

Architectural, melted. Limbs. Delectable light. An internal sea, the weighted fresh. Suffering is not economy, economy so rarely brief. Staccato puffs, the sound a breath makes. Lightness, heat. Outgrowing envelopes, soprano. The glassy edge. We tear the page in half. Roman blinds, the ottoman.

Relative major, minor. The baby, earlier. I was sent by Nancy Drew.

The Key of N, Aria

Wretched, mother. Sings. Expelled, a clear space. Subdural. A fiery exclaim. Salvage. Let me, carnivalesque. Key of spirits, one foot swoon. You wonder, outlook. Tissue, graft. Make your mouth a fingers pinch.

We lift up, lift. Decline, vermillion. Breath. Apparent, heirs.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, and was long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles are the poetry collections Songs for little sleep (Obvious Epiphanies, 2012) and grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Leah Oates

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Artist Statement

The world thus appears to be a complicated tissue of events in which connections of different kinds alternate, overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole. All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux, and at moments this flux is visible.
                                           —Peter Matthiessen

The Transitory Space series deals with urban and natural locations that are transforming due to the passage of time, altered natural conditions and a continual human imprint. In everyone and in everything there are daily changes and this series articulates fluctuation in the photographic image and captures movement through time and space.

Transitory spaces have a messy human energy that is perpetually in the present yet continually altering. They are endlessly interesting, alive places where there is a great deal of beauty and fragility. They are temporary monuments to the ephemeral nature of existence.

Leah Oates’ “Transitory Space” series was recently on view at Pieroi Gallery in Brooklyn, Islip Art Museum in NY, Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Florida, the Housatonic Museum in Connecticut and Unsettled Gallery in New Mexico. In 2011-2012, she had a solo show at Susan Eley Fine Arts, NYC and was part of group shows at Denise Bibro Fine Arts in NYC, the US Embassy in Muscat, Oman, the Flash Forward Photography Festival in Boston, MA with the Humble Art Foundation, the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, NY, Momenta Art in Brooklyn and The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. She has had solo shows at A Taste of Art Gallery in NYC, Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill, Long Island, The Center for Book Arts in NYC, Arsenal Gallery in Central Park in NYC, Tomasulo Gallery in New Jersey, The Sol Mednick Gallery in Philadelphia and Real Art Ways in Connecticut. Her work has been shown at the Affordable Art Fair NYC, the Scope Art Fair NYC, the Pool Art Fair NYC and Miami, the Bridge Art Fair NYC and Miami and in Photo NY. Recently her work was featured in Phaidon Online, Eyesin, Bomblog, Diffusion Magazine, NY Arts Magazine, Daily Constitutional and Art Squeeze.