Bateau 7.1
—— lit mag —— Editor in Chief Dan Mahoney Managing Editor Kiera O’Brien Editorial Assistants Miranda Benson Jack Budd Gaia Lopez Barrera Shir Kehila Orner Megan Nowak Aadityakrishna Sathish Eloise Schultz Cornelia Brabazon Jasmine Bourgeois
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From the Editor
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Ipecac Lead Pipe Dreams—Ghazal for Flint Alternate names...
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The Fire’s Mother The Bean King
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Woman Looking Out Window: Queens
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ELEGY FOR THE IGNORANCE OF NUDITY Vague Seizures or Caesuras in a Fugue or Figure Drawing
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from A RAFT MANIFEST
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What’s a bad poem but a fine penance? I was misinformed. andyetandyetandyetand
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UNTITLED FOR EARS: WHO’S LISTENING
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The Smoker
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Driftwood Trance Logic Maniac Ethics of Dust Surrender to the Maid
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THE ELK HUNTERS LAUNCH FLEONIOS
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Barrow Taking Crops from the Snow Siting the Homestead
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Seema Yasmin
CL Bledsoe Emily Hockaday Kristina Martino rem + rom Devon Wootten
Laura Wetherington Kevin Tosca Larissa Szporluk
L.S. Klatt
Sonja Johanson
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Camden 1892
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La vida empieza en lágrimas y caca
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The Secret Reader Mother Bowdoin, 1948 La Rue Jacob, 1948 White Island In a Paris Faubourg
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Adam McOmber
St. Sebastian in Extremis
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Sergio Ortiz
In a Room Full of Bodies
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Dustin M. Hoffman
FATHER AT SHIFT END
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Tom Stanley
The Neighborhood Series
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Jorge Luis Borges Francisco De Quevedo Willis Barnstone
Elizabeth Onusko L. I. Henley Daniel Hales Simon Perchik Logan February Jennifer Tseng
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ONE DAY MY JEANS WILL BE VINTAGE
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The white doctor gave me white pills
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Post Dawn Song How to Describe Iridescence
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Finished—no new graves This rock no longer tries
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Self-Portrait In God’s Shoes Indigo Religion
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The Fence After Hours Past Lives
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JoAnna Novak Jim Ferris Emil Brägg Amy Mattox Matthew Lippman Nate Pritts Hannah Craig Jake Bauer Seth McKelvey Dan Burt Kara L. C. Jones David P. Feldman Devon Miller-Duggan Salvatore Difalco Janet Bowdan Anne Champion
from Noirmania
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What Holds the Stone Together
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Abraham
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Subterranea
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CITRUS BOMBS OF LOVE ANTS AND BIRDS
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A Noise I Can Wear Second Month
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The Brides are Leaving Us Clatter
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THE QUEEN
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Alm 33
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Sum
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Nostalgia that was never mine
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Field Theory
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Blue, Red
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BACH AND BLUE
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The Go-To Porcupine
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SPELL TO STOP HARRASSMENT BODY SPELL FOSSIL SPELL
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From the Editor The desert opens everything up. The ocean crosses everything out. These are the only conclusions I’ve come to in 2017. I no longer know what anything means. I’ve lost the instructions. I’ve become a porn addict: every time I open my computer I hit the Huffington Post and get all wide-eyed. Bad porn but I can’t stop looking. I do it in secret, late at night. And my newsporn neurosis feels so lonely; when I was younger listening to the band Neurosis was as neurotic as it got but this transcends even the most tortured doom metal. This is reality: who we’ve elected and who we’ve become. How will we translate these wobbly times? When I’m reading other writers I wonder about their process of translation: moving from idea to page, crossing distance and sky, translating cultures, boarders, operating as a majority / minority, or, in a more gendered spectrum, existing fluidly page after page… This is the most satisfying part of small press work, getting to read how a ton of other folks translate the world we live in. It engages and plurals the lonely singular: me to we. This issue of Bateau is nothing less than an instruction manual for grappling with reality. Where can we turn when collective memory ebbs and facts become more and more elusive? We turn to artists. It is the job of the artist to record not what happened but what happens. To produce work that is hungry, angry, dreamy, and insightful. Each artist in this issue of Bateau has thrown you a rope. Grab on. Pull them into you. As to where we go from here? If I remember correctly the Wobblies had a saying: building the new world in the shell of the old. Once you’re done reading Bateau, or another book, lit mag, or zine, fashion it into a brick, grab some friends, and get to goddamn building the new world!
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Seema Yasmin Ipecac these days I do not say my prayers in english there is no english equivalent for bitter-reddish-rage, ear-burning-kidney pain black eyes and white lies The knot in my stomach can only be healed with my aunt’s herbal elixir and a blue poultice. We will never tell you the name of these spices, I will never break down for you my magic. Your unity tastes like ipecac saccharin syrupy safety pin bullshit. I have in my hands a suture kit & real medicine; in my lap three books for war, sex & healing. Suspicious curves & swirls—none of them in english.
Jennifer Tseng The Fence There were an endless number of sheep living in a field. As soon as one died, others were born in its place. They were held together by a soft, electric fence. Though the fence was small and silent, the sheep were frightened of it; the grass grew tall there—it was a marvelous green. Sometimes one, unable to resist, would venture too far to eat. A charge would run through him; he’d be trampled inside but he would show no outward change. Those who dared to touch the fence, returned to touch it again. The taste of the grass, the secret red burn, were equal to knowing they could go beyond, survive, and return.
L. S. Klatt THE ELK HUNTERS They drive their Toyota & crash it into the beard of the forest. The elk head in the truck bed joins the other heads & locks horns, as if this concerto is manufactured. The jawbone of the timber mangles the radio first, now the metal. Each of the hunters was once a masticator of letters, every last one tenderhearted.
Elizabeth Onusko ONE DAY MY JEANS WILL BE VINTAGE and this precious indie song will be a classic and my sheer lipstick will look dated and then look hip again and I’ll wear it all the while because I need structure in my life and when I watch this action movie decades from now, I’ll marvel at how the cars in the chase scene seem almost alien as if that earlier time belongs to another earth and like Superman I emigrated from it in a strange little pod and forgot who I was and invented an identity using nothing but a Messiah complex and a cape which made a comeback that fall there was one in every fashion magazine
Jorge Luis Borges Camden, 1892 El olor del café y de los periódicos. El domingo y su tedio. La mañana y en la entrevista página esa vana publicación de versos alegóricos de un colega feliz. El hombre viejo está postrado y blanco en su decente habitación de pobre. Ociosamente mira su cara en el cansado espejo. Piensa, ya sin asombro, que esa cara es él. La distraída mano toca la turbia barba y saqueada boca. No está lejos el fin. Su voz declara: Casi no soy, pero mis versos ritman la vida y su esplendor. Yo fui Walt Whitman.
Jorge Luis Borges Camden, 1892 The smell of coffee and of newspapers. Sunday and its monotony. The morning, Some allegoric verses are adorning The glimpsedat page, the vain pentameters Of a contented colleague. The old man lies Stretched out and white in his respectable Poor man’s room. Then lazily he fills The weary mirror with his gaze. His eyes See a face. Unsurprised he thinks: That face Is me. With fumbling hand he reaches out To touch the tangled beard and ravaged mouth. The end is not far off. His voice declares: I’m almost gone and yet my verses scan Life and its splendor. I was Walt Whitman.
translated by Willis Barnstone