blue-
moon-
er
The second mooner-2013
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via vol.26 of blue moon
mastadon head loud ghosts Bo Erickson & Chelsea Kern conjuror Kinsey White adventurers blue moon
raw, unfiltered contents Whitman: Mad Lib ‘Whether’
The WriHoz 5
Chocolate Magma 6 Mable Wallace 7
Louisiana Ass
There is a Dead Bird on the Porch For Indiana Jones
Woods, Comma L. 9
Sebastidae 10
Skepticism Apology
The Pinkest Lady 8
Woods, Comma L. 16
Freddie Not Yet
Acretia Wellink 17
Scrapbooks, Cold Wars, and Something about Diversity Sebastidae 21 Mable Wallace 25 Acretia Wellink 26
Tehachapi Hot Flashes
Sepia Latimanus 29
Serpentalogue 31 40
Magic Joni
Trying Elk 41 Chocolate Magma 42 The Pinkest Lady 43
Asterisked* Butts
Porridge 44
Ducky and Georgie 49
Death’s Prequel Plans
MSC 51
St. Francis 50
as this: blue moon magazine presents its underbelly, Rorscach blot, and subliminal sibling
this is blue moonER
whitman: a mad-lib The WriHoz What does it take to plunder? At Whitman, it takes creative penguins and ghastly thinkers, glittering adventurers and
the demands are dirty, the pheasant is tough, and the doors are impressive. Wherever your Dostoyevsky Room may be,
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‘whether’ Chocolate Magma
Captain Black Beard, Whether bending over conundrums or an erect bohemian
Whether one can evoke____ in a _____, combo,
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Louisiana Ass Mable Wallace
hands.
exposed skin.
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there is a dead bird on the porch The Pinkest Lady Flightless, breathless. We set to represent a bird
You bounced
An avian pillar, crunch
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for indiana jones Woods, Comma L.
Was it suicide
I’d say she outsmarted that snake
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polar bears, rockfish, and the ten modes of ancient skepticism Sebastidae
ancient skeptics and their ancient philosophy circa the third century BCE.
lieve in anything, they say. We are skeptics, they say. “You can
all than to hold things to be true that you cannot prove. They have constructed ten modes to convince you that there is noth
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small intestines and then retreat out the other end? I’m a veg
ing in everything like the skeptics think I should. Instead, I’m
Part 2: The Zoo
and dilapidated concrete. The zoo in St. Louis is a lot like St.
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polar bears.
means they should be popular. They should be popular like the
polar bear exhibit. My parents and I the only ones here and this
reason I can’t seem to stomach it.
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by the barrel but the problem is I don’t really believe the doc tor at my annual checkup because he never has to bear children
baby in his uterus only to have it destroyed by a raging hurri 13
I could go on. I could tell you all about the other modes
nothing to believe in here, nothing to be disturbed about, noth 14
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apology Woods, Comma L. He tried promises, False, biting cover.
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freddie not yeti Acretia Wellink
Fred Berenstein once repaired camping tents.
He squinted at the needle point
He kept his shop open to pay rent so he could keep his shop open. When he had nothing at hand he smoked cigarettes
and an especially servile smile.
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costly tents, then retreat back to suburban obscurity and make
He stopped smoking.
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Camille hoisted a smile stepping into the street.
The sun broke through rain clouds to
he couldn’t help but dash out and scoop her
struck asunder. She screamed as screeching SUV tires tore into her.
With Camille at last in his arms Fred let loose a stricken animal cry. A deep red stain spread over him.
Fred stood and staggered He turned and ran blindly back to his hills.
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Some say tents get mysteriously ripped Others say tents get mysteriously patched
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scrapbooks, cold wars, and something about diversity Sebastidae The Cocopah Museum in Sonora, Mexico is a scrapbook of a room filled with cut out and pasted photographs of water and fish and people labeled with descriptions of where they were and what they were doing back when. “Back when” being the proverbial theme plastered to the newly painted and yet still crumbling walls of the short and narrow room housing what is left of a culture whose artifacts bear the rare initials of B.C. and then E. The walls tell of a time back when the Colorado Delta was not a fancy word for desert, back when work smelled like fish and that was a good thing, back when the Cocopah language was spoken, not by twelve people like today but by everyone—back when the Cocopah didn’t need a scrapbook of a museum to remember the Colorado river by because it was there all along, flowing through their veins, pulsing back and forth in a meandering kind of subsistence that simply meant existence. But time is only tell now, because instead of a river the Cocopah have a scrapbook of a room housing a mother and a daughter who used to sit in boats and fish but now stand at the entrance to the museum housing the remains of a life, giving passing travelers a tour of how they used to be, back when. + If a California condor comes within sixteen miles of the Terra-gen wind turbine farm in Southern California, the GPS telemeter strapped to its body will send out a pulsing signal that results in not only a visual and audio alert displayed on the windmill operator’s computer, but also a phone call, a text, and an email sent to the entire staff of the farm, broadcasting the specific GPS quadrant where the condor was spotted thereby mobilizing the farm for emergency mitigation. If it’s close, the 500-foot turbines at risk are remotely shut off until the threat passes by unscathed. I know what you’re thinking, so I’ll tell you before you ask: no, the California condor is not a nuclear bomb. It’s a bird. A vulture. The largest North American land bird, with a 9.8 foot wingspan, skin around 21
the neck that changes color in response to varying emotion states, and a lifespan of up to 60 years. And despite the emergency system’s haunting resemblance to a 1950s Cold War duck and cover drill, these are not children running around classrooms ducking under the nearest desk, this is an energy business, and these are businessmen, “environmental friendly” ones at that. But one false step, one wayward bird killed in the turbines propelling the largest wind farm in the country forward, and the entire venture composed of some 1,500 megawatts of energy, could go up in a cloud of clean, green smoke--courtesy of the 1973 Endangered Species Act. On Easter Sunday in 1987, the United States government captured all 22 of the surviving Condors, by then officially labeled as “critically endangered,” and then divided and distributed them between the San Diego and Los Angeles Zoos, whereby they commenced what is known on paper as the “captive breeding” step of the thick and bold-printed: “Condor Recovery Plan.” And, in 2003 after 35 million dollars spent, the first fledgling condor was born in the wild. As of May 2012, there are 405 living, breathing condors, 179 of them still in captivity. + “When are you going to send us the water?” says the daughter in a broken question, her voice at first a forceful timbre that quickly gives way to a blushing nervous laugh—one, and then another. She looks up at me directly for just a moment, and then back down again, wringing her hands in the extra fringe fabric of her gray and too-large Minnie Mouse t-shirt, finally settling her gaze on our guide, Collin Soto, the Cocopah man who brought us to her museum in the first place. Collin’s hair is long, a dark and greasy set of locks that frame his square jaw and deep-set pupils. He wears a tan hat. “You see, the water treaty for native people in the Southwest,” he says, as if in answer to the daughter’s question, “is like what happens when you try to return a coffee maker to the store. Sometimes the store will honor it, but most of the time they won’t and it is forgotten.” The mother, a elderly woman with silver threads of hair pulled back in a loose bun resting on her curving spine, put down 22
the beaded necklace she was selling and spoke to Collin in the low, throaty tones of the Cocopah language. He stopped, nodded, and said, “She wants me to tell you that the Cocopah people used to live on the river. Totally off the river.” I nodded. I knew the story. I had seen the place where the Colorado ended, just across the MexicoAmerican border. It was a constructed end, a planned one springing forth from the blueprints of the 1950s engineering behemoth known as the Glenn Canyon Dam in Page, Arizona that watered the American Southwestern Desert and turned the Colorado River Delta to dust, as well as the cultures that counted on the river connecting with the ocean. The mother spoke again, her tones reverberated off the concrete, she looked at her daughter, watching her wringing her hands on her t-shirt. Collin translated: “the animals are dying. When the animals die we are soon to follow shortly. It’s a sign.” + I am drinking some highly caffeinated black tea from a silver thermos and scanning the beginnings of a Science Daily article. “Global Warming may cause a higher loss of biodiversity than previously thought,” the article says, “almost a third of all flora and fauna species worldwide could become extinct.” This is the twelfth article I’ve read this morning on the topic of climate change and biodiversity, and even though the wording has changed and the authors have too, the message pulsing throughout them all remains strikingly identical: the Earth is getting warmer and we are losing species. Flora and fauna here today and gone today, slipping through our fingers like loose change into storm drains on the sides of the road. And even though I’ve read article after article this morning, I can’t help but feel that we’ve missed something; that we’ve gone about this biodiversity thing all wrong. That, in our rush to protect individual species in the wake of a coming climate driven extinction though, we’ve lost sight of the very reason we started throwing money at birds in the first place: biological diversity. We’ve pigeonholed individual species as the ambassadors of our planet’s eclectic roots, and yet in the process, we’ve not only stopped seeing the 23
world in terms of fluxuating systems, but we’ve also stopped seeing ourselves, the homo sapien species, as an integral part of that diversity. We’ve removed ourselves from the biology of the planet, set ourselves apart so that we are seen not as another species, like the California condor that needs to be nursed back to health, but instead more like an environmental cancer—like the reason we’re in this mess in the first place. And I am tired of that talk. Because the minute we remove ourselves from this living system, the minute we stop seeing prehistoric languages and cultures and people as just as biologically important as prehistoric birds, is the minute we lose it all.
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the tuccus of the wonderland Mable Wallace
anonymous, but they deemed her Alice in the meantime. But
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confection Acretia Wellink
in the dark chocolate mines
Perhaps, because
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They speculated
across the cosmos.
and sour ingredients together hurtling around the universe on a collision course. but impending doom seemed certain. Stan sympathized.
the decorative topping on a celestial cake. A master baker must have created them because their design
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the stale,
the sky
he laid in bed every morning and
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tehachapi hot flashes Sepia Latimanus “That peak to the right, that’s Molly’s Nipple,” he tells me with a sheepish grin. By way of explanation, his age-spotted hands pantomime a curving breast, fingertips meeting at the mountain-nip I’m meant to imagine. “It’s not a very nice name.” He’s still grinning. I’m nestled in the pleather passenger seat of a white pickup truck, inching up the Blue Mountains desert-side of the Tejon Ranch on an unmarked dirt road. Out the window to my right, Antelope Valley dips out of sight behind deceptively gentled oak chaparral for our 6,000 feet of elevation. To my left, a man of eighty, skin sun-taught to exaggerate wide eyes and a straight-toothed smile, is decked in a heavy-weave red and black flannel beneath a cargo vest, bald head tucked under a well-worn cap embroidered NWTF: National Wild Turkey Federation, California Chapter. A coffee grounds canister with a chewed-on straw holds his daily water supply in my foot well. Oh yeah, and there’s his rifle. And the hatchet for piecing an animal after a kill. I’m practically double-buckled with hunting utensils and taking this moment to remind myself what my mother used to say about riding in cars with strangers. Only shotgun puns come to mind. Darrell Francis is the longest-employed hunting guide at Tejon Ranch. After teaching in Bakersfield for ten years and acting as principal for fourteen, he switched to gaming full-time, guiding permitted hunters through the Tehachapi range three seasons of the year. That was sixty-three years ago. As the truck crests a ridge, we drop into California Douglas Fir and Black Oak. Darrell points to patches of icy snow sugaring the slope’s North side and says in a low tone “We need much, much water. It’s a dry year, Katie. An awfully dry year.” My name punctuates the statement and I know he wants it to stick. This is a lesson he has one drive to teach. We keep moving. I ask about the mountains to our left and the car stops. Darrell turns off the engine and lowers himself out of the truck by 29
the handle, crouching in the road. He motions me over and draws an elongated outline in the beachy granules between his feet. “This is California,” he says, the oblong completed. “This is the coastal range.” The left edge of the outline receives a squiggly fringe. “And these are the Sierra-Nevada.” It’s triangles on the right. “The Tehachapi Mountains connect the two in a horseshoe, like this.” He joins the ranges with a semicircle just South of California’s midriff. Then he stands and guides me to a break in the oak with a view West, his hand on my elbow. “That’s the San Juaquin Valley, Katie”. And I don’t have to ask where exactly to look. Seafresh blue slams into beige. The valley’s sky clears only 30 days a year and today is not one of them. “Now I don’t want to make a big deal of this or anything, but that valley literally feeds the world.” Each of the last three words has equal emphasis. Feeds. The. World. He turns me around to face East. “See that ridge there?” He points to a sharp rim on the horizon, darkened by Doug Fir. “All the water that runs off this side,” his hands sweep to the north of the shady rim, “Goes to the San Juaquin Valley. It all drains down there.” Motioning south, he sweeps a similar arc in the air “All the water that runs off that side goes to the Antelope Valley. Got it, Katie?” There’s my name again. He doesn’t say more, just hops back in the truck and waits for me to follow. Without a word we pick our way down along the valley that drains into beige. As the truck rumbles down-slope, I picture the mountainous ‘U’ Darrell drew in the dirt. That peak is Molly’s Nipple, which means California’s breast is in a dry year. And the years trend hotter and dryer still. Menopause comes to mind. I wonder how long this rain-pause will last. If it lasts long enough, I imagine infant Doug fir and Black Oak moving breastward to suckle a dry peak. Menopause in the mountains above a valley that Feeds. The. World. All I know of menopause I observed in my mother. Hot flashes, erratic behavior, that’s how it went with her. But no woman’s experience is the same. I wonder how Molly will take the heat.
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Serpentologue
and irridescent purple pants. On the day I arrive, I am told that 31
dressed. Four more minutes pass as I race through the Bureau
promenade leading to my destination beyond maximum capac
ragged. I drop my bag, roll out my kit, snap on some gloves and
32
ment despite the extensive edema. His breathing is rapid and
underneath his tongue. While conducting this primary survey I ask the nurse questions in French and he translates them into Fon to ask the child’s parents, and then back again to French
most vipers Echis venom has components that attack tissue
travascular coagulation or DIC syndrome; the result is a victim
by increasing pressure on the brain due to cerebromeningeal
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is because they have simply reached that threshold earlier and
suddenly crashes. I think back to my training as a young Wil
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I am very scared that a child is going to die in my hands right
ation is, because their little boy is currently circling the drain
hospital but this generally entails either running an emergency
and all eyes are currently pointed at me to make them.
shock progresses I ask the nurse to try cannulating the larger
35
spiral he has entered, but I am posted in a missionary hospital
arm and start giving serum, the room suddenly plunges into
arm I am already hooking up to the medication port and begin
the modern medical establishment. I’ve seen it happen, not
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gently slide it under his legs to help bring his blood pressure up.
37
home. I start to tell his mother to make sure he keeps his ban
I hand him the baby docs; and these too, I hand him the bag patient’s presents on a general basis, but I don’t particularly
to Whitman and my mentor Kate Jackson, led me to pursue
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gets destroyed and people bring themselves into close proximity
the bitten limb and zero disability. I haven’t seen him back here
about being asked to take a deep breath, but also because I do genuinely miss the little guy. Perhaps I’ll see him again some
Until next time, Serpentologue out 39
magic
I. the cobblestones on this old street
No, not really. Not anymore. That’s a shame.
II. hair to mouth to knees to eyes I have too many secrets.
rings to beetles to glance to regret
III.
at the most inappropriate time,
so smile 40
joni Trying Elk Strumming open chords,
on her stern guitar. Her bridge is only there to lead into her chorus. Her chorus is only there to lead into her verses or to end the song
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all-nighter blues Chocolate Magma
assignments that results in a seemingly drunken, sleep deprived,
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this is a refrigerator The Pinkest Lady hear
his sad dream to you
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asterisked* Porridge Dr. JASON J. Dr. JASON J.
Ice cream? I am good. What about tiramisu, do you like tiramisu? Ugh. No.
JASON
I go by Jason J.
JASON J.
such as JJ? Just Jason J.
JASON J.
and entrepreneur.
my capitalism, in the sense, that the installations
The rest relies on mutualism: I provide the nose, This is regeneration. He puts the scalpels back 44
to get closer to me by abbreviation. That’s alright. me, that is. Form. Form as in Plato’s Forms like an ideal. For example, my name is an ideal on
exclusive, blah, blah, blah, sustained by trust on
people do.
traumas or shortcomings?
He demonstrates the action. 45
Dr.
Oh.
mean, it’s like, standards. I am not looking to be impressed. I am
Dr.
For nine long years, this January.
his seat . . . Dr. T runs to the deer
closet
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JASON J.
I’m outta here, this is some scary shit.
JASON J.
The name’s Jason . . . I’m, I’m Jason. I’m cured, man. This trick you
Dr.
Personality disorders are the hardest to cure, particularly the narcissistic, but I have to tell you
Dr.
That contract you signed, it’s really, a serious sexual misconduct and there is a paragraph on something to tell you, about the doe:
I took little heed in the seemingly casual topic
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Listen Jason, by signing that contract you signed
and clenching your sphincter: “There is no place JASON
There is no place like home. There is no place like home.
distance. TO BE CONTINUED . . . IN YOUR WETDREAMS
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butts Ducky and Georgie
And then dance. Let loose. Oh yeah.
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Death’s Prequel St. Francis
cargo. So says the opium.
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plans MSC
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