the
b’k
bitchin’ kitsch
7 Iss. 12 Dec 2016 Vol.
The Talent
Cover: “One Ear” by Sandeep Kumar Mishra. Letter from the Editor 3 Jody Azzouni 8-10 Sissy Buckles 12-14 Embe Charpentier 16-18 JD DeHart 30 Tonya Eberhard 15 Jenny Irizary 20-21 Ryan Kent 32 Eric Krszjzaniek 4-6 Marie McCloskey 22-26 Emily Rose Schanowski 19, 34 Olivier Schopfer 11, 31 Sanjeev Sethi 27 Dr. Mel Waldman 28-29 Alex Walsh 7
Chris Talbot-Heindl | A Letter from the editor I need to make a statement in light of the outcome of the recent election. If a submission is sexist, fetishist, glorifies/sexualizes violence against women (unless it is absolutely clear that it is consensual), homophobic, transphobic, racist, ableist, or in another way offensive, I will clearly state that in my rejection. These are all prohibited in our submission guidelines already, but when confronted with it, I have been giving our standard, “not a good fit for our publication.� I will state what parts exactly have been rejected so that we can maybe start a dialogue. Please understand that I understand that when writing, it is sometimes difficult to word what you envision in your head. I am in no way judging you as an -ist, simply reading the piece as a new set of eyes and maybe catching something that was not intended.
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Eric Krszjzaniek | Dear Progressive Friends | Non-Fiction It’s been a rough couple of days. And it probably will continue to be rough for quite some time as we continue to realize that, yeah, this is real. Quite frankly, it feels like for all of our progress, we built castles on quick sand. I am not here to lecture or to proclaim that what happened wasn’t about fear and/or hate of differences—whether skin color or gender—because lord knows it was for many of us and I have no business telling anyone who feels existential dread that what is felt isn’t appropriate. To my Muslim friends, I am sorry. To my black friends, I am sorry. To my Chicano/Chicana friends, I am sorry. To my Latino/Latina friends, I am sorry. To my indigenous friends, I am sorry. To my Indian friends, I am sorry. To my Korean friends, I am sorry. To my Japanese friends, I am sorry. To my Nepalese friends, I am sorry. To my friends from all other nations, I am sorry. To my trans friends, I am sorry. To my gay and lesbian friends, I am sorry. To my queer friends, I am sorry. To everyone that feels scared and afraid and angry, I am sorry. white Americans as a whole really let you down this time. Some among us might feel such attention to inclusion is unneeded and it is political correctness run amok. However, those of us who are white and who are straight, we now more than ever need to help those of us who feel threatened by inclusion to understand that we choose what we say carefully now not because of a loss but because of respect, because throughout our country’s history we have been the only ones who have not had to worry about what we say. What an amazing privilege it has been to never have to worry about what is said, but until everyone has that same privilege, it has to stop. Our words matter more now than they ever have before—even when some would have us believe words are meaningless. Words are the sense-making part of our brain that come to dictate thoughts and actions. Change language and you can change action. American democracy is a fascinating specimen. If the person you support wins, you feel more connected to others than you ever could have imagined possible. You feel vibrant and alive and effusive. However, if the person you support loses, you feel more isolated than you ever could have imagined, a stranger in a strange land, a person without a country. It’s during these latter times that we can fall into despondency and feel a thousand miles from ourselves and what we know. But listen, we all need to be here now. Right here. Right now. There’s work to be done. We got lazy as progressives. I’ve been a lazy progressive. But now, something has reignited, something has clicked again. Fits and starts of progress do not just happen, they take work, and that was work that
too many of us took for granted as somehow the march of history or the work others would do for us, on our behalf. But no. It takes us. It takes me. It takes you. It takes everyone. To be dedicated to a cause greater than yourself is to justify your place in this world. Including more, excluding less. The voices of the voiceless are not a tide of hate, but of fear and uncertainty. It is our job to comfort those that do not feel heard, to be empathetic, to hear and to listen. We cannot simply write off or dismiss the voices of frustration any longer. In also doing this, we must comfort those among us that feel our country has been plunged into darkness, that we have moved forward into the past. Trump does not have to be the existential threat he promised us he would be. We elected Trump, not they. America is always us, and even though our President-elect ran on a policy of turning us against them, it will be us who will remain unshaken and unbroken. America is an action. Government is not the looming, intangible entity that has become such a powerful metaphor for the stripping of humanity. Government and systems can only do harm through complacency. They are people. They are you and they are me. It is only people, do not be afraid. We can become government and we can become the change we took as inevitable. And only through work and diligence can we make it inevitable. We can be better, and ultimately it will be a Trump presidency that enables us to realize this. We have no time for despair. Mourning, yes; despair, no. The reward for exalting a man who appeals to the worst in all of us to the highest office in the land is that no man or woman like that will ever have that chance again. We are lucky that this man and his intentions are so blatant and bald-faced, otherwise it could have had the potential to work against us. We need the blatant and the flagrant obscenity of tyrants to ignite within us our long forgotten fire of justice and decency. I had no delusions about the state I chose to move to. I knew it was Red, like RED red, and that liberals were a rare, if not threatened, species here. This town gave women’s suffrage a full 50 years before the rest of the nation, and it also gave us the humanturned-symbol for hate crime legislation. A symbol that united people and brought light to a dark part of our nation. There is love in the darkness, but it takes work. Some of us are scared, some of us are excited. Excitement is merely fear leaving the body. Those of us who are excited are not lesser than those of us who are afraid. That division can’t happen. Living here in the red sea has given me insight into the Otherness
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Eric Krszjzaniek | Dear Progressive Friends
that I could not have known otherwise. It has given me empathy for the plight of those among us who vote consistently against our best interests. We must unify and acknowledge that the system that brought us here is broken. The enthusiasm for Trump is not strictly enthusiasm for hate or misogyny, no matter how hard it is for us on the left to believe it, it is enthusiasm for the destruction of a system that made life silent for so many for so long. It just happens that the man who promised the destruction of the shackles is also a huge part of the system that forged the shackles. But systems are just people doing one action after another. Systems, like and because of the people they depend on, are fallible. Do not be afraid, we are here together. We will protect one another and now we have a solidified purpose. Is all of this worth the pain it has caused, and continues to cause, those of us victimized by the hateful rhetoric and inhumane treatment? No. It is not. Of course not, it could never be. Nothing could ever make the fear and sadness of a student coming into my office scared about the fate of their parents, of their own education, somehow worthwhile. Therefore it is up to us to make sure this pain and hurt and anger is not in vain. That a modicum of meaning can be squeezed from this cold stone we’ve handed ourselves. And so what is our action? Be mindful of our language, yes, but more importantly we will organize and we will run for office. We will help one another. We will be empathy. If there is no love in our darkness, we will create it. If you elect to run for office and serve us, your win will give you more experience in public service than is necessary to become President-elect. There is nothing holding you back from public service but yourself. This is powerful. We are powerful. With work we can experience fear leave our bodies and be excited about this action called America again. A Trump presidency can make us stronger if we make it so. Do not despair, just be here now.
Alex Walsh | Envying the tide | Poetry Grapes grow on vines and lasagna isn’t pronounced the way it should be. Sex is a dirty word; meanwhile money is beautiful, except it’s also the root of some nasty tree growing daily in all our spines. Even microwaves are holy, in their way. Girls run away from home to live in big houses, but they’re old enough—just— so that it isn’t running but walking, dignified, with skirts fashioned as per the trend and heels stuck up like horse hooves, only pinker. Call me weak for envying the tide’s ability to ebb, flow, gracefully participate in the sacred moon-dance. I wouldn’t want to be beholden, even to such a magnificent body, but routine’s nice.
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Jody Azzouni | Pattern Recognition | Fiction There are the tests you fail, and the important ones that you fail before you scarcely know that there is a test to fail at, at all. The background, the particular details of how you failed the test don’t matter; for whatever it is you do, you do it over and over again all your life: the particular details of your failures belong to you forever: they curiously rearrange themselves in neverending new forms, but ones you find altogether familiar (in that maddeningly subconscious way such things are always found to be altogether familiar): the pattern—and you need to know this—isn’t rooted in the primitive roots of your sexuality, it isn’t buried in the moss of the relationship (however thin) that your parents allowed you to have with them: it’s all just a matter of tiddlywinks, a matter, that is, of sheer timing: your tendency to take that sudden instinctual leap into the flat of a wall. There is, I regret to say, no cure. Once upon a time people much like yourself took wrong turns much like the ones you regularly take, and fell out of trees. They were eaten. Think of the third grade, of children who are eight (and some of whom are already nine; for birthdays are scattershot over entire years). It’s all here already. The children—two of them in fact, boys let’s say, find matches, ones that can be lit by striking anything, sheer cement for (a pertinent) example. Thus armed they decide to do a Good Thing: collect litter that blows adrift and homeless on the streets of Brooklyn—they collect such litter, I say, and burn it. (So much adult behavior is already here, don’t you think? Especially the bit about it being a Good Thing.) You may focus on the thought, good citizen that you are—especially after I tell you that they spend the entire afternoon repeatedly collecting a pile of litter, finding a somewhat spacious region (perhaps near a fire hydrant, in case of an accident: for they are not entirely thoughtless boys), and burning their acquired flammable loot—you may wonder: where are the adults in all this? Who, to begin with, was stupid enough to scatter matches (of this sort) where children might find them? And who, to continue the thought, are these strange adults who unconcernedly walk past two children crouching near a gutter while tending a makeshift campfire between two cars. (Admittedly, one of the unconcernedly walking adults does intercede. Justice, such as it is, requires me to admit this. He has a briefcase: this means he’s coming back from work— probably—and so this places the event squarely between after five in the evening, but certainly before six thirty, since one of the boys at least, and probably the other too, has to be home for dinner by six thirty. The man gestures towards one of the cars and says: that’s where the gas tank is; maybe you should be careful. The boys thank him for his concern, a fresh experience for them, and tell him: don’t worry; we know what we’re doing; we’ve done this before. And then, the man walks off.) The man walks off. Some stories, ones rather like this one, nevertheless end badly; but the accidents of childhood are only that, and no more: the character of a human that’s already in place—already, as it were, set the way cement sets (although much more rapidly); such a character meets the world, which is also already in place (and has been for quite a long while),
and the world decides: this one I kill (and so a child, climbing around on the roofs of apartment buildings, wearing a mask and pretending to be Batman, falls numerous stories), this one I maim forever (and so a child, trying to make a bomb from homespun ingredients—aerosol cans snitched from the bathroom, for example, something viscous and in a jar borrowed from the cellar, an innocent metallic item or two from a toy store, one or two bottles of something bright blue or cherry red from his chemistry set—ingenuously succeeds), and some I simply this time (inexplicably) let go. Consider now a little girl. (This is not exactly a change of subject.) The little girl in question sees the two boys setting the fire (the last fire they set that afternoon, unsurprisingly, especially given her reaction). Perhaps she even sees the adult with a briefcase, the neatly dressed one who has offered them such a sensible recommendation. She has an opportunity to shine, to perform— she grasps this, I hasten to stress, as much as (certainly no more than) the boys grasped what it was they were doing. First, and crucial to it all, is the infliction of agony: I saw you start a fire, I saw you, I’m going to tell Mrs. Gollum tomorrow. Just you wait. (The woman with the improbable name that the little girl has just alluded to is a real teacher, and is, in fact, their real teacher. I know of no reason for why her name has shown up so prominently in so much of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work.) Tomorrow calls for rehearsals, some of them dress (did this girl become an actress later? this is one, and only one, possibility). Each child in the class—apart from the culprits who presumably already know what they’ve done—is told ahead of time in just those words what the little girl will tell Mrs. Gollum once the class has assembled (once the audience is seated). Some children are whispered to while they dutifully wait on line with her; some are told on the way to school; many are told in the schoolyard in a small group that collects around the girl, perhaps for the first time. This is certainly behavior that bears repeating. Just watch her. Here, then, is one test. (There have been several already.) Several children approach one boy and tell him that the other boy denies that he started any fires at all. The boy, feeling betrayed, and despite seeing his friend gesticulating madly to him from across the yard (as only eight year olds can), denies firmly that he started the fires alone. Eddie did it too, he says. Of course, this is the wrong remark to make. The right remark to make goes (something) like this: Fire? What fire? Was there a fire (somewhere)? Whatever are you talking about? (Contrary to appearances, this is not yet a prisoner’s dilemma; those, inexorably, come shortly later in life.) As you may imagine, a boy who has to be told when to coordinate his remarks with those of others is one who in short order is friendless. Let’s not dwell any longer on that particular and sad repercussion of the story. We think of advertising, email spam, phone solicitations—some of us are even proud to so think of them—as modern inventions. But they are not: they are old character traits in new guise. This,
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Jody Azzouni | Pattern Recognition
it is worth pointing out, is equally true of gas chambers. It is, however, not true of certain other things: some things really are new under the sun. The theory of relativity, for example. But I take it that the reader has not failed to notice how little the theory of relativity comes into this. So here we are: the girl—to repeat—has made a Very Big Deal Of It All. Call what she has been engaged in “public relations”—after all, if it isn’t now, it soon will be. But, apart from this, there are many directions the story can now take; many endings that are possible. (The world chooses only one.) Children, after all, who start fires, can get in a lot of trouble if their deeds are publicly packaged the right way: once pedagogical authorities see that changes are needed in a child’s environment their lives can veer in ways scarcely imaginable, taking a trajectory—it is worth adding—that no child would have ever predicted. A different child, one about eleven, once dropped a rock over a highway from an overpass, said rock in turn, and dutiful to the laws it is required to obey, went through the windshield of a moving car. The calculation of impact—the rock’s momentum, due to its mass, its distance from its point of impact, the constant g, air resistance (on our side this time), and, hardly insignificant, the motion of the car itself—leads inexorably to the conclusion that things went badly for the driver of the car, or perhaps, for the chatty recipient in the front seat next to the driver, and consequently, went badly for the child as well. It is interesting to speculate what such a rambunctious child could have found to do thousands and thousands of years ago, what activities, that is, thousands and thousands of years ago, that would have been seen as requiring drastic intercession by his tribal authorities (say). Our story is, and has been for some time, a quieter one. In this case, the teacher is in a bad mood. (Well, the odds of that, I’d imagine, are pretty good.) But there’s more. When the little girl begins by saying: Eddie and Stan—a beginning with, from anyone’s point of view, a lot of promise, its tone pitched just right, the rest of the class unusually silent—Mrs. Gollum (for that really is her name) says: Ellen would you just please just shut up? And that, oddly enough, is the end of it. (Ellen, and this too, is a matter of character—her’s in particular—does not try again.) An experience like this can do a lot for the children involved. (The world has now performed; its character’s turn once more—another word for this, sometimes still used, is contemplation.) Let us focus on the boys, or on one boy in particular, as an illustration: some children would learn that this is a way to live; I mean, of course, that some children would learn that this is the way they will live: risk after risk after risk: people won’t tell or people won’t listen or people won’t believe. (I’ve tried to forgo the all too natural cheap shot at political figures. But there it is, nevertheless.) There are other children, however, who react differently, who ruminate over this event, a pretty insignificant one from a certain point of view—after all, worse things (so one says) have happened to pretty much everybody. Still, if one ruminates on this event, not obsessively, not on a daily basis, but often enough over the years so that when he has reached the far side of sixty, despite this, he can still recollect its details clearly, then he won’t agree with the dismissive characterization of it: pretty insignificant; for if it isn’t forgotten (and it isn’t), there must be a reason. And I’ve tried to tell you what that reason might be.
Olivier Schopfer
Olivier Schopfer | Boom | Photograph
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Sissy Buckles | The Unbearable Lightness of Being | Poetry At 23 I was a bridesmaid dressed formally in black taffeta tea-length gown shoulders bared and once again scandalizing my mother like the time I had the Socialist Worker newspaper sent to the house after studying Marx in history class, her ridiculous concern that the neighbors were going to see what’s in our mailbox and think we are communists but man, I just wanted to read the damned thing although she never was superstitious before and at the time black seemed like a good idea I was a nihilist punk surviving the corpulent deadening impulses of smug conformity in my long gone rolling green Fletcher Hills suburbs, my hair dyed a tenth time bright red henna after lavender at least I wouldn’t be stuck with a fussy polyester pastel pink prom dress like the one I wore in my sisters’ wedding, a talismanic totem gone totally wrong stripped off in the car balled up and high-fived in the back alley dumpster on the way to their backyard mexican reception complete with bbq carne asada and charro suited mariachi, she divorced soon after when her new hubs screwed a waitress at the Pizza Hut and then choked her out but Amy was luminous that day waiting since sweet sixteen for this tall imposing Nordic blonde man to propose and invest in substantial Real Estate and Volvos and a sturdy little bourgeois wife and the glistening Chanel #5 sweat filming the tops of her breasts in the simmering summer heat and you just knew the impatient groom couldn’t wait to lick it off but first Oh No — “THE ZIPPER BROKE!!!” a pearled white gown split down that Botticelli back leaving a church full of well-wishers and the intended in drama filled suspense, finally mended we three maids drifted down the perfumed satin aisle carrying small pink candles dripping hot wax on our fingers and darkly flounced silk flirting with the best man sharing a plastic glass of effervescent champagne at the reception dancing to mobile DJ sounds he admired my salon sculpted porcelain nails
seen through 1940’s net Madonna gloves “that’s a nice touch” (I ripped the cumbersome bastards properly off the next day) and he took my number with tentative plans to catch the Dead Kennedys he was a Cosmo Bachelor of the Month MBA just graduated from Harvard with a fancy killer new job in LA and I was frankly shocked that he’d never heard of Michel Foucault but gee I was smitten with his Ivy League brown-eyed handsome man good looks and at one point his brow wrinkled up and he said “but what will become of you?” and it sounded so earnest, prophetic and sincerely concerned that I nearly cried and of course we never got together I was a lousy lit major and worked at Tower Records head shop sampling what I sold, smoking reefer in the backroom with hippie Dave sharing bro deals with all my hooligan friends, hell the store manager Leslie’s boyfriend Steve who’d recently blown in from Philly with his crazy brother Ray in a smoke belching Donnie Brasco Cadillac Coupe Deville would come in on the weekends and shop for free walking out with a shitload of records under each arm, we were little vinyl crazy anarchists giving the big F-U to Corporate America, while he was a parent’s wet dream and hot prayer away from the mess of my bohemian life I lose my friends when I lose my lovers never thinking I’d end up another miserable 9-5er but hey, we all gotta pay the rent and my sister called her first son Aaron from the bible he almost drowned in a pool that weekend his dad playing poker while their precious little tadpole slipped from the bottom step floating face down under water until a woman screamed when they fished him out he’d turned blue and threw up now I’m sitting at a low round table in Bodies on University Avenue gripped once again with obsessive galloping thoughts about
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Sissy Buckles | The unbearable Lightness of Being
floating babies, incandescent brides, chance connections and the principles of sympathetic magic it’s Potluck Sunday and Harvey’s beers are cheap, Special Guests the Paladins just finished a roaring rockabilly set up front the man with shadows watching from the rear and rascally bikers shoot Sue and I the glad eye playing pool in the back room strayed over from the Trojan Horse next door into our hangout cuz that’s where all the chicks were — “why is your hair so short?” the girl Rachel asks she’s the lead guitarists’ little honey and there’s dapper Tom in a hand painted silk necktie and slapping the hell out of that doghouse bass, soon to be married to Candye Kane former porn star then aspiring country/western songstress three months pregnant in a ceremony at the World Famous Palomino Club in LA between sets, who knew she would metamorphose into an OG blues diva then die at 54 from a grueling bout of internal bleeding pancreatic cancer the blood the never ending blood just kept pouring her joie de vivre and humungous heart along with every penny of savings swirling down the ever-sucking drain far and away while Rachel’s spicy gardenia perfume flutters by on quaaludes in the bar’s sultry gloaming, Robert Graves’ White Goddess of Death, Birth, and Beauty sprung to life her Breck Girl bob sensually swaying and constant yah-ta-ta questions grounding me, like Bukowski always does — “Why are you here? I just got out of the hospital my back hurts - did you cut your own hair? it looks like Sid Vicious, hey want some Windowpane, take a trip and never leave the farm?” that little gal turned out a walking pharmacopoeia I hadn’t even heard of that stuff since Wavy Gravy warned everybody about the ‘brown acid’ at Woodstock and “is that dress from Wear it Again Sam? Tom, come say Hi.” but I knew she wasn’t really looking for answers and we were already partners in crime so the next round was on me, her casual, vociferous truth accentuating my unintelligible silence.
Tonya Eberhard | Oh, Beautiful | Poetry window sill, reach— tongue heavy and speechless for the bottle the need to be put into an American Dream oh, pill, red, white and blue you’ll destroy the liver. oh, here he comes in his army uniform to dispel the rumors ricocheting off the brain walls no, no he’s no peacemaker he’d go to Iraq if a stranger told him to he’ll do whatever the government says machine, armed and ready to kill not fighting for a country you’re fighting for your life your friend who’s dead kill, kill quietly if one goes down, so does another not you the pill. to die alone is to protect others from glorified death to die by one’s own standards that is truth no more of that rich man’s war fought by young men disillusioned brainwashed by uniforms and conformity creed that is false America, America, eyes are swimming blue blood no such thing as honor just blood and bullet wound pill and mouth and swallow It is that simple
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Embe Charpentier | Yucatan Sacriledge | Fiction The shacks of la colonia lean, but not on each other. Salvaged timbers prop them up. Unfastened sheets of tin roofing sit upon shaky walls. Unfortunately, it’s almost hurricane season. Dario’s grateful they made it through the night, that he talked her out of sleeping on the beach. As dawn creeps over the low hills, they make their way so carefully the dust of the parched dirt road remains undisturbed. Before every intersection, he peers around the corner to scope out the empty street. At the city limits of Chicxulub, white cinderblock homes with scrubby palms shield them. On the curb sits the old Chrysler. As the seller promised, the key lay hidden beneath a scrap of worn carpet. They drive by the cement shrine the town erected to memorialize the dinosaurs. Chicxulub’s sole claim on history? An impact crater, sixty-five million years old. Their route winds from rural Tepic to Mexico City’s maze to Palenque. The end lies ahead in Cancun. Dario’s deal for taking down three high-level sicarios from Cartel Pacifico Sur? Two million dollars, a passport, and passage to anywhere but the United States. “Midnight, the Black Bar. Beer’s on me,” Agent Ornelas promised. Neither Yesenia nor Dario speak until they hit Highway 1800 at seventy. The salt breeze fades into jungle heat. “You made a bad deal, Pretty Boy.” The car bucks, hesitates. “I want the Acura back.” “Me, too.” Dario floors the accelerator anyway. “Where’s the shrine?” “I could find it in my sleep. Before you get to Merida, there’s a little rocky road. After the offering, I’ll make good money.” She never belonged to him for longer than a single delicious hour. Life’s better that way, and he knows it. His eyes don’t leave the cracked rearview mirror until she screeches, “Look forward! Stop being paranoid.” “That’s why we made it this far.” Dario, tense as a trigger finger, massages her thigh. It’s almost over. “I’ll miss you.” Her brown – no, amber -eyes and chunky blonde streaks gleam. “The same.” Copal, mango and fiddlewood trees, their emerald leaves thick and moist, line the two-lane road. He passes a Ford, sluggish as the rising heat. Reggaeton tunes by Don Omar pound in their ears.
Yesenia points. “Take the next right.” The Chrysler jolts over bumps until the road narrows to a footpath. She escapes the car’s .confines as if on fire. “She’s this way.” Her body bounds with every stride. He grabs a bottle and wedges his .38 in the waist of his jeans. The Bony Lady loves tequila. The wooden shrine contains the statue of Santa Muerte, a life-sized skeletal figure, dressed in a black robe edged in scarlet. Empty eye sockets take in the world. Her terrifying mouth smiles wickedly. One hand holds a scythe, the other a globe. She is surrounded by candles, plastic flowers, and packages of cigarettes. Bottles of perfume, jugs of water, and boxes of cigars rest near the owl guarding her feet. Behind her, two hundred and five hundred peso notes are pinned to a drape. Yesenia walks toward the bony figure on her knees, mumbling petitions. The neighboring cottage’s expensive generator whirs. Its owner, a diminutive middleaged woman with missing teeth, stands in Dario’s path. “What are you bringing Santa Muerte?” Dario scans the area as he takes the bottle from the paper bag. “Patrón silver, señora.” It’s almost over. “Tequila. Good. She is always thirsty.” Señora gestured toward a weathered board. “Kneel here and walk like your girlfriend does. Roll up your jeans if you want them to stay clean.” He lifts his shirt. “I’m protecting us. I’ll let my girl pray for us both. Where’s the cenote? She gestures to the left, at the narrow, bottomless well. “Filthy atheist. Put the bottle there.” Señora points to the lady’s feet, then slips her rosary from around her neck. “I’ll pray for her and her handsome, faithless man.” Yesenia sings the Ave Maria, struggling on the high notes. As her song resonates, Dario hears a car’s rumble down the rock-studded road. “Stop!” Señora strides forward, fists raised. Dario runs toward Santa Muerte’s statue. “Run, Yessie!” He pulls her to a stand. “Kneel! Both of you must pray!” Señora commands.
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Embe Charpentier | Yucatan Sacrilege
Pressure bears down on Dario’s shoulders, forcing him to kneel inches from the Bony Lady’s feet. Yesenia kneels back down to pray. Dario can’t hold his gun After the Escalade halts, two scarred men clad in leather and denim swagger toward the shrine. “Dario Ramirez, you snitch! Wanna get shot in the back?” Rafael yells. “Too easy for a rat,” Carlos says. “What part of him you wanna take to Ramón?” “His thumb.” Carlos smacks his gun against his palm. Rafael slides on brass knuckles as he marches forward. “Do his girlfriend quick, Carlos.” Dario cannot rise. Oppressive gravity restrains him, and he can barely breathe. “I’m sorry,” he gasps. Yesenia chants her prayers louder, faster. “You two, stay right there,” Señora says. Thunder explodes from the cenote. A furious wind rises. Above the cenote, shards of bone rise, shift, and mass. The bony lady’s gown whips around her. A blast of air pushes the keeper against the cottage wall. Dario covers Yesenia to protect her with his body. “Don’t look!” Yesenia pleads, but Dario can’t avert his eyes. The current of air sweeps past the shrine, and drives Carlos and Rafael against the wall of the Escalade. The fragments of bones fly, sharpened points aimed forward. Both men fire their weapons into the storm of barbs, but the spikes pierce their flesh. The bones rip gory slashes, strike like daggers. Within minutes, the assassins lay lifeless, studded with bone fragments. The wind ceases. Yesenia and Dario shudder as they rise. She vomits until only bile remains. “Drop their bodies into the cenote,” Señora says. “Santa Muerte’s rain will do the rest.” They strip down to their underwear before dragging the nauseating remains toward the cenote’s maw. With every inch he pulls, Dario prays. It’s almost over.
emily rose schanowski
emily rose schanowski | sea dragon | ink and watercolor on paper 19
Jenny Irizary | Witches and Princesses | Memoir Stephanie always made me play the Witch, and I knew part of that role was contesting it, insisting that I should be the Princess like the younger neighborhood girls or refusing the whole game like the other ten-year-olds, who smoked their parents’ weed or gossiped about which junior high kids were getting abortions. But I liked cackling and wearing a hat shaped like the love child of a traffic cone and a flying saucer. In fact, I got so good at deep diaphragm cackling that the hat fell right off my head most days, at the climax of my monologue, my arms bent at the elbows and my fingers curled into claws. “Who will save you now, Princess?” I flipped over our makeshift hourglass (two dirt-filled plastic water bottles taped together at the mouth) and shrieked, “Your time is running out; the spell has been cast!” I lurched at Stephanie in a hunched over pose and sneered. She reached up and grabbed my collar. “I reversed the spell before you were even born.” Now that gave me pause; Stephanie was two years older than me, even though we were in the same fourth grade class. That gave her twenty-four months to anticipate and reverse any spell before I even came up with it, even in the fictional premise of our game, because we didn’t know the story until we played it out. That was how the rules were; they weren’t until they were. Stephanie’s aide thought this was “occult” and “out-of-line” because “God reveals His plans to people, not the other way around.” To me, she whispered, “People with her condition don’t usually live much longer than your age.” This seemed especially ridiculous to me, since it meant that Stephanie had already far outlived every doctor’s predictions. The neighbor kids concurred that she did so by sheer bossiness (we had all been yelled at for being inadequately witchy or unwilling to play). Stephanie insisted that we were addressing each other, not God, and the aide clicked her tongue and rubbed her 14-carat snake chain cross and remarked curtly, “You probably had too much sugar today.” She told me I could stay in the corner of the class where Stephanie did her schoolwork if I helped. I agreed and waited for recess, when the aide always left for the bathroom, and we could resume discussions of the Witch and the Princess. One particular recess, we finally got to the bottom of how the Princess always foiled the Witch. The Princess habitually broke through wormholes in a spaceship that the Witch mistook for a discarded hat and took to wearing without knowing that this allowed the Princess to observe her every spell, memorizing every permutations of each future moment’s conflict. Then the Princess would wait for the Witch to throw
up her hands and cackle so hard that the “hat” flew off her head, kick off before the hat could make its sloppy, spinning Ed Wood landing, and jump back through the wormhole to before the Witch was born. There and then she could enact a counter-spell corresponding to every attack the Witch would soon devise. That was why the Princess could undo all the Witch’s spells before they happened; it didn’t really have anything to do with wisdom that came with a two-year age advantage. Stephanie’s aide returned from the bathroom toward the end of our conversation and clucked that what’s written can’t be re-written “unless you want to pretend the scribbles underneath aren’t there.” She adjusted her white turtleneck and un-bunched the floor-length jumper she wore over it, uncomfortably attempting to make picking her wedgie appear decorous and tasteful. “Sometimes we just have to accept our—” and Stephanie shoved her so that “Fate” sounded like the air let out of a tire. The aide stumbled and braced herself against the table where Stephanie did computer programs designed for kids several years younger than either of us with a mouse pad that didn’t fit the way her fingers folded into her palm, bent in a chair that hurt her back, designed for somebody else’s comfort. A few kids coming in from recess saw it and laughed. We might all have made up excuses when we didn’t want to be Witches to Stephanie’s Princess because she was bossy as hell, and Stephanie had probably rolled her eyes at every invitation to “party.” But we all hung out at some point or another, not all of us in some mystical playtime unity together, but one-on-one or in groups, all vying to decide whether we slid down the hill on trashcan lids, climbed into tree stumps, or in my case, read books about women so powerful they scared men into believing they were witches. All of us except the aide, who’d turned up her nose at all of us, like every other adult who came to “serve” our “underprivileged community,” all the while telling us in a thousand ways that we were diseases our parents passed on to people like them, that our parents smoked too much weed and drank too much when they should be working, that we’d either OD or live too long on welfare. We’d all stepped through so many wormholes she couldn’t discern us from earlier generations or the ones to come, and we’d seen her many times before. It was her private game of Predestination where none of us were supposed to be loudmouthed Witches or time-travelling Princesses. Stephanie grinned with self-satisfaction, and the girl who probably partied the most of any kid in the neighborhood called her a badass. “I told you I was the Princess,” Stephanie smirked. 21
Marie McCloskey | Reunion | Fiction I can’t believe she’s gone. It’s been years since we’ve seen each other, but we’ve talked online, I’ve seen pictures of her kids and she’s liked mine. The usual pseudo friendship that our culture now fosters since losing touch doesn’t happen anymore. Not unless you go out of your way to avoid people. It’s weird to think back and know she’s gone. We never thought about it much as teenagers. Our world of ditching school and trying to avoid reality padded us for a while. Here I am fifteen years later, and she’s the first to go. Death doesn’t bother me much. It’s inevitable. Why waste time worrying over it? But she had to. For years cancer ate away at her body, and now she’s gone. Her kids are old enough to remember her as they grow, but too young to lose their mother. That’s what hurts. Knowing how they must be grieving. To know that her husband is now tasked with raising them on his own. It makes me cling to my daughters. I lean into my husband to tell him what’s happened. He never met her. Never knew her as I did, but he wraps his arms around me anyway. He babies me with the unspoken promise of his arms. I sink into him and think of what it would be like if we were in her family’s position. I wonder if it’s appropriate to bring the kids to the wake. Maybe her boys will appreciate some kids to play with. But what if they don’t? “Should we bring the girls?” I ask my husband. “They’ll probably distract you,” he offers me his practical approach, as always. “But they can help her sons feel better.” Children at a funeral have always seemed like a beacon of hope to me. They might cry, but it doesn’t take much to make them laugh. We need laughter right now. At least I do. I wonder if her family does. That thought follows me until we arrive at the funeral home for her wake. These kinds of places seem accommodating enough, but they also feel stale. It doesn’t matter how many armchairs or couches they littler a room with, it’s still a place to mourn the dead. A necessity for acceptance and no more than that. My husband stops me before I leave the car. “You’re okay right?” “I am.” Sadly enough, I’m more eager to see old friends. We’ve talked online, made enough comments, but to be in a room with people you once knew can be nostalgic. Maybe we’ll start hanging out again like we see in movies. Talk about the family, reminisce over days gone by. I think it’s what I need right now.
My husband gives me a look that says he gets it. I let him go around and open my door for me. I think he doesn’t know what else to do. “I need you girls to be on your best behavior,” I warn my daughters as I step out. My husband kisses me softly. He’s as helpful as he can be. I open the back seat door and unbuckle our youngest. She’s a squirmy toddler, so I hand her off to her father. My eldest sits calm and thoughtful. Her giant puppy dog eyes see into me and she says, “Mommy, do you miss your friend?” It’s a hard question. We’d grown apart. I miss days gone by more than her presence. She hasn’t been an active part of my life for years. If the internet didn’t keep us all connected, I might not even know she’s dead. “I miss being friends with her,” I respond. It’s the truth. I miss a lot of people. The anticipation of reuniting with old friends gives me something to look forward to in this grim situation. It’s the worst reason to reconnect, but nothing brings people together like death. Unstrapping my eldest from her seat, I find cause to smile. “It’ll be nice to reminisce.” “What does reince mean?” she lisps through her five year old curiosity. “Rem-in-isce means to look back on something with happiness.” I think that’s a good way to simplify it. I’ve had to define so many words over the past few years, I’m unsure. It doesn’t concern me right now. I help her out and look around the parking lot. More people are pulling in, doing the same as us: preparing for this watered down ritual. We know the drill from loss of grandparents and parents. You go in, sign the memory book; take a prayer card or two. We’ll look at pictures, maybe watch a slideshow, and somehow muster enough courage to offer our condolences to the family. I hate it. It’s too routine. Why not stand before a funeral pyre all night as the Greeks did? Or offer a sacrifice like the Vikings? This is easy. It’s a gathering, a simple obligation like a family holiday. Stop by make sure everyone knows you came. Hopefully they’ll at least have free booze. But it doesn’t seem fitting. Alcohol, yes. Our way of saying good-bye, no. There’s no real ceremony. They’ll have some
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Marie McCloskey | Reunion
religious send off, but that’s always forced. Were funerals always so mechanical? It’s not like people enjoy them. They’re not meant to be enjoyed. Maybe that’s what’s bothering me. I know I won’t enjoy myself, but I’m here anyway. Out of respect for her and her family. Whatever the reason, I straighten out my black pencil skirt and grasp my daughters’ hands as we walk toward the building. Birds sing their delighted trills and a gust of spring wind offers an unsettling calm. It’s too pretty for loss. I wish it was raining. It’s easy to let go when dark clouds hover overhead. The sunshine taunts me. I loathe the squirrels running about the nearby trees. Don’t they have any respect? Of course not. They’re squirrels. They just live. Probably more happy than us. Why do we do this? I would say fear, but not everyone fears death. More revere it. I’m here after years of living my own life to say goodbye to someone that I haven’t actually seen since my wedding. Why? Maybe I am scared. I know I don’t want to be torn away from my family someday. It could be the allure of reconnecting. I didn’t go to my high school reunion. It had cost too much and didn’t fit into our schedule. I have missed old friends. Aging will do that I guess. Entering my thirties wasn’t all that bad. I’m old enough to be taken seriously now and young enough to still have fun. But I’m not a kid anymore. I have a husband and two children. Facing death gets harder each time because it’s waiting for me. It took her already. She’s the first one my age to go. I suck it up, and face the solemn building standing before me. Before we enter I can’t keep from thinking about all the rooms. Each one holds some body, some death waiting to be mourned. My husband walks close. His presence alone reminds me that we still have our lives. I look down and try not to think about all the children who’ve lost a parent, or both. We got up to the room marked for my friend with a standee. I sign the little book as if we’re guests at a party. It seems indecent. Who wants to remember a funeral? I’ve known people who’ve gone so far as to take pictures at one. The idea sickens me. Maybe I’m more afraid of death than I think. It’s not so much the death, but the expectation of being remembered. What if I just want to be a mom and die a mom? Not all of us want to be
remembered. Before I have much time to enter the room and take in its forced casual appearance, my friend Meredith gains my attention. “Josie?” She offers a hug that I’m not ready to sink into. I pull away and realize that she hasn’t met my family. “This is my husband, John, and my daughters-” “Lauren and Lisa,” she answers before I can name them. “I’ve seen enough pictures to know.” Her enthusiasm seems a little forced, but I’m glad when she bends down to address them. “Your mother and I used to be best friends.” I never much thought about it, but if I had a best friend it would have been her. I could always tell her anything. She still offers me encouragement when we talk online. Right now I’m grateful for it. It’s nice to see her again. It makes this whole ordeal less awkward. We scoot over to a nearby couch and sit down to catch up. I shoot my husband an apologetic look and he nods his approval as he takes the girls off to give us some space. I don’t know what I’d do without him. If he went first, would I be strong enough to be a single mother? The idea haunts me as I talk to Meredith. She’s still the same bubbly person she always was. I find it amazing that she’s still single, but I think she prefers it that way. As we go on about our lives, I wonder how we grew apart. I’ve missed her. Maybe some good can come from this tragic situation. I’m eager to rekindle old friendships. Another familiar face catches my attention, and I nod to Meredith as I gain her attention, “Emily?” She recognizes me right away. “Josie?” Emily moves to sit with us. There’s plenty of space so I pat the empty cushion beside me. “Hi Mere,” Emily’s wistful tone hits me hard. We were always so close. “Isn’t this terrible?” she doesn’t hold back. She never did. “Yeah,” I whisper as Mere nods. An awkward silence surrounds us for a little too long. I try to find something to say, but Emily
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Marie McCloskey | Reunion
saves me the trouble, “I can’t believe she’s gone.” “Me neither.” Meredith leans in. I can’t stop thinking about her children. It dries out my mouth. Makes my throat close up. “You have kids Josie, can you imagine what she must have gone through?” Emily’s question cuts deep. I know she means well, but it’s hard enough without saying it. “Yeah.” It’s been torture. “At least she had time to say goodbye.” Meredith has to try and put a positive spin on it. She always did. No matter what I was going through, she always tried to make me feel better. The thing is, I don’t want to feel better now, and I often didn’t want to back then. “That’s easy for you to say.” She has no idea what it’s like to have a family of her own. She doesn’t know the pressures of raising children, or the duties of being a wife. “You know what I mean Josie.” “I know.” I let it go not wanting to explore the depth of loss with her. Emily’s silence worries me. She never did experience tough situations well. “You okay?” I nudge her. Meredith adds, “I know it’s been a while, but it’s us. Emily glares at me. Me. As if I’ve done something wrong. “Would you even care about me if I wasn’t here?” She glances over at Meredith with less scorn. “We haven’t spoken in over a decade.” It stings, but it’s the truth. Maybe friendships are like lives, they’re born, they live, and they die. There’s nothing left to say. We’ve moved on without looking back, and now death has forced us together again. “I’m sorry.” I stand to go find my husband and kids. I know I’m being a coward, not addressing Emily’s words. But I’m not really sorry. I’ve moved on.
SAnjeev Sethi | Web 2.0 | Poetry It is ignoramuses who expect odium to be alert to netiquettes. On the zocalo @140 characters or less, it is naĂŻve to assume arguments will be informed. In a setting where saints quarrel there may be a play of kinesics. But most of us are not geared to regulate our rage. Virtual communities register and ricochet such vehemence.
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Dr. Mel Waldman | A Voyage to Nowhere & Through the Secret City of New York | Poetry (on reading Audre Lorde’s poem — A Trip on the Staten Island Ferry) On a voyage to nowhere & through the secret city of New York, I fall into the heat of inner space & plummet & flow through my Lilliputian universe moving inward & outward simultaneously parallel-man freely gliding across parallel worlds peeping through the peephole of outer space as I meander around the 5 boroughs, lingering in Yesterday’s landscape & gazing at its hidden wonders with gold eyes & private visions. My solitary journey is a tiny dream expanding & contracting beneath the canopy of haunting human consciousness, a phantom cosmos pregnant with overflowing thoughts exploding with blessings of imagination. I am a mind-dancer dancing in the dream of flesh and thoughts. I am the rushing waves of phantasmagoria & the self drowning in a flood of identity
that is my prison. I am the labyrinth of my lost life flowing across decades in the secret city of New York where the vastness of my unreality shrinks & shrivels up into an everlasting ephemeral dream-flower of gorgeous invisibility & I travel around & around on the Coney Island Cyclone in a space-time capsule & I gaze at the swirling dream of Coney Island & the sprawling landscape of Central Park & vanish inside the Shakespeare Garden & in St. Mark’s Bookshop & Greenwich Village, Union Square, & Brooklyn Heights & stroll along the Promenade until I find myself sitting on the Staten Island Ferry moving inward & outward simultaneously on a voyage to nowhere & through the secret city of New York
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JD DeHart | Presto Chango | Fiction Harry changed his face for the fifth time in a matter of thirty seconds. In fact, before he knew it, his face had changed over fifty times. It was familiar, then unfamiliar, a cloud and then a ray of golden light. Lucille, his wife of some few weeks, watched with disdain. “Harry, can you control it?” she asked. She was really hoping he could because this was one of her many marriages, and she really had hoped that this one would last at least the year. It was not so much the face-changing that bothered her, but the rudeness of the abrupt changes in public. Such practices were common in private, but here in a public restaurant, it was all quite uncouth. “It seems that I’ve gone and broke myself,” he told her, his face then shifting again. Indeed, he had. In Harry’s brief life, he had worn too many hats, as the expression goes, had told too many versions of himself to one too many people. He was a blonde-haired little girl with ringlets named Judy; he was a cage-fighter named Bruce; he was a handsome single man with an oily hairdo named Jet; he was an aggressive old matron named Edith. Others noticed, and more and more they gaped as they watched his flesh contort, form, and reform. They muttered about the etiquette of it all. “Is your name even Harry?” Lucille asked. Of course, her name was not really Lucille. Hard to say what it really was. “Are you even a man?” Of course, she was not even a woman, most assuredly born with quite a different set of practices. “These are all such absurd questions,” a polite waiter said as he approached their tiny round table, decorated with a variety of flower sprigs. “So untimely. How about what I can bring you for dinner?” They both ordered, with “Harry” changing his mind at least four times. With the changes of countenance came changes in consciousness. “Poor man,” the waiter said to himself as he strolled away, “but then, that that is the price of such frequent duplicity and indecision. Like the mouse who helps the captured lion, he should have learned his lesson a long time ago.” Then the waiter changed his face as he noticed someone he had hoped to avoid, and ducked out of the restaurant, not even bothering to place the couple’s order on his way out.
Olivier Schopfer
Olivier Schopfer | Lower Marsh, London, UK | Photograph 31
Ryan Kent | The Monster at the End of This Poem | Poetry he had a daughter once a suicide that was many years ago but no more children after that spent the next 30 years forgetting his second wife became power of attorney over his eyes ears nose mouth fingers now she is gone too ran off with his senses and uncle billy sits alone shirt ironed pants pressed dressed and waiting there just like the doorbell waits the cordless phone waits any minute now i don’t call
History — The B’K
The Bitchin’ Kitsch (2010-present) or The B’K is a compzine edited and published by The TalbotHeindl Experience, LLC in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. The Bitchin’ Kitsch was created as a monthly zine for artists, poets, prose writers, or anyone else who had something to say. It was born out of a necessity to create an avenue for editor, Chris Talbot-Heindl, to remain artistic after school, with her subversive style, while continuing to live in Central Wisconsin. It exists for the purpose of open creativity and seeks to be an outlet for people who may not otherwise have an opportunity to show their work. Although the idea was created as a “what-if” brainstorm between the Talbot-Heindls’ whilst in bed and sort of groggy, it has since blossomed into a legitimate publication that has gone international Through the grace of the Internet, The B’K has had the opportunity to create a juried book and the opportunity to publish two juried chapbooks. Here’s to the past five years, and hopefully many, many more.
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emily rose schanowski
Emily Rose Schanowski | Windows | Ink on paper