the
b’k
bitchin’ kitsch
7 Iss. 2 Feb. 2016 Vol.
The Talent
Cover: “Whaddya Got” by David Thompson. Anthony-Hardie, Brian Buck, Stu Buckles, Sissy Charlton, Matthew Graber, Margaret Jebsen, Nick Kwalton, Catherine Mahoney, K.E. Montague, Milt Moran, Sarah Frances Newman, KG Noelle, Monica Schmieder-Gropen, Rachel Sethi, Sanjeev Sweet, John Thompson, David Tu, Andy Waldman, Dr. Mel Ward, Anthony Williams, Beau Zurawski, Jake
5, 32 7 24 9 4 21 8 14-17 30 26 3 27 25 10 6 28 18-20 22-23 29 12-13 11
KG Newman | The Weed Brownie | Poetry When entitled hooligans of Nazareth tricked trusting ten-year-old Jesus into eating a weed brownie so potent he fell into a prolonged comatose state and crippled the plot of the bestselling novel of all time by neither being able to walk on water nor turn water into wine, the townspeople became very irate and in particular the vintners were merlot-faced and short-changed and sought vengeance on those meddling teens by torching their hemp fields and enlisting thugs to break up their late-night streetlight smoke sessions while the Nazarene dreamed in peace to hymns for a different messiah.
Margaret Graber | Interaction with k-mart bell ringer - valparaiso, IN | Poetry It’s when I walk up to the automatic doors of a K-Mart on the last day of November, and the middle-aged man ringing a bell for the Salvation Army tells me keep smiling that I know instinctively this is another one of those times my behavior is being policed by a man who doesn’t know my name. Doesn’t know my birthday or how my dad cried the night I was born, NBC replaying It’s a Wonderful Life the night after Christmas. All he knows is what his eyes tell him: I’m just another young girl who, even though I’m almost 29, passes for 20 and possesses, I’m sure, that feminine naivety he thinks he knows so well. So I can’t say if he was taken back as I, walking through the doorway into that department store’s red and green costume, shot back with my response, the one I’ve learned so recently to do, to return any unwanted BS to sender, to not let its stone rattle around my ribcage, not let its toxic drop poison my pond self. I say, pointing my finger-wand straight through his chest You keep smiling too! And I say it, of course, smiling, not one to be malicious or too hard in small town America to strangers I don’t even know.
Brian Anthony-Hardie
Brian Anthony-Hardie | Untitled | Photograph
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John Sweet | poem for a generation of tired failures | Poetry motionless like christ’s fingers dug deep inside his spine no good the heart exposed all tragedy all irony all blinding light a metaphor for despair and you don’t love this woman but you want her to love you and none of us in this room are beautiful all of us in this desert are dying of thirst a bunch of fucking babies, but that’s how we were raised
Stu Buck | Heavy Shelling | Poetry the pathway to the red front door of number twenty two was bordered by two immaculate waist high hedges parallel laurels clipped and choked by a mothers pride a post downfall nirvana for slugs and snails of all kinds fat umber leopards mingled with aspersa and pomatia leaving the route to the house a pyrrhic battleground the cost of a war between giants and gastropods tattered doc martens and crisp, cornflake shells the sweet amber days were mere skirmishes practice runs for the jet black midnight crusades a sherry addled teenager hell bent on terror full of repressed rage and egg shell anxiety the snap, crackle and pop the rustle and the razing they never stood a chance each step extinguishing life each cut and thrust dismantled the defences until the red door was cold breath close the battle was over the war had begun.
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Catherine Kwalton | The Last Day I Saw You We Didn’t Kiss | Poetry The last day I saw you we didn’t kiss. I wore a red one piece bathing suit with an open back and soaked your passenger seat. The middle of July was never our time but we insisted on taking that dip. My hair was a dirty straw your skin as coarse as your trust. We sat in an empty lot shouting to the past. You commented on my bare feet. You said I looked yellow. You asked what happened. I said we wouldn’t fade in the fall. I said we died in the spring. Like long overdue thank you cards and flowers that never bloomed. My mouth open and my shoulders wet but you only screamed because I forgot a towel.
Matthew Charlton | Reason VIII | Poetry There is a vanguard of visionaries hiding out in the valley, they are waiting for utter collapse before they start to rally. They are virtuous in decree if not in deed for what if what I do undermines what I mean. The role of the mind in the matters of man, there is no system and no way to understand. Because the money is not there people comodify themselves without a care the sun comes up and it feels a little colder. Atlas shrugs, and the world slips from his shoulder.
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Sanjeev Sethi | Six Down | Poetry In a speakeasy to cover-up for being myself I carry pad and pen. As images appear I jot them. Imperiled by eyeballs I jerk into a cacographic jitterbug. But, what do I squiggle? Where are my worries?
Jake Zurawski
Jake Zurawski | FRom the depths | ink on paper
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Beau Williams | Later I will realize | Poetry I slide the brass lock shut in the bathroom. Turn the music to loud; the shower to scald. For the first time in the seven years I’ve owned these pajama bottoms, I notice that they have a tag embroidered in the waistband that reads “Protest”. That company is either radical, witty, or shut down. As I step into the shower I imagine myself a world renown martyr or a punk rock activist. Crack ginger ales with Ian McKaye over a guitar with a Bush/Cheney sticker all aflame. We laugh as the edges curl; the strings explode. There is a window in the shower that faces all of South Portland and a giant oak tree. She cries all the colors of fall then bleeds them across the lawn. A crow stands nearly drowned in the flood of leaves. Stares up at me, head cocked as if I interest him. Later I will realize how conceited a thought that was.
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He will fly away before this thought is through. Before lethargy clogs the drain with me. Before the water dries the oil from my skin. Before I remember where I am. The bird streaks across my window the way salacious graffiti smears the public bathrooms downtown. I decide not to think of beautiful things today: the woman on the other side of the door, the bruising autumn tree. I think of thinking nothing as the tub fills with water; as the steam starts to burn
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K.E. Mahoney | Pink Skirt | Short-story “Sign up for a Kohl’s charge today! And receive twenty percent off today’s purchase!” Janine clenched her jaw and stopped to collect herself. She had started her shift only thirty minutes ago and it was already the fourth time she had heard the same cloying pre-recorded plea for the store credit card. She wasn’t quite sure how much the voice over the PA system had been paid to annoy everyone, but surely it was more than Janine’s hourly rate. If it had been another day, Janine might have enjoyed the temporary, albeit annoying, advertisement break from soft rock playlist of Kohl’s Department Store. But she would rather listen to Steely Dan’s Greatest Hits twenty times over than clean out the dressing room in the intimates department. “Did a tornado rip through here?” she called to her co-worker, Billy, as he sat on the floor defeated in a pile of delicates and tiny bra hangers. “Nah,” he said, “No tornado. Just Hurricane Black Friday!” He winced as the bra hanger snapped between a knot of thong underwear. Janine sighed and peeked into the dressing room area, full of discarded items from throughout the store. “There are more hangers out back, you know. I can handle this,” she said to Billy, as he wrangled garter belt from his name tag lanyard. “Alright, good luck then!” said Billy, throwing the knot of underwear to the ground and trudging away with a pasty stuck to his shoelace. Janine took a deep breath and grabbed the stack of lingerie mercifully hanging on the rack outside the dressing room. “Can I just go in and try these on or do you need to give me a number tag?” a young lady asked Janine. “No, you can just go in. Put anything you don’t want on the rack right here,” said Janine in a cheerfully helpful tone, a full two octaves higher than her natural voice. She motioned to the lady’s selection of clothes. “I’ve been eyeing that pink skirt for weeks. That’s a great choice.” “Oh do you think so? I just love everything pink, you know? I hope it fits!” enthused the woman, who Janine noticed was already wearing five different shades of pink and was clutching a pink handbag with an equally Pepto-Bismol shaded cell phone. “Good luck!” said Janine, the cheerfulness in her voice fading to sarcasm as Toto’s “Rosanna” drifted from the PA. *** “Captain, we are ready to initiate the mission,” gurgled the blue blob on deck, one eye peeking out from the red shirt it had painstakingly shoved itself into. “I’m not sure these uniforms fit correctly, though.”
“Number One, I don’t have the time or the patience to listen to you complain about fashion,” said the darker blue blob. It had inserted football shoulder pads into shirt to simulate a human upper body. “Doctor, this is how it should be, correct?” The doctor’s amorphous head oozed from the collar of the gold shirt it was wearing. “Yes, after absorbing all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I am certain this is how it should be. When we finally make contact, they will simply think that we are cut from the same blob.” “Fantastic. Make it done,” decided the Captain. “No, no, no! Make it so. That’s how it goes,” said the exasperated Doctor. “And anyway, we need to find out what these creatures do with all of the objects they take from this big building. They go in the building, collect things, get their collection inspected, get in their ships, and then what? This mission is of the utmost importance if we want to understand this world. Find a human in the store and send me to their body immediately.” “Very well, doctor. Make it so and beam the lasers and shields,” marked the Captain. Number One mashed a big button with its formless head. The Doctor’s pile of body mass disintegrated in its chair. “Do you think it matters which body the Doctor is ported into?” gurgled Number One. “I suppose any shall do. They are all quite the same,” replied the Captain. *** Janine snuck a stick of gum into her mouth and she made her way to the front of the store. The dressing room in the Intimates section had been deemed a lost cause by her manager and she was now tasked with working the cash register. “It’s anarchy in here,” the manager said to her. “We’ve got to maintain order where it counts!” Janine had gone from just listening to store credit card advertisements to soliciting customers. “Can I put this on your Kohl’s charge?” she asked, fearing she would turn into a broken record and go crazy at the sound of her own voice within the hour. The lady from the Intimates dressing room approached her register carrying an assortment of socks and three lamps. She dropped the pile of merchandise onto the register bay and gazed at Janine.
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K.E. Mahoney | Pink Skirt
“These are mine,” she said abruptly. “Inspect at will.” “I guess they will be. You’re going to wear that out of the store?” Janine asked, pointing to the pink skirt. “Yes, I plan to. Do you need me to remove it?” the woman asked. “No, no,” Janine said, waving her hands and shaking her head. “Please, no. I can just scan the tag from here.” Janine picked up the handheld scanner and motioned to the woman. “I mean no harm!” the woman screeched. “I am here in peace! I just want to learn!” Janine looked at her scanner. “It’s not a gun. It is just a device that reads the code on the tag puts the price into the computer.” The woman exhaled a sigh of relief. “Very well, carry on. I would also like many bags. One thing in each bag. The more bags, the better,” the woman decided. “Okay then,” Janine muttered under her breath, scanning and placing each item in a shopping bag. “The total comes to $125.72. Can I put this on your Kohl’s charge?” “My what?” asked the confused woman. “Your credit card. Do you have a Kohl’s charge card?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the woman sputtered. “Okay, cash then?” Janine offered. “This is an unforeseen issue,” muttered the woman to herself. She stood silent for a moment and then quickly snatched as many bags as she could and ran to the door, setting off every alarm on the way out. Janine snapped her gum and wondered if it was necessary to give two weeks notice when quitting a retail job. *** Billy sat on the ledge by the shrubbery in front of the store as he picked a pasty off his shoelace. He wondered what the plain, flower-shaped sticker was used for and ultimately decided that it was a fetish he did not understand. He would consult the internet later. He only had ten minutes left of his break and needed to think of the perfect reply to a text message he received from a girl he had met online. Billy lit a cigarette and pondered life’s greatest mysteries: women and the use of “lol” in text messages. “My ship! Where is my ship?” yelled a frantic woman in a pink skirt as she ran from the side of the building. “Please, person, tell me where my ship can be found!”
Billy flicked the ash from his cigarette, annoyed that his thoughts had been broken by someone clearly more stressed out by retail life than he was. “Your car? I don’t know, lady, did you try the remote thing on your key? The panic button?” The woman cocked her head to the side in confusion. “It’s probably in your purse, there.” The woman rifled through her purse absently and produced a jingling mass. “Key?” she asked. Billy nodded and pointed to the remote attached to the key ring. “Press that and just follow the alarm sound,” he said. “You are most kind!” shouted the woman as she scurried to follow the bleeps and siren sounds of a car, dropping a bag along the way and shattering the lamp inside. Billy watched the strange lady arrive at the silver Nissan Altima and proceed to throw socks at the windshield. “Red alert! Noise be gone!” she bellowed at the vehicle. He stared back at his phone with the open text reply to his future paramour, somehow more confused about women than he was a few minutes ago.
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Andy Tu | It Came Silently in the Night | Short-Story Momma brushed her fingers down Barbie’s hair as I shuffled into my blanket. She murmured something I couldn’t hear, then put her back into the dream house and circled around the bean bag to my side. The light was off but her eyes flickered like black glass in the moonlight haloing in through the window. She tucked me in, pressing her lips against my forehead. As she left, she began pulling the door closed, but I started up from my blanket and asked her to leave it open. “Are you sure honey?” “Yes,” I said. She was a shadow against the hallway light. “You know, I can never leave the door open at night, not even a little crack. It makes me feel like someone’s there watching me. Wouldn’t you feel safer with it closed?” “No, just leave it open please.” She left a sliver open and I heard her footsteps walking away. I pulled the blanket up to my nose and stared at the column of faint light in the doorway until my eyelids drifted closed and I began falling asleep. For a while it was seamless blackness, my mind a void. Then I felt fingertips brushing my forehead, and opened my eyes. “Goodnight Sweetie,” Daddy said. I asked him to stay with me until I fell back asleep. As usual, he crawled under the blanket and lied at my side. I wrapped my arms around him and absorbed his warmth, his hand caressing my back, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm that reminded me of a song he and Momma would hum while cooking. I began dreaming. I was sitting in the back of a train. Outside the windows, the sunlight shined strongly through a cover of clouds. The train conductor, wearing a cartoonish, blue top hat that slanted over his eyes, strode down the aisle toward me. His head turned left and right, rotating like a machine as his body floated forward. I kept reaching into my pockets, my bags, searching for the slippery edges of my ticket—I couldn’t find it. But each time I looked up, the man was at the back of train again, hovering toward me. The pattern broke when I looked up and found him above me, his hands on his hips; his eyes were clear marbles with ribbons of purple swirling through. He didn´t look human. When I awoke to Daddy’s bony grip on my shoulders, shaking me so violently that I thought someone was trying to
hurt me, my panic in the dream transferred to my reality, aligning with the sparks of urgency in Daddy’s eyes as smoke seeped in through the crack of my window and a glow of orange sliced through the angles of the shutters. “There’s a fire,” he said quickly. “We need to go.” He pulled me out of bed and through the hallway toward the stairs. I stumbled trying to keep up, and thought of everything in my room that we were leaving behind—Barbie’s dream house, Barbie’s convertible, the Barbie princess outfit I’d worn but once on Halloween. Having heard the burning house question some time before, I wondered: why didn’t we have time for me to take my one thing—the thing I could not live without? My mind had already been made up the day I heard the question. I would take Barbie herself. Momma was waiting for us at the top of the stairs. “Hurry!” she yelled. We rushed down the steps, Daddy gripping my hand, Momma ahead of us. But the heat pushed against our faces and got so bad that we couldn’t continue; a hot aura of yellow and orange leered at the bottom, on the verge of climbing up. Daddy started swearing. “Come on! Let’s go!” he shouted. He squeezed my hand and we sprinted back up, my heart pounding with our footsteps. We blazed through the hallway, past my room and into my parents’ bedroom. Daddy let out more swear words as he tried to open the window facing the backyard but couldn’t get it to budge as the latch had been broken. Momma grabbed a chair and ran it to Daddy, who began ramming its legs against the glass. “It’s going to be okay!” he shouted. His eyes were wild. From downstairs came the sound of glass shattering. Momma threw the blanket off the bed, then began dragging off the bedsheet. My eyes panicked around the room until they caught themselves in the mirror on the wall. This was my chance to save Barbie. I sprinted out of the room. Momma screamed after me.
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Andy Tu | It Came silently in the night
As I opened Barbie’s dream house and reached for her in her bed, I felt Momma’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me away. Barbie slipped from my fingers and fell to the floor. “There’s no time!” she yelled. As we rushed through the hallway, the floor cracked beneath us, tilting and dropping, and Momma’s foot broke through. I screamed and tried to pull her up, but the splinters of the wood dug into her knee, trapping her. I ran to get Daddy. The window had been smashed through; broken shards jutted on the edges of the window and gleamed on the floor. Daddy had tied one end of the blanket to the bed sheet and was pushing the other end out into the yard. “Daddy!” I screamed. “We need to help Momma!” He sprinted past me and I ran after him into the hallway. The floorboards were snapping with the crackle of the fire below. Daddy grabbed Momma by the waist and tried lifting her, but her leg only sank deeper. As I rushed to help them I felt the floor break beneath me. A hole opened wide around my feet, and I barely caught the edge. Below, flames clawed at my toes. I screamed as loud as I could, my voice a piercing shrill, stabbing at my own ears. I screamed for myself, screamed for Daddy to come and save me, screamed for him to choose me instead of Momma. He left her and grabbed my hand, pulling me up as Momma broke through the floor behind him. He carried me to the bedroom and we escaped down the bedsheets into the yard. I screamed at Daddy to go back into the house to help Momma, but he just collapsed on the grass and shook his head. By the time the fire department arrived, the flames had devoured everything inside. Only the walls were not ash. I didn´t understand I´d never see Momma again, kept thinking she’d show up at the front porch of my aunt’s house, drop her bags, bend down and give me a hug. That is, until the night Daddy handed me a wrapped present right before bedtime, a purple bow-tie and all, and I opened it and found Barbie, safe and smiling, along with a brand-new dream house, just for her.
Nick Jebsen | Terrarium | Poetry When my mother married my father, she hoped that one day he would give her the world. Seventeen tumultuous years later, on the eve of their divorce, he gave her a terrarium instead. Since he alone could not give her the world, my father decided he would give her the next best thing; a world just for her, flourishing under a glass sky. The terrarium now slumbers on the kitchen window sill; the sum total of my mothers wish lies therein.
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Dr. Mel Waldman | A brooklyn Meditation at Lily Pond While Sitting with the Beat Poets | Poetry (on reading Jack Kerouac’s poem — How to Meditate) I return to Lily Pond.
Tomorrow, I shall remember the swirling madness of the moribund day & its dust storm of destruction. But now I return & taste the scent of Cherry Trees in May & sit with the beat poets, my chimerical companions, in this delirious dream, & gaze at their glittering reflections-phantom visions in Lily Pond & listen to the jazzy beats-the raw naked rhythms-the enchanting music of cacophony & rediscover the oval mirror of peace at Lily Pond & flanked by the furious rebel-ghosts, Ginsberg and Corso, exploding into volcanic non-existence in my bucolic dreamscape, I sit quietly and listen to Kerouac shriek “—lights out—“ & soothe me with his unholy tutorial on How to Meditate
& I fall into an otherworldly trance here—in yesterday’s cocoon & I am fixed and healed by a broken idol-breaker & even Ginsberg and Corso are still & voiceless here on the Brooklyn College campus, circa Spring 1962, at Lily Pond when I was just a young college freshman, 3 years before Mother’s death & one year before Lee Harvey Oswald butchered Camelot and murdered J.F.K.— before the seamless flow of blood and the phantasmagoric sweep of death and despair, before the unfathomable escalation of jungle war, the crashing crushing unending trauma, & the unforgiving Fall. Long ago, at Lily Pond, when I was just a boy, gazing into the little Lily universe of serenity, I summoned the beat poets, tasted pretty words and discovered peace, if only for an eternal moment
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Sissy buckles | choka: adios, lemon grove | Poetry Picking flowers at dawn’s first flush attended by neighboring rooster’s circadian rhythm crows, spot solitary garnet rose soon to be bloomed from a lone climber that lies by weathered wooden shed in my front yard. The plant doesn’t seem to get enough sun, and buds visit once in a blue moon, sheltered by awning of vast weeping staghorn fern hanging on the wall; unconscious of its bashful rubicund beauty, a first rare blossom of the season — I just left it there.
Rachel Schmieder-Gropen | Weathering | Poetry I’m hoping my accumulated coping habits will kill me so that I won’t have to. My body is already freckled with the depressions of hammer taps, the cracks left by miners straining my veins for gold. Repetition digging at my ribs like river at rock. Memory building itself a future like wet sand slapping wet sand, like my tombstone is sedimentary, like building up, like whittling to fit. See, stand at the edge too many times and the edge will erode, leave shale splintering in a grey cloud, sliding under your feet like a handkerchief in a magician’s dinner-table trick: yanked back just slowly enough to carry you with it.
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Sarah Frances Moran | Letters to my brother: Patton | Memoir We started off the day with bellies full on eggs, potatoes, beans and homemade tortillas. It was a beautiful sunny Saturday so outside was our destination. You decided that riding our bicycles should be first on our agenda so we sped off down Wellington Road ready to greet the wind with our faces. We only got five houses down when we noticed our neighbor’s Robert and Paul had stopped at the old brick house and were leaned over the fence where the “beware of dog” sign hung. We were naturally curious and we stopped. As we plopped our squeaky kickstands down we heard them. Squealing and fussing, small yaps coming from the fence line. We knew it was puppies. We ran over and the old lady that lived there waved to us and asked, “you kids want a puppy?” My god did we want a puppy. We’d been asking mom for years. She was sitting there in her lawn chair and beneath her a small horde of pups. She explained that big Old Red, the neighborhood scoundrel, had jumped the fence and got her pitbull pregnant. Now she had these eight puppies to get rid of. I turned to you and pleaded, “go ask Mom, you’re the baby she’ll have a harder time telling you no.” You didn’t need much convincing and took off down the road, your short little legs pounding on the petals with excitement. I immersed myself in the puppies and began fantasizing of taking one home, what we’d name it, what we’d feed it, walking it and cuddling it. Not long after, you came walking back up not with Momma but with Roy, our cousin that lived behind us. We adored Roy. He was a young adult, wise as far as we could tell and we looked up to him. He approached me and the puppies. “Let’s pick a puppy.” “What about Mom?” I worried. “She won’t say no once you have it. They’re too cute.” Reluctantly I looked at the eight pups. You wanted a small female and I was set on a large boy. As we disagreed Roy began grabbing each puppy and inspecting them like an expert; pulling at their ears, looking at their teeth, scruffing them at the neck. You and I were still contemplating when Roy said, “this one!” He was holding up one of the biggest males by the scruff of the neck. It was black with white on his chest. Its black coat had a faint tinge of red that shone when the sun hit him. He was mostly like his momma but also a bit like Old Red. He just hung there in Roy’s large hand, tail wagging and looking at us. He never whimpered or worried over being held up in the air. Roy said, “this one here is tough,” and so the three of us walked home to confront Momma with this raggedy illegitimate puppy and we called him Patton, a name befitting our tough, new best friend.
Monica Noelle | Less Shiny | Poetry i was born a year and a half after he died a little baby boy allotted eight hours of fresh breath a slap in the face to my mother who carried him for nine months who would’ve given up a lifetime of breaths to save his they say i am made of stardust particles from the universe, the very matter from a now dead star forms my raggedy bones that i carry around and berate and criticize and abuse my grandmother left her house knowing she’d turn black and blue when her mom found out that she crawled out the window to give my grandfather one last kiss before he left for the war when i was two i jumped into a pool of water at a party for grown ups when people were laughing and not watching the now disturbed cold water and some man jumped in that didn’t know me in all of his clothes saved my life and it’s interesting, so interesting to think of the boy - what’s his name? who left me in the dark during that tough time and how i thought my life no longer mattered because when you think of the stardust, the baby, the swimming pool, my grandmother, the war, the boy seems a bit less shiny, don’t you think?
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David Thompson
David Thompson | City Limits | Photograph
Anthony Ward | Requiem for Progression | Poetry She kept the appearance of a bedraggled under-watered plant. With the foundations of her face like cracked render Plastered across her facade, A crock of porcelain posterity, Porcine in her dignity, Hockling points from her lips like yolks impacting flour. Her knurled skin and gnarled eyes Spreading in her dislocated head That tottered about her shoulders like an egg in an egg cup — Like the world cup. Held firmly aloft with self belief. A trophy of her triumph Over man-kind.
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Milt montague | shall we fly | Poetry
when I was young my favorite means of transport was a magic carpet always at my disposal maintenance free and self parking one of the many advantages of this vehicle was that time was no barrier it could travel back into the long agos as easily as into the tomorrows without ever stopping at a gas station
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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Brian Anthony-Hardie
Brian Anthony-Hardie | Untitled | Photograph