The B'K February 2018 Issue

the

b’k

bitchin’ kitsch

Vol.

9 Iss. 2

Feb 2018

The Talent

Cover: “Buried in Absentia” by Carlos FrancoRuiz.

Arif Ahmad Christopher Barnes Sissy Buckles Clara Burghelea Greg Counard Richard Dinges Jr Niina Tsuyuki Dubik Carlos Franco-Ruiz Alyssa Havens TS Hidalgo Mark Mitchell KG Newman Tommy Paley David Sermersheim Chris Talbot-Heindl Dana Talbot-Heindl Rodd Whelpley Mark Young

3 26 20-24 13 5, 19, 30 10 8-9 cover, 25 5 28 18 4 14-15 27 6-7 11 16-17 12

Arif Ahmad | The Optimist | Non-Fiction Tough economic times, wars, famine, tsunamis, global melt down, moral and ethical dehiscence.

So is the glass half full or half empty?

Enough going on to sap the energies, to drain the enthusiasm. Enough going on to cloud common sense.

But wait.

It refuses to be a pessimist. It believes in the human will, the human resilience, the human rebound.

It believes in the human race to stand up and deliver.

Every human being to be counted and ask, how can it better another life, how can it make proud mother earth, how can it first do no harm?

It is the good Samaritan, it is the human spirit, it is a dreaming child.

The question is, can it become I, we, us, yet again.

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KG Newman | Today’s Phenomenon | poetry In the path of totality— at the moment when moon blotted out sun—you could swear as much as you want, especially if, like the cartoon President, you didn’t wear protection as you craned your neck skyward, pigeons circling a doubled Wyoming population and waiting to scavenge the blind from what’s left of the exodus.

Alyssa Havens & Greg Counard

Alyssa Havens & Greg Counard | Melt Man | Multi media on paper 5

Chris Talbot-Heindl | Can You Just | Prose The irony of reading Sing, Unburied, Sing as part of the New York Times/PBS collaborative project “Now Read This” and getting invested in it and joining the Facebook group that accompanies it only to be bombarded on Martin Luther King Jr Day with the caucasity of the White Women™ who thought the book was too in your face too ethnic too something that made them uncomfortable as they read and couldn’t something else have been selected first like that book Hillbilly Elegy by that nice white man JD Vance because of course their opinions are what counts and all the POC in the comments can suck an egg because Reverse Racism™ and they’re just telling it like it is.

I don’t understand why everyone has to make everything about race because aren’t we all one race the human race and you’re just trying to divide us and that does no body any good but let’s not talk about the things in the past that happened to different races other than ours because that makes everyone feel uncomfortable and it’s not like those things are still happening oh they are but not to the same degree and I’m particularly upset about the stereotyped white characters that had no redeeming features did you notice that that none of the white characters had any morality at all that is just so unfair and I resent being depicted in that way.

Never mind that the White Women™ would never experience the forced sterilization practiced on Native women well into the 1970s or the stigma that black women experience of being called welfare queens despite having jobs that pay minimum wage which they have no hand in but have to accept because there isn’t anything else to get and the children still need to be fed and clothed and I know White Women™ who well fit that stigma who have more than 3 children but have not worked for decades but who would never be called that because we humanize White Women™ in this society while dehumanizing WOC and blame them for it by accusing them of earning the generalization that Leonie is such a stereotype and I don’t understand how she could have those children if she didn’t want them and as an employee of child services I just couldn’t even with this book.

Never mind that the White Women™ would never be called an abomination to their face as a child for being born mixed race something they had no control over but will be forced to consider negatively by their teachers the White Women™ at their church and society as a whole while the White Women™ simultaneously deny that experience and become overly ingratiated when told a story to that effect in an attempt to distance themselves from the White Women™ who do such a thing.

Not all white people™ do that and I certainly would never and it’s horrible that you would experience that in church and don’t they know the words of Christ our Savior who accepted everyone even prostitutes so certainly you but not queer people because that goes against God’s word which I didn’t choose but I will certainly abide because I want my place in heaven and you should too I’m not saying you should deny who you are but maybe seek to not be what it is that you are so that you can too enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

And if you don’t agree to disagree while these White Women™ let you know their faithbased biases and discriminations for your own good then you are not respecting their religion and being unreasonable and we can no longer have this conversation with you because you have made it uncomfortable and taken my words wrong and you shouldn’t have done that and you should stop talking now so it doesn’t get awkward.

White Women™ in my own family ask me to make a synopsis that they can digest about who it is that I am and how I justify my presence in POC or queer communities because my life partner happened to be a straight white man but I am not and somehow riding that line of 50% white and 50% straight and 50% cis means that I am 100% those things and shouldn’t speak to my experiences of being othered but if you ask any White Woman™ outside of my family what I should identify as I am other in all three cases because one drop is the rule and you aren’t like me you have an agenda with your identities that is of threat to me.

White Women™ tell me which space I should occupy because I’m not enough to occupy your space but not allowed to occupy the other space that you have decided I also don’t belong and you need things to be categorized while simultaneously chastising POC who point out the categorization and the lack of respect and humanity that is afforded those in categorizations that are not your own and it’s hard to know what the fuck you want but it’s impossible to not do it because then I’m one of the bad ones because I made you cry and your tears are worth more than our lives and you made me say our by making that separation yourself and then telling me not to notice because it makes you sad.

This book was not my cup of tea because it was relentlessly bleak and unhappy and I don’t want to spend my time thinking about sad things because I don’t have to with my privilege and it makes me sad to think that other people don’t have things as easy as I do so I don’t think about it at all.

White Women™ I think you should take time in that sad place where the rest of us live half way between wishes/dreams and reality/stagnation and stop making us do the work of educating your asses while simultaneously trying to navigate the spaces you allow us to be in within the rules you have set that will always favor you and keep us low I think you should live there for a little while until you learn something and it’s too bad you couldn’t do that with Sing, Unburied, Sing and instead had to unburden yourself with your semi-racist rants but I believe that you could learn if you just took a moment and really tried.

Can you just try?

Can you just

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Niina Tsuyuki Dubik | Something More Than This | poetry I find $3.75 in change in my pocket.

Perhaps I will buy soup.

Perhaps in the line at the café a boy will stand behind me.

Perhaps we will talk, polite, senseless small talk.

Perhaps in my next lecture he will sit beside me.

Perhaps we will exclaim “Oh, it’s you, from the cafe line!”

Perhaps we will have a conversation.

Maybe I will laugh.

Maybe he will be charmed.

Maybe next lecture he will save me a seat.

Maybe he’ll save me a seat for the rest of the semester.

And perhaps we’ll date and fall in love. and in 3 years, when we’ve both finished our majors, perhaps we’ll get married.

Perhaps we’ll get a nice house, in a respectable suburb.

Perhaps we’ll both have nice, respectable jobs.

Perhaps we’ll have children, two girls, two boys, or maybe one boy, one girl?

Perhaps I’ll quit my job, become a stay at home mom.

And every day will be pleasant, nice, enjoyable, blessed.

Unremarkable.

And perhaps they will find me on my 40th birthday, in the bathroom, in the shower, surrounded by red.

Dark red pouring from my wrists, spilling down my arms, spreading everywhere, staining the clean white tiles.

And perhaps I will have been dead for many years before my 40th birthday.

That evening at the bus stop I give $3.75 in change to a lady who forgot her fare.

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Richard Dinges, Jr. | Early Evening | Poetry Shadows lurk beneath my lids. Pillows and damp sheets whisper sweet mysteries and sour odors.

Now when I sit still, I fall asleep, no dreams, a humid ache between moments and TV commercials.

Doors slam and I barely notice. I awaken to my own snores, rise just long enough to go to bed.

Dana Talbot-Heindl

Dana Talbot-Heindl | Women’s March Denver | Photograph 11

Mark Young | The Overlap | Poetry The dichotomy that is Cyndi Lauper in garish technicolor in a documentary on a pre-MTV music show opining girls just want to have fun &, two doors up on a World Movies channel, Toshiro Mifune in the melodramatic black & white of Throne of Blood— Kurosawa’s take on the Bard’s “Scottish play”— is somewhat shattered when you notice the inear headphones on the manipulative Lady Macbeth & the way her lips move in time with the words of the Cyndi Lauper song.

Clara Burghelea | The pain, the evil and the brevity of summer days | poetry There is a woman made to look like a mess, fragmented into instances of domesticity, smelling like burnt eggplants and wormwood soap nibbling on homemade bread, deriving small pleasures from the routine and because of it.

This version of home she’s returned to is full of legends and false gods slaying her soul into nothingness.

One grandmother calls her a pain in her bones.

She smiles, kneading a sudden tightness in her left shoulder. She wipes the old woman’s arms and tries to remember a time when she could fit the hollow of their embrace.

Outside, the night feels like a well.

She moves in sight, unseen, a braided scent of moth balls along the familiar walls, the moody rhythms of the house stroking her restless pace.

She’s more watchable these days.

Indulged into her inner numbness, she bakes her uneasy heart into different pie flavors.

Late at night, she gazes into the face of her two babies weaving valiant dreams.

On TV, some sepia-toned David Lynch hallucinating doppelganger fills the room, enlarging the doubts: Is she a poet trapped inside a woman’s body?

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Tommy Paley | It Was So Nice to Meet You! | Prose It has been so nice to finally meet you!

I’ve enjoyed the past hour so much, 57 minutes if I am to be honest and precise - which I am constantly being told to “relax about a bit as it is making me nervous” by others.

I just hope you’ve had as much fun as I have, or at least approximately as much fun as it is so hard to measure and, even if we could, what would the chances be of us having exactly the same amount of fun?

I have to say that if first impressions are any indication of how things will play out in the future, and based on my past, I’m not at all sure if they do seeing as how great I am at making first impressions and how equally poor I am at sustaining that in every instance afterwards, I’m quite excited about how this relationship will develop.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how this would go tonight as we met online and other dates I’ve met online in the past have voiced their complaints, quite loudly and articulately, that any connection between the real me and the persona I created on the dating website would be purely coincidental.

One particularly unhappy date went as far as calling either me or my online profile “fictional” and she couldn’t tell which one which, when she was able to get over her total and complete disappointment at my absolute lack of any musculature, was quite intriguing.

But with you, even from the first glimpse at your demure and impressively cat-like profile picture, I’ve just wanted to tell you the candid, and often sordid and overly complicated, truth about who I am, how I got here and where I am going and why I am here and not over there by the wall.

I’ll never forget the first message I sent you and how I, in my excitement, used way too many contractions rendering the message nearly incomprehensible except when put through Google translator, which seemed to indicate that I was encouraging you to eat more tuna fish casserole and join the revolutionary army.

You just make me so giddy and excited, which is mostly an amazing feeling that I want to feel more and more of, except when driving or operating equipment with rapidly spinning sharp blades, and during those moments, only slightly less so.

It made me so happy and relieved when you complemented me on my appearance as in the hours before this date I meticulously groomed myself after spending the previous few hours taking free lessons from my cat despite my lacking all of the requisite flexibility needed.

I just so badly wanted this to go well and I believe in being prepared, so I went as far as memorizing whole romantic poems, hilarious and slightly offensive comedy routines as well as rare international import and export regulations just in case they came up.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration at all to say that I “needed” this to go well and that I had a lot

“riding” on its outcome and that it was a “life or death” situation, although, as I’m sure you’ve realized, I am essentially a walking and breathing human-embodiment of the word exaggeration all the time.

I was quite worried about coming across as too anxious or, the equally worrisome, not anxious enough and, if I could just take a second to mention, it is just so hard in this day and age to act with the correct level of socially-acceptable anxiety. Good thing I invested my last pay check entirely on aromatherapy oils which goes a long way towards clearing up why I am emitting a near lethal level of oregano and lavender this evening.

I just loved getting to know you better and finally putting a face to your name, which is much easier than all of those other times when I insisted on literally putting a name to a face, which was somewhere between slightly and completely a violation of other’s personal spaces.

I hope you found my outfit appropriate as I decided to pick it out via an elaborate game of Pinthe-Tail-on-the-Donkey, and seeing as I don’t actually own a real donkey and don’t possess the rudimentary art skills to draw a donkey that doesn’t look like a scary dog, I just pinned socks to my wall before closing my eyes and randomly selecting these clothes.

I think your description on the dating site was quite well written, clearly with either the use of an advanced degree in English or a thesaurus. I’m in awe of how humble you were in your write-up as you are, in fact, dauntingly attractive, intimidatingly warm and literally pee-your-pants funny, or in this particular case, it would be “my pants.”

And all of those humour-filled, perfectly punctuated and increasingly risqué email exchanges! My heart would be pounding, while my other internal organs somehow maintained proper levels of decorum, as I raced inside to sit in my dark room to see what you had replied with this time.

Just reading those words, which you mostly formed into sentences, only organized vertically, that I knew were typed by your finger tips and then somehow through the magic of computer technology appeared on my screen, made me so pleased. I wanted to ask you if you were at all aware of how emails actually got sent, but I didn’t want to know all of the answers about us just yet.

Tonight was magical and I must thank you, not formally, or at least not formally right now as I left my fancy stationary and calligraphy pens at home. Excuse me for being unprepared! I’ll never make that mistake again – mistakes will be made, just not that exact mistake as I like to share the wealth.

Anyways, I must go to sleep as tomorrow I work early in the morning and I don’t get enough shut-eye I’m a zombie at work, and yes, in case you were wondering, I insist on applying my own make-up to complete the effect.

Thank you for a wonderful evening and I just can’t wait to see you again!

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Rodd Whelpley | Anger* | poetry A fact.

As a toddler, a baby, at birth or before, I swallowed a tornado, a nascent volcano, and the two megawatt diesel generator that the Department of Homeland Security shanghaied for the Aurora Event – their demonstration of terror.

Catch the video on the internet, how when DHS hacked the logic controls, opened and closed the circuit breaks out of phase with the power grid the engine steamed, sputtered, popped, set my room on fire, a delicious sable smoke exiting the building out the catalytic converter’s crumbling stack.

But the film fails to capture the shockwaves, the debris field riddled with household objects, yardsticked in years as good as meters; and, even high def, could never bewray the thrill – the turbine spinning up to, then beyond the moment when blood becomes electrons; all parts animated, not just the motor (which has always turned at speed), but the heat-spike ecstasy; eruption; the wind rotation, menacing, pounding at the door; the made-to-be-still parts – the bonnet to the bolts – almost dancing: Every inch for that moment before the boom hot, sharp, moving.

Alive.

* Excerpted from the longer poem “Eight Impure Emotions in an Arbitrary Order.”

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Mark Mitchell | Traveler | Poetry Her baby cried like an opera star so the bus stayed half-empty. Cars slid past.

She didn’t see them. Adjusting the starred straps on a thrift-shop backpack as they passed construction sites, she shifted her wild child along plastic seats then unpacked loose piles of books and cigarettes balanced on top of a flat sandwich. She stretched. Pulled the cord.

Threw things back as the bell rang, looking bored.

Hopped off. No one noticed the crying stopped.

Greg Counard

Greg Counard | Thinker | Pencil on paper 19

Sissy Buckles | If you can’t dig the Underground Man, why the fuck even bother? | Poetry Our Native Americans called it the Sacred Weed to the Blackfoot it was Nawak’osis used for healing, ritual, worship and spiritual contemplation AKA Ganja, Mota, Rainy Day Woman, Whacky Tabacky, and jazz musician Milton Mezzrow was credited with introducing marijuana to Harlem in 1929 The Reefer King on The Stroll he who diggeth the digger and Really the Blues the dude abides and now almost a century later Captain America can finally be retired because holiest of holies weed is finally legal out in California’s Wild West and I’m glowing in the budding red sky dawn while wondering if my neighbor’s calico barn kitty could be high on second hand smoke from the mighty mezz she started buying to deal with her ever present searing pain after smashing a brand new sports car into the side of a house while pushing one hundred her back a racked pretzel and pussykins daintily stealing little bits of my fresh homemade cherry pie off the front porch turquoise formica dinette table where I am sitting still in catatonic shock after witnessing the night wreckage of downtown Horton Plaza Mall while wasting a groovy hour perusing second hand books at Crown and Lo! behold a fatal misfortunate’s swan dive off Strawberry Level 5 taking that

one toke over the line ingloriously splashing down next to The Gap and a noisy food court cutting the ribbon to the other side with a spectacular champagne crash mayhap got tossed from his job or could be some sad and sorry hedge fund genius who lost his proverbial shirt to Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme who is now safely esconced in the Federal Correctional Institution at Butner, North Carolina and rumored to have cornered the lucrative prison market in Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate.

The Filipino IT guy who we all depend on to care for our ridiculous computer travails at work has a picture of John Wayne in a ten gallon cowboy hat on his wall with the caption “Life is hard. It’s harder if you’re stupid”.... and every time I walk by it reminds me of all the stupid things I’ve done and can’t take back, the stupider love I’ve given away gratis, the stupidest bosses I’ve let talk down to me because I needed that blood-stained paycheck, nobody wants to be the shit show but hey if things get too bad you just post tons of wishful crap on the internet so that then the ironical karma rains gently down on all of us and some believe the universe is chaos, “and is the score upon which reality is written” (according to Henry Miller) and all I see now are patterns and witchy omens like my irreverant Cassandra dream where Political Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal finally set free oh Sweet Justice! then he hot foot it down to Riverside and joined up with the

Black Sabbath Motorcycle Nation like Marlon Brando in the Wild Ones, and fresh ideas brewing in Chinese tea and Oranges or the ever rad Legacy of the Divine tarot cards like the Two of Swords -Ambivalence, if you are at a crossroads and unable to make a decision, look within for the answer, like will he make me pay for telling my Truth? I imagine so, they always do oh woe is me and my big fat mouth because baby you are one fucked mother in America if you can’t muster yourself enough to be a rousing good Capitalist tow that money grubbing hook line and sinker with a humongous price tag on everything like everybody else, you will be well and truly screwed up the behind for your audacious belief that the Food from the Gods was made free to begin with like the ever present stars winking down at me from the sky my books, music, sumptious garden become my Magnum Opus transmuted (in the alchemical and hermetic tradition) into the Great Treasure of Troy and the haunted irony of it being is that you knew all along that if you gave in to temptation and picked that low hanging

bitter fruit (and you could have, at any time) just to buy into the Big American Dream and be ‘normal’ it would have been worse than a scab being picked off over and over and over and you would no doubt die an agonizing protracted death of a thousand cuts but now back to the fateful jumper folks, who is never far from our thoughts and still ruminating an hypothesis, for who of us can claim to know another’s inner considerations, I’ve never been one to second guess so heck his only ambition may have been to be the best damn self-immolater in the world who knows or perhaps just a deplorable bum who finally lost his ever loving mind and weary of screaming landladies berating lazy gonzo flotsam and jetsam “WHY DON’T YOU WORK LIKE ORDINARY PEOPLE DO!!!” shaming the Hells Angel guy who looks like WWE wrestler Roman Reigns and lives down the block, he wakes the world at mysterious dawn every morning with otherworldly magnificence revving between his legs truly showing us all exactly who is the cock of the block speaking for the permanent record: “we’re the one percenters man the one percent that don’t fit and don’t care people will just

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Sissy Buckles | If you can’t dig the Underground Man, why the fuck even bother? | Continued have to learn to stay out of our way we’ll bust up everyone who gets in our way” and his magenta haired landlady snooping around the patio in her long floral muu-muu she keeps 100 canaries trapped in a huge cage in the courtyard and every time I walk past I’m sorely tempted to indulge in some beautiful insane clandestine disobedience and set them all free at once, but I’m no Activist just a lousy beat poet trying get by and the one who is always dragging the 9-5 line at work and dealing by day with serial bully Supervisors throwing temper tantrums this allowed by some sneaky authority like that scribbled up villainous tax bill the Senate GOP slipped under the radar in the clandestine dead of night the big billionaire gimme-it-all money grab of 2017 and hell, even that bougey rag Forbes said it was the end of all Economic Sanity in Washington (if there ever was?) so howzabout we all pull out our magical pitchforks for a good old-fashioned public flogging slam bang drag em out on the White House lawn and slap in the stocks (hanging’s too good and quick for that group of satan’s spawn) I’ll gladly bring the popcorn and this vast shadowy invisible society psychotic manipulators of Government Policy their secret Corporate signals and rules unknown to mortal serfs who in self defense resort to taking

their clues from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War don’t trust anybody they are ALL the enemy but by night we plan our escape and lazily sprawl on silk painted shawls covering Victorian fainting couches enigmatic bohemians feasting round midnight in a 1930s plum wine colored kimono with embroidery kissed by the dragon like Jane Lee (sniffing at the New Yorker) drowsing when we desire, perchance these dreams would last forever, then jolted awake to city siren wail 911 decoder ring passwords in eradicating ink facsimiles on the back of the breakfast Cheerios box I have a locker but who hath the Key? the secrets lie behind the Green Door to enter: a private handshake words of mouths with an isolated eyeball company officials with corrupt diplomas hanging on the wall and promises etched in stone with a magic marker and presents brought from the near east on a passenger pigeons back osmotically felt and just one card laid wrong, breathed upon with raw morning breath by a grubby compadre and the whole house comes tumbling down along with my botticelli hair falling Rapunzel-like on living things ripe vegetation rotting underfeet monstrous substructures hosting a sea of part-time dead

end jobs and New Gig Economy expendible personnel reading T.S. Eliot at lunch dining on Fukushima radiation fish and they say popcorn is brain food Hitler had only one testicle (urban myth, huh?) and Jefferson died of diarrhea he literally crapped his life away and today I realized that I don’t even need to be making brownie points along with the notorious cognizance that I could just disappear ~ poof! and never have to deal with the social media junkies and fanatics littering that fantasmigorical landscape never, ever again to consort with those reactionary frothing at the mouth Russiagate foolios conveniently misrecollecting (like John Gotti he forgotty) whatever they learned in History class for as we all should know Russia hasn’t been our “enemy” (a crass & subjective euphemism at best) since 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and if that’s the case how come I never recieved an official poll in the mail asking whom I would care to now designate as my “Enemies” seems only fair (and ‘Democratic’ for cripes sake) & hey they used to call “Commie” if you said words like “vanguard, book-burning, or hootenanny” for reals and shoot, far as I can see those in power are just a bunch of corrupt businessmen, tantamount to our illustrious duopoly wracked Congress why this swarming rabble don’t even have a premise to stand on.....

besides Libertarians have more fun and if some of the last words of that woeful tortured man up there on his bloody perch surveying the panoramic shithole of the world were “they know not what they do” well man, that’s a fucking crock because they know, oh yes yes they do know and just because all I wanted out of life was to write angelic poems like Julio Cortazar in Saving Twilight (City Lights Pocket Poets #53) my mind as vast as the heavens and to finally be finished and done with the calculated and casual cruelty like when some sanctimonious D-list Hollywood celebrity posted that beat up photo of Lara Flynn Boyle in a vulnerable private moment (my gawd Twin Peaks/David Lynch & saddle shoes!) looking all haggard and hungover inciting lingering malicious gossip on her FB wall, and to be irrevocably done with the graceless mob exhausted and done with the madding crowd to soar above the horror and endless squabble or just to kick back on Sunday evening with the radio dial on WPVM out of faraway Ashville listen to Land of the Sky radio and I don’t even need your Extra-Extra but I will settle for the purity of The Blasters’ “Marie, Marie” and the throaty pluck

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Sissy Buckles | If you can’t dig the Underground Man, why the fuck even bother? | Continued of a few open notes on my little Spanish guitarra along with the innocent thrill of a new vintage black velvet hat c. 1950s with french netting from Saks “I need it. I gotta have it. It’s my lucky hat.

I never fly without it...” all this now filed under lessons learned like walking into the Real Estate office in Smalltown U.S.A. of my dear departed daddy only to find the local mafioso sitting pretty in his Michael Corleone bespoke suit, captoe loafers and a load of paper sacks spread haphazardly across the floor and filled to the brim with anonymous cash opening a sudden floodlight in my innocent baby mind ~ “oh, just business as usual” (and that’s the way of the world, and men sigh) because nobody is forgotten and everybody is remembered this my perpetual curse, and the titanic mantle that I must wear anyway, I keep getting rudely interrupted by intermittent bells.

Carlos Franco-Ruiz

Carlos Franco-Ruiz | Unmovable | Painting 25

Christopher Barnes | For Those Who Indulged That Vital Spark | Poetry Rollover Corp™ furnishes the definitive satisfaction – A coffin modelled from actual Havanas.

(Smoke whorls into black tie.)

Extravagance immortal, perfectly organic, Cane and leaf end to end.

(Cacti prettifies a sandy tract.)

Any diehard inhaler’s worthy of this eulogy.

David Sermersheim | Night Crawler (after Stobe The Hobo) | poetry they’ll never see me in here tamped down tight as a mole in his hole the bulls’ll pass and not give this place a second glance I’ll take that chance go out when night crawls up your back become a specter sliding between shadow and shade survey the scene on empty streets where everything’s closed walk the tracks past rusted relics of a former time — be among you/not of you — “welcome back Jim nobody knew you when you were here and didn’t miss you when you were gone” there’s the horn gotta hop my ride slip inside maybe wave next time I come through

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TS Hidalgo | Saying Goodbye | Poetry I wanted to, today, create the most overwhelming, the harshest, the most tragic poetry, the antithesis of trite, the furthest, in short, from charming (I say this truthfully: I am so full of deep thoughts); I will do it, probably, as soon as I finally find the keys.

History of The B’K

The Bitchin’ Kitsch (2010-present) or The B’K is a compzine edited and published by The TalbotHeindl Experience, LLC in Denver, Colorado.

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 four juried chapbooks.

Here’s to the past eight years, and hopefully many, many more.

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Greg Counard

Greg Counard | Sacred Garden | Pen and Ink on Paper