The B'K January 2016

the

b’k

bitchin’ kitsch

7 Iss. 1 Jan. 2016 Vol.

The Talent

Cover: “Happy Christmas, Relatives!” by Giada Cattaneo.

Mike Andrelczyk Adam Brown Alexis Carlisle Fiona Collins Elizabeth Desio Nick Gregorio Brian Hardie Kyle Heger Anna Mahrer Caitríona Murphy Zach Murphy Matthew Nemeth Tommy Paley Andrew Perry Andrew Peterson Katie Pukash Richard Salembier Chris Talbot-Heindl David Thompson Vin Whitman

8 25 18-19 21 14-15 3 9, 32 12 30 23 16-17 4-5 26-28 6-7 24 22 29 20 13 10-11

Nick Gregorio | Fall | Fiction Somebody wrote something about sound and fury once.

The sound of air screaming as I tear through it. Polycotton-taslan-nylon composite flapping around the edges of my body with the friction. Dry lips, ballooned cheeks slapping against my teeth.

Gravity dragging a body as fast as physics can go without unwinding reality. The green and gray patches below interlinked tougher than me at the atomic level. An impact that’ll wreck everything involved.

Not sure this is what that line was going for, but still.

I’ll prove it’s true.

Mouth open, wind forcing itself down my throat, breathing becomes an active function. Otherwise everything’ll go spotty, then black.

But there’ll be nothing soon anyway. Now, or sixty—no, fifty seconds from now. Won’t matter. Same end, couple ways to get there.

It’ll be labeled an accident. A tragedy.

It’ll make the news if I burst on a car, all blood and bone dust, killing everyone inside. It won’t if I don’t.

I’ll be a phone call then. An empty casket. Whatever’s left of my shattered, jagged body’ll be burned and funneled into an urn to collect dust on a mantel. Something someone would have to find space for.

Nothing’ll change.

My hand moves to a cord. Muscles tense in my hand, my arm.

So, it’s the lines.

Intersecting, curving, splitting, looping into themselves. Through the goggles, eyes wide, not blinking, the lines widen all the time. There’s a blue speck, a red one, a black one, all in a row, separated by a little gray. Trains of them moving all nice and orderly in opposite directions always going somewhere.

Somewhere, nowhere, whatever.

If everything’s for nothing, the easiest way to prove it is to test it.

The lines’ll turn to concrete, the specks to cars, the green to grass and trees. And me to nothing.

Everything’ll be redefined as what it already was. A deep analysis of the useless.

And when everything, finally, is black?

Proof.

Matthew Nemeth | My Cover Letter to The CIA | Fiction Dear The CIA, I am writing to express my keen interest in procuring employment within your esteemed organization. In lieu of the traditional résumé, I have compiled a comprehensive list of personal attributes that demonstrate I possess the professional know-how and requisite skills to become a topnotch secret agent. Most are self-explanatory, though I would be happy to elaborate at length during the subsequent interview process.

First and foremost, I love America. I love it so much that I would do anything to safeguard its welfare. And when I say “anything,” I mean “anything,” as I have a lax moral compass.

Not only do I possess the desire to protect and serve my country, but also the physical means to do so. I can bench press one hundred and fifty-five pounds. This might not sound like a lot, but it is actually quite impressive for someone who works out as infrequently as I do. My Modern Warfare rating is a forty-four; needless to say, I am a deadeye shooter and surgical with the flash bang. I can run a sub-seven minute mile and—thanks to YouTube and Spike TV—I know a small, but potent cache of mixed martial arts moves. Although my physique is capable, I am but vaguely charming and blandly handsome, which will allow me to fleece enemy agents without the risk of being remembered.

Furthermore, I am well-educated, well-read and an incredibly fast learner, especially when I take Adderall. Throughout my schooling, I aced a slew of courses that helped form a knowledge base suitable for CIA fieldwork, including, but not limited to, Physics, Chemistry, Psychology and, of course, Spanish—it’s the second most spoken language in the world (according to Wikipedia). Perhaps more applicable, I have seen every film in the Bourne series, as well as Safe House and all five seasons of Homeland. Accordingly, I am fluent in spy protocol and vernacular.

Rest assured, no one has ever called me a “rogue” and I rarely, if ever, “go off the grid.”

That established, I fully understand the importance of discretion when it comes to government operations. I am a seasoned secret keeper. I do not have, do not want, and do not know how to use a Twitter account and my Facebook profile is equipped with the highest privacy setting available. I have a hard time trusting people and a propensity for sniffing out liars, evidenced by the fact that I have gotten three girlfriends to admit to cheating on me (references available upon request).

I work well alone. I work well in a team setting. I have no real attachments and am free to start immediately. I am unmarried, unemployed, and possess only lukewarm feelings for my friends and family.

Thank you very much for taking the time to review my application. If you need anything else, please let me know. It would be greatly appreciated if you could field a handful of my queries in the interim. What is the pay? Is there a dress code? How many vacation days do secret agents normally receive? What is the protocol for expenses? Do you use direct deposit? How long do employees get for lunch? Do they just leave or do they have to tell someone they are stepping out to grab food?

Many thanks for your consideration. I look forward to being in contact in the coming weeks.

Sincerely, Matthew Nemeth

5

Andrew Perry | The Things that Come With Us | Poetry When I was young and brilliant there was no evil for me to fear.

My eyes were sharp, and my mind was limber.

I could reach Into the stinking mouth of the world, and With a tar soaked hand, Pull from its darkness All sorts of bright shiny things; twisted, and wonderful, and beautiful, and squirming.

I would hold them to the light; watch them wince and curl.

I’d poke their stupid little faces, tell them I see you I love you.

Then, lowering my hands I returned them, uncomprehending crawling, lurching, and slithering from my fingertips back into their oily black pitch.

Now, a thousand years later I am a haunted man, grown.

At night they whisper to me in backward sentences I can’t quite catch, rattling through the keyholes between us.

They are searching for the boy to whom they were playful musings; but now fully realized, they are my beautiful nightmares.

Clicking and scratching.

Trailing his darkness behind them, stealing into my bed by way of quicksilver dreams To hold me in segmented arms; poke my stupid face with cold antennae and feed on my sweet sweet crazy.

Only then, fully saturated in the sweat of my unconscious do they relent.

Retreating eternally with all my midnight epiphanies, and rolling out upon the revelation of daybreak.

7

Mike Andrelczyk | Pets Chasing Lasers | Poetry It’s like reading Sanskrit in the endzone seating section of a Cleveland Browns game – or even reading Sanskrit in a cool mango bower – it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t make sense to me. The only thing to know is that you don’t know a thing.

When I turn on the TV there’s the rerun ghost of Johnny Carson holding my paystub against his forehead. He’s doing his psychic routine. “A thousand clowns.”

“A thousand clowns” echo through the decades. Where does time go when it goes?

I follow green pinpoint flashes from comet tails with my eyes. Did I even really see them? And I hold you tight as we take a running leap from the stone building blocks of ancient Machu Picchu and as we fall toward the jungle, you pull out your iPhone to show me this video – “Pets Chasing Lasers” – it’s funny cuz the cats can’t grab ahold of the green laserlight. They think they should be able to grasp the light but it eludes them. There’s nothing left to hold onto or know. Even you disappear. And then everything becomes terrifyingly funny.

Brian Anthony-Hardie

Brian Anthony-Hardie | Untitled | Mixed-Media

9

Vin Whitman | Nightmare Age 2 | Poetry Sleeping baby Dreams of fire As the world turns quietly Something so familiar In those blazing moths that leapt From their graves to hold her heart down And tickle it into submission The fire yawned and Accidentally swallowed the dogs Neighbor poodles lapped into labyrinth Lungs — and coughed back Tiny black kittens that wouldn’t wake (All these symbols remain pastel until later) Abbreviated squeals below the Floorboards, familiar sound of favorite Toy bitten, Covered in orange slobber A fluid skin This was a womb she left Not long ago A Hell she left at the altar Come to reclaim her While two spineless creatures refused To walk this reincarnation of her Down the aisle Disappearing into the wild Orange yonder

Morning came And she wouldn’t walk Through the living room Where the charred abyss Had opened in her mind The astral umbilicus cut at the proximal Rung, leaving room for evolution She came to understand the sentence She escaped — She’d never seen the twitching tabby ears Of the inferno But she knew its voice Its eerie yelp The perverse friction of Its lick She grew wise without Punctuation in her heart She dreamt of talking owls once A month But never could remember The critical things they said

11

Kyle Heger | They’re Just Kids | Poetry What’s the harm in giving these first graders science lessons that refer to “people and animals,” “birds and animals” and “fish and animals” as if somehow people and birds and fish aren’t animals?

Kids this age aren’t exactly ready for a goddamn lesson in taxonomy, so let’s let it slide in the name of developmental appropriateness. It’s part of the curriculum, approved by committee after committee, so why raise a fuss at this point in the game?

Seven-year olds won’t complain if the rhythm to which this poet has been religiously hewing for the first 13 pages of a picture book as if it were important, loses contact with his muse and lets himself skip a few beats here and there at the end of the book. Or if many of his rhymes are near misses at best or accomplish their ends only by “rhyming” two identical suffixes, or even two identical words.

After all, he’s a Newbery award winner, and I’m certainly not going to risk my professional standing by asking if the emperor is wearing clothes.

So we start them off with a few myths passed off as history, some science made obsolete by years of research and theorizing, a bunch of ham-fisted certainties instead of subtle ambiguities.

Who’s to complain? It’s just too hard to be truthful and accurate. And anyway, they’ll forget all this stuff in a year or two, so there’s no harm, no foul. Besides, they’ll have the rest of their lives to straighten out all the details. For now, they’re just kids.

David Thompson

David Thompson | o come let us adore him | photograph 13

Elizabeth Desio | 3AM, Bastille | Poetry The city of lights?

At the ground level, it’s more like the city of urine— I guess they use the sidewalks since it costs a euro to pee and twenty euros to get into the bars, where disco never died but you might—especially if you are blonde, especially if you take le nocturne, the all-night bus that could be the premise for a Stephen King movie— fluorescent and airtight, carefully preserved suspense between bare legs covered in goosebumps glowing in the stale night-lighting, drawing attention to themselves.

Why am I worthy of their stares, more so than the Chinese man who sells satchels with Mao’s face on them,

or the couples who grab each others’ asses on public transportation and definitely have boners silently— because audible speaking is deemed vulgar, like a gypsy theatrically rattling for money in a country where demande means to ask.

I’m pretty sure that the lank girl slumped and smeared across from me on the nocturne is une prostituée, and that the man leering at me from under his hat has one eye and possibly a boner too.

My brains swirl in my skull as we descend further and further into the city of piss, forcing me to cough up my last few euros.

15

Zach Murphy | Road Trip at Night | fiction Jared drove as the rain pounded the windshield and the wipers squeaked to ear-twitching levels. Tammy, his girlfriend sat up front. Julie and Tim sat in the back. A suitcase rested between the two. They pretty much broke up in the morning. Tim blamed Julie for everything.

“You two are quiet,” Tammy said, peaking around the seat. Julie let out a “Meh.” “Well, it’s all downhill from here,” said Jared.

“In the good way or the bad way?” asked Tim. “Good, of course.”

They were still about three hours away from Jared’s cabin up North.

Tim squirmed. He couldn’t bring himself to turn his head even an inch toward Julie’s direction. The awkwardness practically fogged the windows.

“You guys want some Combos?” Tammy asked, holding out the bag.

Tim shook his head, “No thanks, I’m not really a pretzel guy.”

“I’ve always thought the cheese and pretzel go really well together,” said Tammy. “Julie?”

“Sure,” Julie said, grabbing a small handful. She crunched into them. The noise from the chewing sounded violent to Tim. “Can you turn on the radio?” Tim asked.

Jared snapped on the dial. Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” faded in through the speakers. Tim clenched his jaw as he glanced out the window and noticed his reflection. He was beside himself.

“Wait,” Tim proclaimed.

“What?” Jared asked, “It’s me,” Tim answered.

Julie turned and gave Tim a strange look. Tammy’s face popped out from behind the back of her seat, “What’s you?”

Tim sat up, gesturing with his hands, “You know when you’re riding in a car at night, and a light glares on the window in a certain way, and you

see your reflection off to the side and it feels like you’re sitting next to yourself?”

“I’m not following,” said Jared.

“When it happens to me, I feel all weird and uncomfortable. Like, I don’t want to be near me. I can’t stand it,” Tim continued.

Julie face-palmed. Tammy and Jared looked at each other from corner of their eyes.

“I still don’t get it,” said Jared.

“Never mind,” Tim said, slouching down.

Just then, the light occurred again. Tim took a deep breath, unbuckled his seatbelt, opened the car door and tuck-and-rolled out into the rain, onto the pavement.

Tim was alright—he just needed some fresh air.

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Alexis Carlisle | Big City Baby | Poetry I check the clock.

3:35am.

You ask me if it’s too late for me to love you back in a phone call from your big city Where you don’t believe anything can be as tall as the buildings that you want to jump off of, The city never sleeps, except for once, and the last time. you noticed the way her skirt fluttered in the wind before she hit the water. that’s all you ever said about her. and you keep talking about Adderall and Concerta how you take it right before you go to sleep but you aren’t sleeping just dreaming it’s always nighttime where you are but you still see everything you’re mr. third eye starlight city cigarette in hand you bring the light with you dim but continuous and you see me as the sun but you’re the dying star you told me on your walks you can see into windows you watch the businessmen pack up and go home you see pretty girls remove plates of armor and unzip their skin but you always change the subject before you can say what they hide under it is it too late for me to love you back? the thought races in your mind

on cold nights watching cool girls jump from bridges right before you get the chance to offer her pills you noticed the way her dress fluttered but you didn’t notice the way she hit the water how your head never hits the pillow you don’t notice how your eyes glaze over in conversation or how you don’t stop talking until someone starts crying dreamer boy needs to wake up by letting his eyes close he’s blinking so fast his eyelashes flutter like he is ready to take off because he’s swallowed too many pills thinking they’re full of reality but they’re just full of the city full of tiny lit windows he can see in from across town full of business men becoming blacksmiths and pretty women, soldiers is it too late for me to love you isn’t the question anymore it’s 3:37am and I ask you is it too late for you to love me back or have the women already jumped from bridges inches away from your arms but you’re too busy looking at the buildings made of amphetamine and methylphenidate is it too late for you to love me back I ask as you stumble off the edge of a building reaching for the sun, for the green light, for another cigarette.

19

Chris Talbot-Heindl

Chris talbot-heindl | uni | marker on paper

Fiona Collins | Hypersleep | Poetry In the wake of our divorce, there has been a precipitous and, if I am being honest, calamitous escalation in my drug use.

Lying here in the emergency room, drifting in the flotsam of my life and the jetsam of my latest overdose, I am thinking of enrolling in some kind of space travel program.

I have no taste for adventure, harbor no desire for exploration.

It is the hypersleep I am interested in.

I am seeking irreversible amnesia, hoping for years and years of unconsciousness while I am borne away from you.

My only reservation is the dreaming.

I may sleep for centuries and awaken beneath the light of a different sun, surrounded by alien vistas.

My greatest fear is that, even in the most profound disorientation, my first thought will be of you.

21

Katie Pukash | The Poet | Poetry You are fluent in the language of the deceased.

Carpeted coffins.

And you cry in your scotch every time you hear the word father.

You smoke camels in your hotel room and pay the hookers to leave.

You are fluent in the language of the deceased.

Caitríona Murphy | Night Watch | fiction One evening, there is a storm warning. Temperatures too high, no rain to break that heavy, aching heat, rain that might make the ground sizzle. The summer had been fighting to finish, but every morning that promised to be cool and foggy blazed into warm days and nights that were almost insufferable.

I looked at him and thought that someone might go mad, waiting for the rain, waiting for the coolness to emerge, to salve the burn. It was a good thing, really, that I was working the night shift. I could manage a few hours of sleep in the cooler part of the day. But those languorous nights made it impossible to find sleep, at least a deep, comforting one.

Beautiful, elusive sleep escaped me, had been escaping me for most of the summer. I closed my eyes and the words, the looks, the implications, flooded my mind. I was almost mad from it. The wondering is the hardest part. A confirmed diagnosis that both parties are afflicted with the same fever is one thing. Wondering if I was to suffer in isolation is something completely different. My carefully applied powder seemed to evaporate, traceless, leaving that pink blush high on my cheeks. If I touched my face I could trace the heat usually only felt after a glass of wine, when the blood seems too close to the surface.

Night shifts are different. There is so much more time. Time to absorb that heat in your blood until you’d swear you can feel the sizzle as it courses through your veins; until the staccato beats of your heart are near deafening. Words sound different, during the night. Things you might say when the day’s light is bright and there are people, so many people around, sound different when they’re said to one person, in the strange grey light before the dawn. In that grey space when you wait for a breeze to stir the thick air and cool you down. That darkness, only lit by the artificial, warm glow of the lamps make you brave, make you able, eventually, to look in his eyes and forget present obligations and rules of order.

We worked through the night together, as the dusk deepened and the temperature climbed. Some nights I could not look in his eyes, too afraid the heat might consume me fully.

Back on days we are polite strangers once more. We are endlessly careful and frustratingly, essentially, polite.

The heat is there, banked beneath thick clouds. A disguise, but certainly not a solution. We wait for the rain; we wait for the storm to break.

23

Andrew peterson

Andrew Peterson | Jace | Graphite on Paper

Adam Brown | Problematic Perceptions | Poetry Political parties practice parliamentary procedure.

Political parties purportedly pinch purses.

Parties portion power pompously, practicing pacifist pragmatism.

Pious persons practice prayers prolifically.

Peers pay palaces piles.

Precious placidity passes.

Precariousness presents problems...

Problems, problems, problems...

Panoptic prisons packed. pusillanimous politicians patent peremptoriness.

Proud proletariat people prescribed pain.

Privileged patriarchs pursue perpetuity.

Progressive prerogatives penalized, perplexing possible peacemakers.

Problems, Problems, problems...

25

Tommy Paley | I Don’t Speak Horse | Prose I’ve been told so many times by so many people that it’s just water under the bridge and I always answer, with a voice overcome with emotion, that to me it is so much more, it is also my home.

Whenever I get really angry, I threaten others and swear if they don’t leave me alone I will clean their clock which usually ends with me sitting at home alone icing my knees and polishing minute hands.

People are always announcing that the ball is in my court and I keep saying that it isn’t a ball, it’s an apple and it isn’t a court, it’s a tree and then they take out their rackets.

My number is up? What? My number is actually, finally up? What does that mean? Don’t tell me to calm down or relax! I am panicking over here right now and am just not in the right frame of mind to think of what I want or need from that deli over there. How can you think of cold cuts at a time like this? My number is up and you are hungry? You are dead to me.

I am going to knock your socks off! That’s right! Be prepared to be wowed and desocked! Here comes something so amazing and thrilling that your feet will be bare in moments. That’s right, what comes next is so bedazzling that your feet will be in one place and your socks elsewhere with your sock drawer being only one possible destination. Are you ready? Okay, if you could just remove your shoes and pull your socks partially off before I begin that would be very helpful.

“The grass is always greener,” my roommate always said filled with jealousy. My roommate was a poetic cordless lawnmower.

“A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” sings a lady on the television.

Whenever it plays, I always mumble along as I lay on the floor covered with ants after yet another accidental sugar-induced coma. Always taking things too far when sweeteners and ladies in song are involved.

Yes, I know. The writing is on the wall. I put it there. I sensed the end of our relationship was coming, so I went to the store and bought a set of new permanent markers, spent hours working on my penmanship and my cursive writing and then came up with the most passive aggressive, hitting-too-close-to-home and well-written good-bye material I could come up with considering my full time schedule and the pain that I feel inside.

Your point?

I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to hurt you! But your voice is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Although, to be honest, after spending the better part of last week locked in a small, windowless room being forced against my will to scrape my own fingernails on a chalkboard, I am just not the person to ask if your voice sounds too high-pitched and

screechy these days.

My boss is so cruel and uncaring and I can’t believe he accidentally cut me with his antique and supposedly dull machete that he brought to work to show off to us all. And then to make it worse, not only did he refuse to use the first aid skills were were taught last week and mandated to use, but he took my vials of rare and expensive salts that were the last gift my unnecessary-risk-taking and law-breaking salt-collector grandfather gave me on his deathbed, and literally poured them into the cut on my arm! Who does that?

I wanted to love her and treat her like a fragile porcelain doll. But despite all of the gifts I bought her and the flowers I sent and the breakfasts I served her in bed, I just couldn’t help adding insult to injury - which she loved up to a point, as she had quite the tolerance and appreciation for sarcasm and wit and biting humour - until I broke her.

Literally.

I’m not sure what you are trying to say! Yes, I have a positive outlook on life, and yes, I choose to see the best in every person and situation, and yes, I do believe that everything will turn out in the end and there is no reason to stress or fret, but I am honestly starting to get a little annoyed with your smirking at and obvious disdain for my new rose-coloured glasses that I happen to think are quite fashionable.

She told me, before she left, that I read her like a book - complete with accidentally staining her with coffee, folding over her corners, leaving her open upside-down on the counter overnight, and ignoring her for weeks at a time, amassing huge overdue fines from the local library. Plus, I never returned her calls.

Wow! I am just loving life right now! I’ve got so much youthful enthusiasm and energy and I just want to go out in the world and make a difference. And although I am bouncing off the walls and raring to go, I am second guessing actually walking around with a spring in my step - horrible blisters and massively uncomfortable.

I’ve got the world on a string. That isn’t saying much as I made the mistake of literally filling my house with sticky string and now I have everything attached to me via string: a plastic globe, my cat, a bag of cinnamon - everything! Nothing worth singing about.

It’s where? Are you kidding? For real? You actually took the proof and mixed it into the pudding? But why? That is seriously messed up and weird, dude! I get hiding the proof and all, as those proof-seekers will stop at nothing to attain the truth, but why ruin a perfectly good batch of pudding! As I’ve told you before, tapioca doesn’t grow on trees,

continues 27

Tommy Paley | I Don’t Speak Horse

it is a root that is grown mostly in Africa and South America!

Nothing is quite like taking candy from a baby aside from prying sweet bonbons from the sweaty, grimy and cute little hands of toddlers reducing them to nothing but wailing little humanoids who are far cries from the “oohs” and the “aahs” and the “I want to hold and kiss the baby” and the “you’re so cute, do you want some candy?” babies you were a few minutes ago! Who is the cutest and has the candy now? Damn straight.

Regardless of what you’ve heard, I do not have eyes in the back of my head. That is the front of my head where my eyes are, I just have my back to you right now. No worries it’s a common mistake.

I have been as patient as I could be. I have sat here biding my time, making sure I knew what I wanted to do. I know it has been hard for you to choose what you want as well, but now is the time. We have waited until the 11th hour and now, now we must dance the tango in the moonlight my darling.

Quit yanking my chain! You can tickle me, slap my back while doubled over with laughter, gently pull my ears, mess up my hair and even tie my shoelaces together and place my hand in a cold bucket of water when I’ve fallen asleep, but the chain yanking must cease!

I only agreed to be tied up in chains because I am a good friend and wanted to help you with your psychology project as well as helping out your dad’s fledgling chain production company at the same time.

You are always telling me that you are hot to trot and I’m always telling you that you are a horse and I don’t speak horse.

Richard Salembier | The Masculinist Politics of Physics | Poetry Being a rocket has its disadvantages, you know.

I’m not like the newer models, with hypergolic engines that spontaneously ignite with the flick of a switch.

My receptivity, and performance, too, may be affected by Van Allen belts; solar radiation; gravity; celestial bodies; orbits; magnetic fields; atmospheric friction; and burnout, not to mention the ablation shields I must wear so as not to burn up completely upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. ...and, once my erect insertion is effected, to insure protection and optimum comfort, the following requirements must be satisfied: my force of thrust must exceed my force of weight, otherwise I will not get off the ground; I must lift off vertically, and afterward I should be horizontally positioned.

Once these measures have been taken, the firing of my first and second stages will give me that extra burst of power and energy that I must have if I’m to go the distance.

I understand that not everybody is sensitive to the needs of a rocket, but you want me just for my booster.

So you can go and find yourself another rocket.

I can fire my own payload.

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Anna Mahrer | Sonnet Self-Portrait | Poetry At the beach late night moonlight hits the tide, sucks the color from the surface, white skin stain in the middle. La Pacifica.

You’re in too deep now, man, scrape the dirt from the edges. Finger-fucked and void-lost, what a mess. What is it that unravels, gene pool sun dive in the body, a shadow in bloom. Anatomy as far as the eye can see. How does it feel to be alive?

An expanse so infinite the Earth cracks and strains underfoot. What truth is there to me, the cosmic hallway between birth and death, pull the wet cherry heart from the chest.

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