the
b’k
bitchin’ kitsch
7 Iss. 7 July 2016 Vol.
The Talent
Cover: “Arms” by Kayla Elmhorst. Heath Brougher Nathan Caines Kristen Clark HR Creel Alexis Danner Chad Fisher Sasheera Gounden Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois Bruce A. Heap R. Loveeachother John Maurer Jeri Peterson Adreyo Sen Anna Shapiro David Thompson Dr. Mel Waldman Rodd Whelpley
4 3 20 12 8 13, 30 9, 25 11 28 6-7 14-16 17 22-24 18-19 5, 21 26-27 10
Nathan Caines | I’ve Lived | Poetry I think I’ve lived my life in the woods or half a block from a 7/11 Looking out of moving windows Of cars, planes Buses and my westward room, Standing on summits and front porches that faced the rising sun In the moments between headaches And mania I think I’ve lived my life following sky trails Between the cumulous and my own beaten paths Leaving my baggage around, leaving myself around Writing in little notebooks and reading fine print on beer cans or alley wall poetry I think I’ve lived my life looking for all the things I lost and finding people who never thought They were anywhere Sprinting through the gaps in trees and telling people to drive slower Screaming along to 80’s hardcore and crying over my dead pets I think I’ve lived my life as a thought experiment in contradictions And found they all fit together like a jigsaw inside of my every soft spoken yell Every tangled thought that tumbled out
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Heath Brougher | 3 | Prose Even the bombs with the longest wicks will still one day explode. The seeds of these bombs have already been planted. The seeds of these bombs have already been buried deep within the soil. The seeds of these bombs are just waiting and waiting. The seeds of these bombs are just moving through time.
David Thompson
David Thompson | Rabbit Ranch, Illinois | Photograph
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R. Loveeachother | For My Mother | Poetry Last night, I grated carrots. This morning, I was walking to work. Crowded in a plastic bag with a twisty-tie. Suds strewn on a downtown window, by brown hands in a white jumpsuit, pulling the glass clean, in neat rows, with a wide rubber blade. The bright earthen fingers dissolved into orange slivers, splinters. The morning sun cracked ashen clouds, like pierced egg-yoke, pooling onto the street in puddles. They fell fleshy into the bowl and clung to the minutes of my small apartment kitchen. Now, my wrists are wrapped in metal. I thought: the faster you shred, the more things scatter. Two officers told me to stop. I was trying to listen to a podcast called ‘Beyond Time.’ They told me to put my hands against the brick wall. I couldn’t hear the narrator over the noise of the grating—something about particle physics. Spread your legs, they ordered. Wider, they barked. I didn’t have a plan for the salad. The Judge says she’s disappointed.
The narrator is breaking up. The court appointed attorney is looking into his phone. I only got pieces of it. I wear an orange jumpsuit. Time splits. . . multiple universes. . . one where you chose vanilla, and the other . . . chocolate. I had a zip of dope. They knew. I picked up another orange universe and grated its parts against my metal. I tell the truth. It yielded, as it had to. I see my mother, in her kitchen, praying. But the narrator insists, theoretical infinity. I see my mamma, at church, lifting prayers. I turn the last carrot slowly, between fingers. A zip of dope for all this shit.
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Alexis Danner | Modern Vows | poetry Do you, Take [fully consenting victim], To be your wedded and bedded partner, And to live despondently together in heartache? Do you promise to gradually grow to resent them, Despise your mother-in-law, Abuse them and use them for better (or more likely worse), For richer, but as it will of course turn out, poorer, In physical and indigent mental health, And forsaking all others, Be faithful to only them (and your boss/secretary), Until divorce do you part?
sasheera gounden
Sasheera Gounden | Isolated | charcoal on paper
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Rodd Whelpley | What Love Is Now | poetry Independence Day. Our friends – mostly hers – pull iced beers from the tub on the deck. Their kids (I know their names, again, because, before the doorbell, she whispered them) are filled with watermelon. There are subjects (I’ve forgotten them) off limits. We satellite the picnic mass, host and hostess in opposing orbits. Across the universe, by nod and grimace, she keeps me in the balance. (Someone needs a drink; Say little Skyler’s dress is pretty.) Gravity goes harder at us now, tugs lightly at her paunch and also mine. Her hair has not completely dried. A friend snaps pictures, but will post a stranger’s memory: I am not so big. Her clothes don’t bind that way. Our son is somewhere here. He is thirteen, or will be soon. I trust she will pick the present. I forget how he chose to look today: At turns he goops and jelly rolls his hair, sometimes, gingerly, he shaves at the shadow below his nose. I want to be there, his mirror, the voice whispering about the men with long knives. ‘They are already on the dock, sawing the moorings. When you are swept out, then you will see the sea is not, as you imagine, hued fanciful, like the eyeshade of a girl. It is angry. For years to come, only the absence or the presence of every color – Scream.’ I want to tell him, ‘Scream now.’ As though he could out decibel the currents and the undertows and the sirens and at last the buoyant mermaid, whom he thinks will float forever.
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois | My Two Homes | fiction In Moldova, east of Romania, stray dogs are hanged in the woods. Townspeople are kidnapped. Kidneys are removed. The new American president dunks terror suspects into barrels of used motor oil until they almost drown. He makes the terror suspects watch as he does the same to their pre-school children. In Moldova, young girls are abducted and made into sex slaves. If we gentiles hadn’t killed the Jews, our economy would be more robust. When a woman is surprised, she spits into her bosom. The new president considers himself a humanitarian, comparing himself to former presidents who were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands (perhaps up to one million) civilians in the War Against the Wrong Country. In Moldova, when someone awakens, he drinks vodka. Townspeople rub their scars, the cuts through which their kidneys were removed. Accordions that were made of Dead Sea parchment fall apart in the winter. This is the United States of Amnesia. Amnesia progresses faster than Alzheimer’s. The new president has already forgotten why he is dunking these peasants in dirty oil. In Moldova, two glue sticks lashed together make a crucifix. Our Lady of the Third Arm becomes an amputee. The adventure tourist Ganesh’s tusks are lopped off by hoodlums. He sits slumped and bleeding against the side of a building in St. Petersburg, longing for Kolkatta
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HR Creel | A Pit in the Tooth | Poetry A sauce I crave, too hot for my aged system, the cogs and wheels are rustier than they should be, a pit in the tooth, I am a set of fragile mistakes, what was once iron strength, could lift beams, now encased in glass, what once made love, now only wants to sit and rest, watching sun pass over, clouds gather and move away in herds of bad weather.
chad fisher
chad fisher | deep thoughts...with Homer jay | ink on paper 13
John Maurer | A Twinkle in Dead eyes | Fiction I didn’t learn to be a man by splitting firewood with an axe with a rusted steel head and rotting cedar handle. I learned to be a man when I took that axe and split my father’s skull with it. He used to say, “Think before you act.” I did the second, to stop him from doing the first, that’s why I am here with the seas of my cerebrum as calm as water could never be, while his skull is a cracked egg and his psyche sears into an omelet on the sand. Brain matter matters less than rain matters because rain is God’s way of erasing mistakes. The rain falls where I stand firmly. It baptizes me in holy water and I feel blessed that in peace is a place where my father will never rest. My father’s life was nothing more than a tear in lubricated latex. My spontaneous outburst was nothing more than a heavenly back alley coat hanger. The insects of the lake weave through the bloodied hair of my deceased father as if playing dandruff to the water nymphs was an altogether unfulfilling career. There are some who live and die in a part of the rainforest, a place that has only known their touch, where they breathe heirloomed air. My father’s skull would be their fine china and the stuff of his thoughts would be something to be picked apart and later picked out of teeth. This isn’t some psychosexual, Jefferey Dahmer, unbalanced brain chemistry, paraphilia, this is the wet dream Plato had after missing supper. We don’t learn things, we only remember what we already know. Well these primitive people didn’t need a pedophilic Greek to teach them that, maybe because they remember it because maybe he was right. They eat the brain tissue because that is where thought and knowledge lives; philosophy disagrees science agrees but they are never on the same page, most likely because they are reading different books. My digressions’ digressions aside, this is what is on my mind—synonymous with brain to most—and thankfully, mine is insect-free. So I had to wonder: did one of those maggots fly away believing in God? Did one fly away as a closeted homosexual? An alcoholic? A philanderer? But what do the Greeks know anyway? They are more bankrupt than I am morally. And those precocious primitive people? I also read that they eat their own shit. The water is starting to wet the bottom hem of my father’s light-wash denim and make it ride up to his mid calve. I can see his tattoo. The tattoo that was the reason he was wearing long pants on a 103 degree day. The tattoo that was the reason he wouldn’t fuck my mother with the lights on: a small heart with the name Phillip written inside. He claimed he got it as a teenager when his dog died, his dog named Phillip. He told me this the one other time I had seen it. A towel too short hung around his waist, his legs dense with hair as thick as his skin left the outline looking like a connect-the-dot constellation of stars that burned out long ago. Now that I really look at it, it is dotted and raised, it had obviously been done by hand. His skin perforated with braille disclosing words his lips couldn’t form. The sun, baking his skin into a gimp suit of himself, raises the ink messianic-ly. The white powder sand rips through his flesh like coke through a nostril. The waves, thick with salt, shells, and
sand, steep his body in a stream of liquid sand paper. It takes 252 licks to get to the center of a tootsie pop. The flicks of the river’s saline tongue over my father’s corpse taste him with buds of polished beer bottle fragments and dead jellyfish eroding his flesh far faster. A man turned into a nesting doll, shedding layers of epidermis like cheap, wooden, novelty souvenirs. Mother nature’s saliva dissolves him just enough so that she can swallow him whole. As he sinks, the tide still rises up, its appetite not satisfied, and apostolically washes my feet. I run my hand upwards through the salt water and diffusing ribbons of wandering blood which watercolor my hand with the brush strokes of Van Gogh’s shrapnel. The rain subsides and the clouds take a trip to somewhere where sorrow is without a proper backdrop. I used to be scared of the rain but my mother would tell me it was just God crying. Crying because kids in Africa don’t have food stamps. Crying because our hometowns football team lost again. Crying because another dried up prune of a washed up celebrity died of autoerotic asphyxiation. She said that the oceans themselves were just puddles of our Lord’s tears over all the things in the world that had went wrong. Today, as my father finds rest under the blanket of the warm summer water on the bed of the river, God has no reason to cry. He had wanted to go swimming that day but did not know it would not be done with a map to his meat drawn in the blood that is piranha perfume. Once you know death, life means much less. Hard to laugh at a joke when you know the punchline. I get up, collect my things, then look down at the axe lying in the sand. I kick it into the lake and let it float away. The long knotted wooden handle reddened—all that was left of a man on a journey he was never meant to finish. The river carries it downstream to serve as a reminder that some stories will have morals you would rather ignore. I get in my dad’s rusted Chevy pickup, with the confederate flag flying like the dragon we all chase. I guess he thought if he hated himself enough somehow he wouldn’t be himself. I start up the truck and the smell of diesel fuel and chewing tobacco make my stomach turn like a key in the lock of a Pandora ’s Box that only has nausea left at the bottom. A man strapped a bomb to his chest, C4 and some duct tape, and walked into the coma ward of a local hospital. The windows blew out and the bodies of the soulless rained down with the glass. They call him a monster because news outlets don’t like to call white men terrorists, it sets a bad precedent. I just sit there in the car with the radio on thinking that at least for the fraction of a second between that seventh floor window and the concrete they could pretend to be angels. My father was no angel and could no longer pretend to be anything but what he is. Death makes us all honest in the end. And there would be my mother, waiting at the window for our arrival, hair curlers in and night gown draping over her bony, bruised stature, wondering when the head lights would spray through the window into the kitchen where she was drinking chamomile tea. To me, my father was a drunken phantom having phone sex in the kitchen perving out into the
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John Maurer | A Twinkle in Dead Eyes
receiver with a whiskey woven series of incoherent words. To my mother, he was an amorphous, toxoplasmotic tumor on her heart. Malignant. Inoperable. He was a stray shot of acidic bile Easter-egg-dipping her heart until it was a sticky, sickly, tar black. As he walked all over her, her only concern was that she might give him a splinter. When my father made her cry she used her tears to shine his boots. To him, I was just the result of poor planning and she was just a medley of wax teeth smiles and canned laughter. I turn onto my street where cars are up on blocks and mailboxes are shaped like cows chewing on the cud of eviction notices and court summons. I turn off my headlights as I cruise down the street, sending all the shadows under the microscope of my tungsten rays back to the home of fear and mystery that night envelops us in. My house is on the right and on the outside it could be described as something close to beautiful. Edged flower beds, perfectly trimmed grass, and calla lilies as white as the sky isn’t. It is nice but nice becomes inadequate in a world where things can never be nice enough, nicer but never nice enough. As I turn into the driveway, my tires kick back gravel with metallic pings off the neon colored body kits of the lowrider cars parked on the street in front of my house. My mother would think this to be harmful; even such a small thing to her was too much. But life isn’t about not hurting anyone. Life is about hurting the right people, the right amount, at the right time. She is scared that I know this. She fears my belief that wrongs can create rights will lead me away from the path to name brand complacency. Apathy dopes up the herd where I whitewash my black wool. When I pull my diesel burning carriage into the gravel drive in front of the house I know my mother already has her hand on the doorknob and has unchained the chain locks and unbolted the dead bolts. By the time I paralyze my transmission and my dipping bird pistons find no more fossil fuel to quench them I can hear her creaking the door open. This door being behind our other door with another lock and bars loomed with steel spool to create a tapestry of safety. Not safety for me or her but safety for everyone else. Safety from imprisonment in the concentration camp with floral wallpaper that we call home. I sit in park, knowing that my mother is a moment from stepping out into a silhouette existence beneath the bright patio light that is the sun in the gnat population’s universe. When we had left two doors had shut, when I arrive back only one opens. She had always said I had my father’s eyes but now she sees me standing before her with eyes sagging from exhaustion looking like stomped, scraped firefly guts. Doing no more than illuminating something that is more beautiful forgotten than remembered. I see her neck drop from a distance, her jawbone beating with her heart from the mere proximity, and I can hear her sob with tears dripping from her wrists due to her hands curtaining her reddened eyes. Then her neck swings back until she is practically looking backwards and the light shines onto and reveals something I never knew she had. The light reflects and curves around her dry lips where she is spreading a smile that could only be understood by those who occupy a world that is never on their side.
Jeri Peterson
Jeri Peterson | Hens | Mixed Media
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Anna Shapiro | I Don’t normally like cheap beer but that night I didn’t Mind | poetry she approached me from the other side of the room “I love your shoes” and I only nodded because my stomach was churning from the cheap beer that they had provided but when she asked me how I liked the Miller High Life I told her it was smooth and if I had to choose a beer to take a shower in that would be it because I figured it might moisturize my skin like those expensive soaps that they sell at the mall that I never buy because I’m content to wash my face with dish soap at night which my friends always tell me is bad for the pores but I don’t mind because there’s no one i’m trying to impress except for everyone so we started talking about the art which looked a lot like something I could have done if you gave me paint and an even more twisted mind than I already have which is already so twisted and my head felt fuzzy and I was drunk and her boyfriend handed me another can and I opened it up and we got to talking about that night over the summer when I offered my best friend $100 to walk around the block to get me a fried chicken sandwich from KFC because I was even drunker that night in the summer than I was at the art gallery and she laughed and told me “you’re funny” but I wasn’t trying to be I was just telling a story of something i’d done which I guess in retrospect didn’t make much sense which made it in its own way a funny story and we talked about our lives and as it turns out we all want to write the four of us my best friend, her, her boyfriend, and I we joked about bringing our notebooks and laptops to the KFC to scrawl out poetry amidst the scent of grease but I told her that I didn’t really like fried chicken it was just a lapse of judgement which was a lie
but I wanted to impress her and her boyfriend whose hand she held tight and I find nothing impressive about a girl who drinks too much beer and wine and likes to eat fried chicken but in that moment she told me that she too was enjoying the Miller High Life and I figured then that I guess we’d hit it off but when we left we’d say goodbyes and i’d forget her name in time like I forget everything but instead we bubbled up giggles over the carbonation and I kept staring at the art on the wall which grew more appealing with every sip of my beer until finally it was so beautiful that I contemplated buying a piece to take home but my friend talked me out of it and my new friends, too, said it was a bad idea so I didn’t and when the night ended they didn’t just say goodbye they said “let’s do this again” so we went out for drinks the next night only real drinks not Miller High Life
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Kristen Clark | Cathedral | Poetry “All music is inherently psychedelic� The man with leather patches on his elbows says Debussy pours into the classroom Parallel fifths muffle the sounds We are all underwater Watching.
David Thompson
David Thompson | Seymour, Wisconsin | Photograph
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Adreyo Sen | Magnificently Munchausening | Non-Fiction On my first day in boarding school, I was taken to the dining hall by a painfully serious and tall boy who looked like an anguished parrot. Indeed, one of his many nicknames was “Tota” – the Hindi name for a parrot, as well as the beginning word of a scintillating Bollywood dance number from the era before Central European belly dancers became a vital – and exploited - part of film songs. We were stopped by what I assumed was a buffalo. The buffalo, in reality, a swarthy and heavyset boy whose flesh had been compounded by years of nursing petty resentments, put his hand to my chest and said, “Give me your intro.” An intro, incidentally, is the most benign form of hazing in Indian institutions. You recount where you were born, where you lived, where you studied, and which power ranger or Friends character you most identified with. Inevitably, in the end, you were asked to dance like Urmila Matondkar, who was known as the “dhak-dhak” girl for the rhythmic and wild oscillations of her butt. I was full of it. Of course, I still am – full of it, I mean. But then, I was more so. I imagined myself the protagonist of my own boarding school story, which was, in a way, true of course. I stuck out my violated chest. I proclaimed: “I will not.” The parrot gasped. The buffalo goggled. I smirked. “Well,” said the buffalo, clomping away, “tell the new boy to mind his attitude.” “Now look at what you have done,” said the parrot, who would go on to play basketball at college, star in a Bollywood movie, and marry a woman with his milk-and-cream prettiness, “look at what you have done.” The next time I came across the buffalo, I was a bit wiser in the ways of boarding school. My inability to play sports and my inevitable progress to the press-up position at PT had knocked the butter-chicken stuffing out of me. I still was the protagonist in my boarding school story, but this was an imaginary one. “Look,” said the buffalo, to a group of meanly lean-faced seniors lounging around on the dining hall steps in various postures of seemingly casual coolness (anything but, I would later realize), “it’s the motherfucker who was showing me attitude earlier.” I wrung my hands. “That was my twin brother,” I quavered, fixing him with my eyes, “He’s, like, really evil. He goes around showing attitude to people. I would never show you attitude, never, never, never!”
I ended on a high treble. His attitude to me became solicitous, like that of a Cheeryble brother – this metaphor is brought to you via Charles Dickens, from the one novel of his I have not yet managed to read. He put his arm around me and took me to the tuck shop and watched me nibble decorously at a bun-samosa – a samosa crushed between buns, which was the epitome of high living at my school. Over the next few weeks, I consolidated my imposture. Sometimes, I would show him “attitude,” sometimes I would be adorably helpless. And then I told him the only way to distinguish between me and my brother was the shape of our spectacles. The buffalo, who grew up before my eyes into a perfectly sweet gentleman, albeit one who insisted on peppering his speech with words from the SAT exams like rubicund and persiflage and who wrote a hilariously awful love letter to a girl from our sister school claiming that she adumbrated him, whatever that means, must have discovered my gamine deceptiveness at some point. But he never said anything. He was one of the few souls who praised my pieces for the school rag – the others generally derided them as soft porn, with some justification, given their excess of fair women with anguished breasts. He was not my only victim. I would tell my squat and formidable-looking English teacber, in reality a softie with a heart of golden butter, that I had an elder brother, who for reasons I could not divulge, had not been able to enroll at boarding school. Never weaned off the nearly interchangeable Indian soap operas with their housewives literally clutching daggers, she was pleasantly titillated. I thought she had quite forgotten about him. I only ever mentioned him once. But she brought him up at a parent-teacher meeting and when my parents denied his existence, the look of betrayal she shot in my direction should have been heartrending. I found it acutely funny. Munchausening always made me feel deliciously, maliciously, feminine. I would go on to feel an affinity with one of my own characters – I am most in love with my own creations, and my excuse is an inexcusable vein of vanity. This is Ariel, a transgender woman with shifting moods, a creature of such physical and emotional diffidence that different people see her differently. At times, I think I am Ariel. But I am being encrusted into an identity and one, I suspect, not of my own choosing. As an adult, or, at least, someone who is way past the age of eighteen, I have been honest. I
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Adreyo Sen | Magnificently Munchausening
would say scrupulously so, but that would be inaccurate. My honesty is inevitable, a knee-jerk reaction. I know no other way to be. That is not to say I actually am a wholly reputable character. I am tempted to steal – generally pretty things, like iPods. I obsessively search the student lounge at my university for meatballs, which, for some reason, arouse this insane greediness in me. My favorite self-image is that of a small child in a blue Columbia sweatshirt atop a pile of dictionaries, with a fountain pen sticking out of her filthy hair, as she dourly inspects, judges and then eats one meatball after the other. Mentally, I usually feel about eight. At other times, fifteen, especially since my fevered imagination runs the way of the Mills & Boons I used to steal from my female cousins, these blue-bound books with their cover images of sheikhs and Oriental princes ravaging bosomy and silk-shod heroines. And also, of course, my honesty is rather ineffectual. I may be honest on the page, but I am not honest to my heart – Celine Dion is NOT behind that image. I have known that I am bisexual and transgender from an early age and been rudely confronted by this knowledge at the age of twenty-four – and yet, there have been days and months and whole years when I have forgotten this entirely. I know that my lack of interest in clothes stems from the fact that I have a passionate interest in the kind of clothes I do dream about – long salwar kameezes (a set comprising a tunic, pant and scarf) and sarees and scarves and dresses. I have made my characters wear them, but that’s no longer enough. I have a recurring dream, one I am yet to act upon. And that is to put on a prim and yet pretty salwar kameez and go to New York and walk down to the little LGBT bar near Columbia’s campus. And once I am there, I will go inside and sit down on one of the barstools and ask for a Bailey’s. And hopefully, nearby, will be some tall, dark and handsome man. And even as he runs his eye down me, I will feel against my beating heart (ok, eww) the firmness of his chest, the promise of the security his arms around me will provide. And he will say, “So then, what’s your name, then?” – for some reason, I imagine him as an Indian gent from South Africa come to the US via London. And I will look at him, drain my glass, take his hand and say, “Call me Ishmael.” And the whole bar will erupt into a Bollywood number. Ok, that’s not quite how I imagine my first seduction, but the reality – of my imagination, I mean – is far more ridiculous.
Sasheera Gounden
Sasheera Gounden | Tomatoes | Photograph
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dr. mel waldman | Alchemy of the Everflowing Light of the Unfathomable Self | Poetry (on reading Lenore Kandel’s poemEnlightenment Poem) A flood of anguish
falls heavily from the Heavens & waves of light hide inside the circle of the oval night while the slanted ocean pummels the cold earth & sweeps across the haunting harrowing dream, Brooklyn on ice, & furious folks rush into frost-bitten oblivion covered in overflowing downpours of despair & within the wilds of this frozen wasteland I sit inside my tiny tomb ensconced in my womb chair & drift off to Lily Pond, a beautiful place in my mind, back there through the postern of inner space in the swirl of the circular past on the Brooklyn College campus circa Summer 1962 & suddenly,
the Beat Poet Lenore Kandel pops out of the lost light of my brainwaves, her rebel-voice a trumpet of truth blasts-sings a poem of whirling illumination, like a jazz musician playing the wild music of revelations, by waves of opalescence at Lily Pond & she sings “our selves were pearls” & I enter her Enlightenment Poem & in the soothing sensuous heat of this glorious moment when she reveals, “our pearls became more precious” I see, feel, immerse myself in the everflowing light of the unfathomable self & it is beautiful & celestial, my unbearable light, mine
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Bruce A. Heap | Free Fall | Poetry Jumping out of an airplane at 30,000 feet is the coolest thing that you will ever do and even though I now know that my parachute is not going to open, I have decided to enjoy the ride. There is no doubt that I would prefer that those puffy clouds catch and hold me so that I can relax and wait for a passerby, but I know that won’t happen because I am already through them and now the earth looks shiny and not at all bumpy as I expected. The air rushes by me and it feels kind of good, but I don’t like what is waiting for me. I push those thoughts aside for now. Perhaps I can air swim to water and somehow glide in at an angle so my impact is minimal and I survive after all, but such thoughts are those of a fantasy coupled with a denial of my pending doom. No, I think that I will continue to enjoy the ride and wait for it to be over. I am getting closer now and I can see things better. I maneuver myself to avoid buildings and concrete. Trees would be nice as they appear so much softer, but even now I am still hoping for a way out. I say good bye to my loved ones and think of a few regrets, but there is no time to dwell. I try a quiet prayer as one last act of desperation, but my answer doesn’t come so my next step is to...
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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chad fisher
Chad Fisher | She Shells Sea Sells | Ink on Paper