The Bitchin' Kitsch May 2016 Issue

the

b’k

bitchin’ kitsch

7 Iss. 5 May 2016 Vol.

The Talent

Cover: “Wide Open” by Sasheera Gounden.

Sissy Buckles Annis Cassells Shannon Cawley Payton Cianfarano Darren DeMaree T.J. Dennett Matt Duggan Dani Dymond Michael Edwards TS Hidalgo Douglas Polk Michael Prihoda Joel Recla Nikol Roubidoux Sasheera Gounden Bekah Steimel David Thompson Dr. Mel Waldman

12-13 11 16 10 3 24-25 14 21 22 4 28 6-9 15 20 18-19, 23 17 5, 30 26-27

Darren Demaree | On the Same Day Medgar Evers Was Laid to Rest | Poetry The tangled crowd in Arlington cried out loud, cried beyond the cemetery & at the same time, on the same day, Sam Cooke was left to straighten the tie of his dead boy, his eighteen-month old son who found the pool too deep, too uncontrolled to exist without his memory in it forever. That ended Sam, the version of Sam that always had fun, always took the drink, the girl, the drink & when he blamed Barbara for not seeing the boy find the pool, for being too hungover to chase the toddler away from danger, his sorrow took the night, took all of the nights until his last night took him with it.

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TS Hidalgo | Camping Gas (Arbeit macht frei) | Poetry BDSM regulars, in their most unequivocal switch versión in space-time (the Universe is made up of zeros and ones), trapped inside a wrap-coated paper, or polystyrene, perhaps, translucent in any case, The Enormous Room, in Poland, 1944 (Where´s the Place de L’ Etoile?, a tourist asked them, at the sudden amusement ride, amid general indifference and they pointed to their own hearts, with one voice).

They were half dozen (also of zeroes), and were trying to leave, desperate, the wrapper, carrying, each, a dreidel; an Austrian pharaoh passes around, disguised as a playing card, and they call, begging for help: the phone was Busy, busy, busy.

David Thompson

David Thompson | Big Boy, Ohio | Photograph

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Michael Prihoda | The Forecasters | Fiction Sometimes sunshine was despicable.

“Corey,” Dylan said.

Despicable sunshine. Where were the clouds, scudding over the vast oceanic impenetrability? His childhood was in the clouds, not the sunshine. His childhood was trapped in puffy, rising white billows, a life gone up in smoke.

Corey believed everybody resembled a dying cigarette, lit at birth, dripping ash until we cease to exist forever, a dampened stub, useless, prolonged ridiculously. We don’t remember our early childhoods and so they have to be the best, they must, because what isn’t remembered can be turned into anything we wish. The unknown can be perfect, despite our imperfect understanding of what constitutes perfection.

Where were the clouds? Where were they?

“Corey, hey, you there man?”

Dylan smoked a cigarette, puffing carelessly. Nobody thinks about the state of their future lungs while they smoke a lit cigarette. Only after the light goes out do they consider the damage. It is the same with other things.

Take death, for example. We consider a person’s value after they are gone. What did they mean to us? Anything? Everything? Nothing? Sitting right there next to us, they are something, something tangible and vital and infinite until their infinity collapses under the weight of living. When a person is born, fate sends a tangent line from its pulsating core to catch the baby one day in the future. Maybe eighteen years. Maybe thirty-six or ninety-six but that tangential radiation will catch up given enough time. Time always gives enough for itself.

Clouds. He wanted clouds more than anything else right now.

The billowing smoke of Dylan’s cigarette was a pale replication or representation of what could be, what should be, what nature had the potential to produce yet refused to produce. And why? For the same reason three legged donkeys and four winged robins don’t exist. Everything natural is limited.

Dylan puffed and proffered, eyes slightly glazed, cognitive functions fooling his body into believing for small junkyards of lost seconds that this was weed, that he was a ravenous shark fed until beyond bursting. No, he couldn’t be a starving squirrel who hadn’t stored any nuts, scrounging for anything when winter came, ready and willing to eat bark, drink snow, test the feces of other animals for nutrition. He had to believe he was something, doing something, even if that something was just smoking his lungs into slow oblivion.

Corey knew if you made the wrong choices over and over again, eventually they would catch up with you. Everything is a matter of time.

“Corey?” Dylan asked.

Corey shook away the offer of a cigarette. Clouds. Why were clouds the only thing that mattered?

“So get this, I’ve been bouncing this radical idea around my noggin.” Dylan said.

Radical. Idea. Noggin. Corey heard these words through Japanese room separators (he couldn’t remember their proper name, if they had one). He heard them through a flaky film canister, echoes and echoes to anger the bats whose sonar couldn’t handle interruption, distraction, diversion.

“Cool bro.” That was the clouds talking. Not Corey. Everything talked these days, except for him. If it wasn’t clouds it was people and if not them, his eyes, his ears, his cheeks, rarely his mouth. His mouth barely spoke any more.

“Check this out. If I predict something and it comes true, that means I accurately predicted the future, therefore I’m awesome, or something,” Dylan said.

Corey needed the inspiration of another puff. Thinking was hard sometimes, as if the neurons traveled through piranha infested streams no explorer had ever dared before and only certain words, certain chunks of thought (proved illegitimate by their bitten companions) made it upstream. Sometimes thoughts were trout swimming upstream, hazards galore. It was a miracle the mind produced anything cogent.

“Weathermen do this all the time but the thing is they aren’t right very much. Yet we continually believe them, trust them, look to them for advice. Why don’t people try this more often? See, if you make enough guesses or predictions, the law of averages says a lot of them are going to be right by the natural proliferation of your guessing habits.”

Weathermen. Law of averages. Corey found it hard to pay attention when there weren’t clouds in the sky.

Wait, over there, finally, in the distance. A cloud. A messiah.

So this is what being saved feels like.

“Weathermen have models and I don’t think you understand the law of averages as it’s meant to be understood,” Corey said. Tired. Really tired. Those words had

continues 7

Michael Prihoda | The Forecasters

taken enormous effort. He watched the cloud approach, a lumbering bunny hopping through the sky trail, delivering candy and joy and something very necessary to him as an individual. How do you save yourself when you don’t know what it takes to save yourself?

“It’s all about getting on a streak. Like Lou Gehrig. Get this. Today I say that tomorrow a meteor will strike somewhere in Siberia and it does, destroying a bunch of Russian farms and maybe a few peasants, hopefully not too many because predicting death is so trivial when you consider how easy death is to predict based on per second death count world wide. Okay, I predict this, I post my prediction on Facebook, Twitter, everywhere.

Tomorrow, the meteor strikes and wow, I’ve predicted the future correctly. Everybody is in awe but the awe will pass unless I keep this up. One prediction means nothing. I need to do more. The trick is picking what to bother predicting. Something enormous is necessary to get the ball rolling but after that, why not small stuff? The name of Fiona Apple’s next child, the next Oscar winner for Best Picture, the next tsunami hit, the next Somalian drug lord to rise from the dregs. If I kept the streak going, I could be famous.

Clairvoyant, practically supernatural.”

“Somalian drug lords?” Corey barely heard anything. The clouds filtered everything else Please come closer. Let me touch you.

“Sure, the Somalis have drug lords right? They have to. Imagine a grumpy man, mustachioed, sitting on a yacht off the West African coast, plotting, planning.”

The approaching cloud was a behemoth.

“What do you think of when I say hulking behemoth?” Corey asked.

“A giant puffy faced grizzly bear, angered beyond belief, probably holding torches because he beat up a group of peasants protesting local tyranny. He brandishes said torches, spittle drips from his jaws, he’s feral, dire. Why do you ask?”

If you have eyes, everything is graphic.

“Not sure.”

“Check this, my fame starts today. See that kid down there by the pond?”

“Sure.” He hated distraction from the clouds. Closer, come closer. The cloud approached the sun like Alexander racing across the Arabian wastes toward his next conquest by phalanx.

“See the boat he’s about to sail?”

“Yep.” “It’s going to sink. That thing is the Titanic reincarnate. Doesn’t even need an iceberg.”

Dylan waited. Corey watched the cloud begin smothering the sun. He felt himself separating, sublimating in the most delightful way.

“Here he goes.” Dylan sucked in his breath, coughed, chased the cough with another puff, simultaneously felt everything going right and everything going wrong at the same time.

The boat fell into the water, floated for a bit, and sank.

“One for one.”

The sun was almost engulfed.

“Tomorrow it will rain,” Dylan said.

“Give me a cigarette.”

“Sure thing.”

What better day to start smoking regularly? Corey stood up.

“I have to go.”

“Where?” Dylan asked.

“Anywhere but here.”

“Look for me in the news by next week,” Dylan said. “I’m going to be famous.”

Corey said nothing and began walking away, smoking as he left, his back to a sun whose rays progressively diminished.

He could feel it, smoking with the sun at his back. This was why people didn’t think about the long-term effects.

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Payton Cianfarano | Five Things that brought me here | poetry after having sex with you for somewhere around the sixth time i move my body off of yours and face myself away from you and think of the five things that brought me here one, i think of middle school health class and my teacher who would make fun of the quiet kids in the back, accusing them of watching very specific types of fetish porn, mostly revolving around bagels. two, i think of my grandma who often told me stories about when she was a teenager. one night, i am laying next to her in bed and she tells me how she met my grandfather by throwing eggs at him from a bridge and a few months later she was getting married in a hardware store. three, i think of crinkled bed sheets and typing ‘what is masturbation’ with my phone brightness turned down, only nights after i had accidentally watched lesbian porn on late night television four, i think of how your face mostly resembles that of a raccoon who has just been caught stealing garbage from the back yard of an elderly woman who is more fearsome than she appears. five, i remember all of the times my grandma used her hardware store marriage to accuse my grandfather of “really screwing her over from the beginning”. i wonder if the kids in the back of sixth grade health felt the same as they were being accused of putting their dicks in bagels. i think of your guilty raccoon face and how it took four platonic kisses to realize that i would rather stare at that face than anyone else’s.

Annis Cassells | Porcelain smile | poetry Mocking red-haired baby doll grinned like she knew a secret, Sat in my rocking chair, surprised me as I opened the door Her teeth showed bright white, while I read the blue 3x5 index card.

She grinned I absorbed his message the one I’d feared would flay me.

Scalding my eyes my heart my fingers the card fell, floating, twirling, then landed face down in the baby doll’s red-and-black-plaid lap.

She smiled her smirky grin, Until l quit the room.

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Sissy Buckles | Enough | Poetry Flipping through an old Cha-Cha Charming magazine there’s a black and white early Ronettes fan-photo, tough looking streetwise homegirls grouped around a parlor grand piano working out 3-part harmony, beehives piled high with Aqua Net hairspray dressed alike in stylin’ empire waist satin frocks and t-strap kitten heels, their exotic dark eyes kohl-lined, babyfaced smiles still innocent preceding Ronnie’s Stockholm syndrome imprisonment, fighting for her very existence behind Phil Spector’s crazy Wall of Sound and little star Estelle hospitalized with anorexia then homeless and disenfranchised shivering through ruthless New York City byways in agonized schizophrenic wonder, a photo reminding me of visiting my cousins in LA when I was a kid away and back, before nebulous decisions, mulberry hued shiners and fat contused lips, my poems soaked in macho urine with a backhand to the kisser - “that girl needs to learn her place,” and all of us roadtrip piled into

the cream Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon with the woodgrain trim, my sisters and I wearing pink madras sundresses that matched our Mom’s who’d made them for us on her old Singer sewing machine, on the way up from San Diego we’d tussle with our brother, passing steel mills, orange groves, and miles of Long Beach oil fields and my cousins lived in a neighborhood so different from our quiet lawned houses, louder and more alive, intense colors and spicy smells mingled with concrete and corner liquor stores then we’d go have huge potato salad picnics at South Gate Park on Tweedy Blvd. where we’d all play, our dads listening to the Dodger game on the portable transistor radio.

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Matt Duggan | Jarrow and Bull | Poetry This corruptible soul of the sown earth will spoil the wick of man’s cracked whip, through forest and raptures curse, shed the manacles of man’s ownership.

Milk the soil – freshen the lips, we will all march again in the name of Jarrow and Bull never for selfish or political means; No longer the programme inside the digital Eden that they control, we will all march again in the name of Jarrow and Bull.

Prozac trooper – the sociopathic trader are all under patriarch rule when man strips away his flesh unwiring himself from the looking glass; Where the gate keeper rests in the mirage of this unhinged paradise, we will all march again in the name of Jarrow and Bull.

Joel Recla

Joel Recla | on edge | white charcoal on black paper

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Shannon Cawley | Dandelion Path | Prose i.

you make a timeline and you crumple faces of dead presidents and wars together, things of significance that have happened over time are now arranged like a crow sitting upon a telephone line. this is far beyond the nineteenth pole, however the stereotype still remains – this is how remembrance crucifies itself.

G/god is only just a line that starts at “a” and ends at “z.”

ii.

your legs swing over the end of a full sized bed and you’re staring at all the pictures of the people you’ve formed relationships with that cover your walls like firecracker debris. the tape tears away at the paint, and the pictures tear your attention away from the overwhelmingly lucid purple eggshell that has four walls instead of endless interiors. you’re staring at all the pictures of the people you’ve formed relationships with rather than forming more of them, rather than looking at their hands when they talk about the futures they caught in their dreamcatchers last night. these friends are arranged like a blue Bic mark upon a perforated line, and they all hang at the last rip.

iii.

you’re in a field of daisies and you pick them up by their roots. they don’t stain your fingers like the dandelions do, they don’t stain your memories like the dandelions do, they don’t stain yellow, tacky spit where you stay on the mattress like the dandelions do – this is not a line anymore, this is temporary permanence.

Bekah Steimel | Backfired | Poetry I was baptized in gasoline and taught to play with matches I was told everybody burns Even so Burn in silence No show and tell it is impolite to speak of the flames it is improper to reveal the scars But the arsonists miscalculated when they lit me because instead of burning me into defenseless ash they actually ignited my voice

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Sasheera Gounden | For the love of miss sue | Prose Frothy, minuscule cotton drops emerged from the nozzle of whipped cream.

Salt, tequila and lemon, baby.

Their pretty-perked bottoms swayed with the gestures of the wind-in rhythmic, profound steps.

The Hawaii girls — I’ve been warned, by my doughy-faced wife with protruding, raisin eyes; the youth sucked from her now wrinkled body.

You can imagine the extent of my amazement once I discovered my wife’s infidelity. I expected the bogus affair to be nothing more than a cheap fling, and then she dropped the whopper — she is in love with the IT guy, Norman, on level two of my office building. Norman, thirstquenching name, isn’t it?

The thought of her orgasming with his name — Norman, like melted strawberries on the tip of her tongue, sends pulps of lime-colored bile through the narrow piano cords of my throat.

Heck, since when did women start cheating on men? Feminists are beating their chests in protest. Norman — the nerd, had become my biggest threat. I should have noticed the sexy, black-satin lingerie from Barneys and the scent of new perfume but I had thought it had all been for me- how pathetic am I? Not that I’m not a pig myself; I can’t help but stare at pretty young things with perky buttocks and pairs of D-cups.

There’s one huge difference between us — I choose not to act on those feelings of lust.

Look, but don’t touch, as daddies all over the world would say.

With our fingers entwined, in our four-poster bed, like lovebirds; she laid the fat egg on my head.

“I love Norman,” she said.

My face turned pallid.

“Our marriage lacked passion,” she said.

The marriage lacked passion bit, was by far my favorite.

She expected a roller coaster ride; I provided a merry-go-round.

She eventually hopped on a plane to be with Norman — great anniversary present, honey. She left Hawaii, she left me.

I cried like a little girl — feminists again, beating their chests, strokes of red paint, smeared on both sides of their Himalaya-cheeks.

II

The sun peeked, shyly, from the sheet of cirrus clouds. I rubbed sunblock over my already tanned skin — compliments of Honolulu and took a jog along Waikiki beach, my Nikes, beating against the pavement.

A little out of breath, I brought the bitter-sweet Americano to my lips — everlasting kiss.

“Everything is going to be just fine,” I told myself.

A pair of seagulls playfully pecked at one another, in mid-air.

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Nikol Roubidoux | Psychology today: a dash of trust | Prose Jealousy. It consumes from the inside out; my own insecurities feeding the hunger.

Carnivorous bitch. Psychology Today is the acid adding flavor to the dish.

A sophisticated palate of distrust. You read it in every Facebook and Twitter post; Alerts by the minute, each one contributing fodder for the feast.

The green alert appears against the black phone screen, a name in shorthand.

His nickname for her? Term of endearment? He’s never shortened by name So cutely. Has he ever called me by name? Who am I to him? Who am i?

I am not this jealous woman feeding the green evil monster who asks The questions to which any answer is a dagger straight to the beating organ.

Is she young? Pretty? Talented? Better beneath the sheet? Do you see her When my lips touch yours? Psychology Today can discern and interpret any infidelity.

“Stay strong when things go wrong.”

“You’ve got humor, looks, and a job…but don’t forget this…”

Am I enough?

He “likes” her pic and her status update.

Are they having sex?

How old is she? How old do I look?

Is she thin? Does she cook or ride a bike?

Psychology Today can tell me how much he really cares.

I need a translation table. Every picture tells a story. Who is that standing next to him?

Is the blonde, pubescent bimbo in the shared post a family friend? Does she mean something?

What would the psychologists say?

I can be strong. I don’t need a man.

I am an oak tree.

I am an activist.

I am an ocean view.

I am Wall Street.

But this jealous cancer eats from the inside, consuming my sanity.

Psychology Today can tell me when to seek help.

Dani Dymond | Crash Test Dummies | Poetry We lay there side by side, mannequins of circumstance.

The hood of Dad’s ’95 Camaro surprised me in its romance, warming bony teenaged elbows while we resigned to shoot the shit.

I could feel your stare boring holes in my face. Your pupils each contained their own maze, and with every glance, you turned me thrice, blindfold knotted tight, before shoving me down bending corridors, an abrupt relocation from the safety of my driveway.

Your spontaneous declaration was a coordinated assault, copiloted by the heat of a Californian summer.

The evening newscasts failed to report on the ruin that came to be that night, the teleprompter blank of any indications, plastic anchors unaware of your private disaster: an “I love you” met with an “I don’t.”

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michael edwards | untitled | Poetry Chances are 5 to 1 you just want to be heard, maybe feel like your ideas matter; but — we’re all just molecules and matter, awaiting atomic deconstruction, and, in 1838 Poe predicted the Donner Party would cannibalize Richard Parker — I wonder if Yann Martel’s tell-tale heart is thumping under Poe’s floorboards; he needn’t worry — Bradbury proclaimed the death of the book in ’53; and Whitta didn’t worry, either, no one cared when he rewrote 451, no one reads anyway.

Sasheera Gounden

Sasheera Gounden | Open Window | Photograph

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t.j. Dennett | Gradually Elvis | Poetry The changes were subtle at first, a curl of the upper lip, or (when standing in a queue) a slight shake of the hip.

He’d swap his morning coffee fix for milkshakes or a coke, his business suits for 45s and Filofax for smokes.

Although his hair was thin and grey, he combed it in a quiff. of course it’d collapsed by lunchtime, ‘twas shaking like his hip.

Later on, past afternoon whilst talking on the phone, his voice, once rough East-Anglian, had Mississippi tones.

He tried to cram a shopping list into a twelve bar blues, bought a six string he couldn’t play and ill-fitting blue suede shoes.

At teatime he’d eat cheeseburgers, with ketchup on his chips; as the chair began to creek with his large, expanding hips.

He quit his job in Finance for the bright lights of the stage; bought a ticket for Las Vegas with an accountant’s wage.

His lady, she stood by his side She could do nothing but; (having vowed on her wedding day) to love him and his gut.)

For Christmas he asked her for a jumpsuit fit for kings some black-hair dye, a microphone and a dozen diamond rings.

She took him to the hospital, and kissed him on the lips, where the surgeon was instructed to cure his shaking hips.

As the patient lay sedated, the surgeon marked his pelvis; but very soon they’d both shook up and changed their names to Elvis.

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dr. mel waldman | a brooklyn revolution at lily pond while sitting with the beat poets | Poetry (on reading Diane di Prima’s poemRevolutionary Letter #1) A faraway voice inside the circle of the night spirals around & around the dome of time until it plummets into my mind & whispers, I am the snow flowing majestically & I am the rain rushing to earth.

I am now & yesterday & the ephemeral sunlight exploding in inner space.

I am, on the verge, swirling on the rim, of a revolution, so close to something beautiful & ineffable, & rolling across the velvety susurrations of the night silence, I kiss the Void & vanish.

Ensconced in my womb chair, I return to Lily Pond on the Brooklyn College campus circa Spring 1962 & my brainwaves glide & dance gracefully across the glittering waters of my dreamscape

& in my Mind’s Eye, the Beat Poets appear inside my sweeping dream sailing through sweet phantasmagoria past Lily Pond but slowly, magically returning to me & here & now in my makeshift kingdom, inside the Circle of Time, I sit with Joanne Kyger & Anne Waldman & we listen to Diane di Prima recite her little visionary poem, revealing the secrets of “myself,” “my spirit,” and “this flesh.” & suddenly, she sheds the burial shroud of the soul & shrieks, “the stakes are myself I have no other ransom money” & with the fury & fire of the real self, flings Revolutionary Letter #1 into Lily Pond & Joanne Kyger shouts, “It is Lonely” & Anne Waldman cries out, “Revolution,” on her journey to the sacred center of the Source & in this Heaven & Hell, we share our visions & anguish grows into ecstasy & we glow & glitter with Lily Pond & feel the Revolution of everlasting Love

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Douglas Polk | A visit Home | Poetry pull off the highway into the hometown, age has shrunk the place, both men and buildings, so small and fragile, memories questioned, this could not be the same place, where a childhood was spent, the pool hall, and movie theater, gone, in their place, only vacant lots, a spiritual emptiness, the old church, replaced by a building, made in the cookie cutter mold, of a government building, efficient and cold, the only place looking even close to the same, the graveyard, north of town, a commentary, on the future, of my hometown.

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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David thompson

David Thompson | cadillac ranch, texas | photograph