the
b’k
bitchin’ kitsch
8 Iss. 5 May 2017 Vol.
The Talent
Cover: “Connection” by Olivier Schopfer. Christopher Barnes Sissy Buckles Gordan Ćosić Gregg Dotoli Ryan Quinn Flanagan Ricky Garni Jennifer Lothrigel Max Luque Joanna Michaels Mark Myavec Michael Prihoda Sy Roth Seth Ruderman Olivier Schopfer Dr. Mel Waldman
28 3-7 27 8 19 18 26 14-17 12-13 9, 30 10-11 20-21 24-25 cover 22-23
Sissy Buckles | Mecury Blues | Poetry Not sure how long I can do this, hanging on by a thread. I liked looking at the Ellis Island photos this morning anyway, and wondering what new stories those ancient sojourners would have to tell. Morning meditation? I ran for an hour at daybreak in the rain, hell yeah and if you have any extra time stop and loiter at the construction site watch them build stuff I could linger for hours drive the jeep out to the heart of the desert and clear your mind apprehending the wilderness “we cannot be naked enough” (Namaste, Thoreau) visit my Julian wolves back up in the hills and def not miss the superblooming wildflowers in Death Valley then ponder eternity whilst listening to Ray Price Crazy Arms on the jukebox and a quick stop at Pete’s Place after the La Mesa Classic Car Show because you can whittle it down in your mind all you like to just a few fundamental things like the sudden comprehension in the absolute essentialness of Bob Kaufman’s Abomunist Manifisto
(sing it like a tragic aria!) and for instance do you sell your soul like a crummy can of soup at the crossroads, hunkering down for the highest bidder like all those fucking phony leftists who voted for that imperialist war-mongering HRC (third party renegade 4life) and foreverly damned if I do or don’t eternally working for the Man and so bloody tired of faking it including the nonstop nerve-jangling media blitzkrieg circle jerk (& heaven forbid we all miss out on Kim Kardashian’s latest snapchat who thinks she gots it so bad getting robbed in a luxury Paris hotel? Rather consider the happy fate of not being plundered by ten men at a time in the South Sudan killing fields) or should I be merely content with the occasional insincere bone thrown in my general direction and all these ominous portents which I inevitably knew were coming the morning I witnessed a bike go down on the
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Sissy Buckles | Mercury Blues
freeway off-ramp right in front of me while heading to work he was able to jump up and muscle it over while I blocked traffic from behind but we both knew we were Dostoevskian idiots staring at each other’s vulnerable skulls, as I’d surely reached the zero hour exigency point and left to my singular wits I would stand alone in the middle of the room like that loca femme fatale in Texas ignominiously screaming BULLSHIT at the top of my lungs till I’m blue in the face or hell I could just give it all away and learn what my survival really did depend on, including poetry because don’t kid yourself folks, you will only find true Art in the outsiders world just ask Eartha Kitt, conceived from rape, born picking cotton on a plantation, spoke five tongues and sang in seven or platinum vixen Jen in a frilled red vintage playsuit filing her long nails and baking in the SoCal sun on a backyard chaise lounge her tattoos covered in zinc oxide never teacher’s pet, rather the scapegoat rather the black sheep
gossiping with the chatty mailman in that charming way she had, lamenting her bully boss snarling “and all the flunky ‘Yes Men’ can BITE me!” and last but never least that sage young Ockhamist Adrian up to no good in the Coachella Valley whose words almost saved my life one long and lonely Indian Summer night, I lost my America years ago stolen by all the lazy unoriginal takers of language for granted (and a person who introduces themselves as a poet is a prime suspect in my book) besides your first big mistake was deciding it was a good idea to try and game a chick who don’t play, yes I’m talking to you land of the free home of the brave of purple mountains majesty of shameful mass incarceration fed by modern-day slave patrols, of the freshly anointed Ministry of Truth Barack Obama’s little parting gift guaranteed to root out any and all Un-American activity, “come and see the blood in the streets” saith Neruda the Prophet, my original sin branding me a troublemaker
because I never needed my daddy’s approval yet still, gratefully noting the list of folks who don’t hate me after my last Truck poems to include: hot rodders, musicians, poets, farmers, librarians, booksellers, surfers, Mongols motorcycle club and the gang down at the Sportsman Pub poetry mag editors, course my family, and miraculously this was enough at least nobody has threatened to piss on my grave (not yet, anyway) and my only belief the science of counting my lucky stars. So I’ll be doggoned if I’m not in on that build and the fanciful notion of turning my sister’s 1934 Ford truck race-ready for the Barona 1/8 mile Antique Drags we’ll dial in that little mama going fast as a speeding bullet, see you’ve got to understand these guys/gals have been entrenched in the Cali counterculture scene for decades, hmmm you could say starting with the WW2 vets coming back a motley crew with their knowledge of general mechanics (and hydraulics for the lowriders but that’s
a whole other chapter) and the pilots building cafe racers which was the closest thing to flying they could afford, you could probably also add the adrenaline rush they had felt during wartime and just a means of getting around for dates and work like we all need to do and shoot, just wanting to feel genuinely alive after so much misery and death and the free wind blowing through your hair so with very little money they had to make do with what they could find and improve on, go down to the junkyard dig around (still a fun trip) where someone’s refuse could be recycled and reused; buy a non-running car for 5 bucks a runner for 15, lots of elbow grease, some friends, hours of tinkering, hence the beginning of Custom hot rod world and course we all know that folks first impulse is to stone the messenger but please regard this sincere impartial chronicle as a simple invitation
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Sissy Buckles | Mercury blues
to flip your ever lovin’ wig but that’s a moot point, or rather the story of an era and don’t dare confuse them with restorers or you are bound to get the business, guess every club has to have somebody to look down on (aka gold-chainers) but the dif is these guys actually work on their cars and you could say create as they pretty much can build up something rad from nothing, but I’ve no beef with anybody do your own thing man, that’s what I always say.... and the many legends & heroes & beacons of freedom that sprung from the tradition, past and present just to name a few -- you could start by getting your socks blown clean off at Famoso Raceway’s Cacklefest, and speed records broken right and left amidst the otherworldly pristine beauty echoing off the endless white sandy glare of the Bonneville Salt Flats, Smokin’ Mo-Kan Dragway in Asbury, Missouri, legendary Top Fuel dragsters tearing it up cheating death with steely-eyed determination through the hellish nitro fumes at Pomona and Salinas Boyz Cole and his pops Pat Foster a renaissance builder and test pilot de rigueur,
a man’s man and a racer’s racer offering us redemption under a dirty hood and this nothing to do with macho spectacle it’s all about the velocity, baby then great googly-moogly who remembers Big Daddy Don Garlits doing a ferocious fire burnout in Swamp Rat 16 and the SoCal Bean Bandits whose members originated right in our own South SD Logan Heights hood and back in the day one of the few clubs that let everybody join, their all-inclusive nature incorporating blacks, whites, Japanese and even Lebanese members during the club’s existence, and howzabout artist/pinstriper/car designer and all around unique individual Ed Roth of ‘Rat Fink’ infamy along with his protégées Johnny Ace and his lovely wife Kali Verra dancing to their own monster mash and all the fellas/their wives, kids & gal mechanics on the Jalopy Journal HAMB & never forget ol’ Jess getting his start constructing bikes out of mom’s Long Beach garage and just look at him now sitting on top of the world and that loveable Germ and his fueled-up whirlwind-talking Tom Paine common sense outer limits a mile a minute always stirring up trouble
for the hell of it and his co-conspirator cynical scoundrel Harvester of Bondo (I still owe his good-looking face a slap) a modern day Sal and Dean lordsofhellfire making tracks and foreverly looking for girls, visions and kicks and yeah they’re a little wild but you couldn’t ask for better comrades they have each other’s backs like familia, when anybody falls down they’d share a wrench, hand, or greenback whatever it takes to get them back up on the bumpy highway of life in other words loyal, dedicated, smart and talented folks and metaphysical misfits but I’ll tell you what & this merely an innocent observation -take away their gasoline and guaranteed they’ll have some hillbillygearhead moonshine stills jerry-rigged out back figuring how to cook up a load because Whew! they are crazy ‘bout a Mercury looking oh so fine gonna buy a Mercury and cruise it up and down this road.
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Gregg Dotoli | Last Dance (Climate Tears) | Poetry the slow-burn endures as money-green carbon skeptics play a ravaging death dance acidic seas sway swinging to que sera, sera wind blasted trees stoop like ballerinas to gusting cracking notes Swaying to que sera, sera polar caps melting spawning new dirges and puzzling eerie weather rainbows and lightning form natural stages for the extant to extinct finale Biota in decline and decay Fragile and frail mumbles que sera, sera we’re not here to stay we’re not here to stay
Mark Myavec
Mark Myavec | The Face of Merlin | Photograph
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Michael Prihoda | My Dog | Fiction My dog is writing a horror novel and sometimes he asks me if parts make sense. The basic premise involves a human who goes apeshit and starts serial killing escaped zoo animals around the country. The killer is so hard to catch because he keeps moving, transferring IDs. He’s got passports for different countries and driver’s licenses from four different states (including New Mexico) but he generally prefers Greyhound buses for the irony. He carries a pitchfork, miniature-sized, so he can hide it in the special-made inner lining pocket on his double-breasted suit. I ask my dog if he’s ever worn a double-breasted suit. He tells me not to be ridiculous. Does he look like a fop? I tell my dog most writing workshops tell you to write what you know. He says only amateurs do that. When pressed, he goes to his kennel and pulls out a stack of rumpled pages that he hands to me. Upon reading, I realize it’s a manifesto concerning his life with me as owner. He’s already written what he knows and is moving on like any artist worth his salt and pepper. His manifesto is not flattering to me. I only read part of it and immediately make an excuse to go out and run to the store for better quality dog food. How he even knows which brand is good is beyond me but it costs more than how much I spend on food for myself in a week. I guess seeing my dog as an artist makes me think of him differently.
He shows me a new chapter he wrote about the newest closest call the serial killer has with the cops. They almost catch up to him in Reno and I ask my dog if he’s ever been to Reno? Because his scene at the courthouse (which becomes a chase through darkened Nevada streets, culminating in a pseudoshowdown which the anti-hero [his label, not mine] clumsily escapes, vowing never to repeat his mistake again) seems oddly visceral and insider, as if my basset hound worked as DA in Reno for a stint right after passing the BARR.
Eventually he tells me he’s thinking about sending his manuscript to agents. It’s not long until some agents are emailing him back and he’s glued to my computer screen, sorting through his offers for representation. His preferred publisher is Vintage, though how he earmarked them I don’t know. Toward the end he stopped asking me to weigh in on plot changes, character development, or the rhythm of a scene. I take it as a bad sign of his independence. I still pay for his dog food.
The agent he emails back comes over to our house and my dog tells me not to be a square, to offer the woman something to drink. All I have is sparkling water or milk. She opts for the water, then barely touches it. My dog and her talk shop all afternoon and he signs a contract.
Three months later my dog says he has someplace to be. Doesn’t give me more details. I see an interview of him on Ellen a couple days later. Then he goes to our local library for a reading. His agent leaves messages on my machine almost daily, giving him updates for book tour locations, quotes from reviews of his book, etc. She has a voice like a parakeet but I don’t know why I think that because I’ve never heard a parakeet definitively ever in my life before. My dog has signings and readings lined up for the entire summer and fall. Apparently spring release with a summer tour is the way to do it nowadays in the book world. I fly out to New York for the first reading of his tour, realizing when I land that I haven’t bothered to pick up a copy of the book yet, though it’s been out for weeks and it’s all the rage among contemporary horror/literary fiction. One of the messages his agent left on my machine said someone from The Times called it “a breath of fresh air for a lagging genre.” Somebody from The Washington Post noted how “it is a landmark in fiction: finally something from a non-human perspective. Just what literature has been waiting decades to sink its teeth into.” In another life I imagined my basset hound sinking his teeth into my copy of War and Peace. Or was that already my life but just in the past? I pick up a copy of his book before the reading and browse through it as I wait in a plastic chair some intern probably set up. I’m waiting to see my dog for what will be the first time in weeks. He’s too famous and busy to call me let alone stop in for a quick pet and evening watching Seinfeld. Something bothers me while paging through the book but I can’t place it until my dog finally comes out to wild applause from an audience whose demographic I can’t place. Then he starts reading and it hits me: the killer has the same name as me. After the reading I wait in line for two hours to get my copy signed, when actually I just want to confront him about why his killer ended up with my name, when all the drafts he’d shown me left him nameless. Finally, I’m at the front of the line and I flop the book on the table. His agent beams at his side, smiling and waving at the fans and cameras. “What the hell?” I say. “What are you talking about?” he says, his voice impassive, exactly like how basset hounds usually look when they are resting. “You know what I mean.” “You know what they say,” he says, red eyes meeting mine, “write what you know.” 11
JoAnna Michaels | Waterboard | Fiction I was 29, then. A young 29. Perhaps it was the years of dancing in bleak, smoke-filled clubs, or perhaps it was the childhood robbed by alcohol and cigarettes—another story for another time. I was 29. He was 28, younger by only 10 months, yet he teased me all the time. Cougar he’d say. We met by accident. A documentary I watched compelled me to email random soldiers about opening free clinics (something I still haven’t done) and I’d stumbled upon a beautiful man. The day he confessed his love, I fell in my closet. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it was foreshadowing, or maybe I just experienced a sudden drop in blood pressure. He flew to Austin and I wore a black dress. It was short. I had worn it for years, but for some reason it seemed appropriate. He later told me he hated the dress. I threw it down a garbage chute in NYC. He proposed twice, the second time, we both scrambled to take a knee, candied rings in hand. Our friends took photos. My jaw ached from smiling. I wore flip-flops. He hated flip-flops. In the week after our engagement, I wrote him love letters and send Haribo gummies. I tried to convince him we should wait. He was traditional and asked for my mother’s blessing. She exercised caution, told us to be practical. We didn’t listen. Once he asked me if I had been sent by his former unit to watch over him. He confessed to asking another soldier if I was FBI. He told me this as we drove in my Hyundai looking for pancakes or some other breakfast food. We introduced our friends. They were married several years later. I was a bridesmaid. He wasn’t there. My body was no longer predictable. The signals were crossed and I couldn’t give my future husband the parts that were meant to be given. They stayed locked no matter what we tried. Strike one. He called me one night drunk with his awkward roommate. “Is it wrong if I watch videos of abortions?” I laughed. This was foreshadowing. Strike two. The night before I moved to NYC, I told my mother that I would either make it or die. I’m still writing. You figure it out. I remembered the shower, just before we got in the car to drive to San Antonio. He was washing my hair. “You have to be prepared, JoAnna. You never know if we’re in Afghanistan---you’ll be tortured. I want to waterboard you.” I giggled. He was serious.
We got married in San Antonio. A ranger married us. How appropriate. He was still convinced I worked for the CIA. We honeymooned with bullets and overflowing bathtubs. He poured an entire bottle of shampoo into the tub. Bubbles were everywhere. We went to dinner and my dress blew up from wind. I heard lewd comments. We laughed and he snapped photos. At dinner, he told me he had the potential to destroy me. It was said as a mariachi band that he called over was playing to me on our wedding day. I believe that the cliché of time standing still wouldn’t do that polaroid justice. I asked him if we’d made a mistake. I don’t remember much else. Strike three. The letters came only days after we married, letters from women I had never met or heard about. I wonder how many had seen his bullet scar. I got pregnant immediately. It was said that I would never have children. We were at this fancy gala and I wore a fancy gown to fit in with fancy bougie college students who spent far too much money on closet sized living spaces. We were caught trying to fuck in a kitchen on a floor above the venue. “We have found the lovebirds,” a radio echoed. The condom broke that night. I got pregnant. I thought of that moment as a belligerent doctor was removing my daughter with a suction. She told me I was doing great. They told me I couldn’t have kids. She left half of her in me. For months. I thought, this is worse than waterboarding.
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Max Luque | Apology Peaches | Fiction Through the kitchen window, I watched you pull into the driveway and get out of the car. You held a paper bag in one hand and your briefcase in the other. I opened the door for you, and you stood there smiling at me as though we hadn’t argued that morning. “Hi,” you said. “How was your day?” You leaned closer to me, and I knew that you wanted me to kiss you, but I pretended not to notice. “What’s in the bag?” I asked. “They’re apology peaches.” You pulled one out and held it to my mouth. I felt the fuzz touch my lips, and I let you stand there like that, holding the peach up to me, looking stupid with your arm outstretched. I wanted you to feel stupid for a second. I wanted you to know what it felt like. Then I bit into it and took it from your hand, our fingers touching briefly. I wiped my lips with the back of my hand and stared at you, waiting for you to say something, but you didn’t. You nudged past me and walked into the kitchen, setting your briefcase on the table. You pulled out a chair with a scraping sound, and then, sitting down, you took another peach from the bag and started eating it. “I thought you got those for me,” I said. “Oh. Right.” But you kept eating it. “So. Apology peaches.” “Yeah.” You held yours up. “Usually people just bring flowers in these situations.” “But you love peaches,” you said. You smiled, and I wanted to scream at you. I couldn’t help but say, “Apologizing means, like, saying sorry and admitting wrongdoing. Understanding what you did wrong.” You looked at me, but you didn’t say anything. “You can’t just…you can’t just show up at the end of the day with a bag of fruit and expect me to be, like…happy about it. It doesn’t work that way. It takes a bit more.” “What do you want me to do, then?” “I want you to tell me you’re sorry. I feel like…I feel like you don’t even understand why I’m upset. You don’t even know why I was upset in the first place.” “That’s not true.”
“God damn it. You can’t just shove a fucking peach in my face and make me forgive you. Why is that so hard for you to understand?” Then you were silent. You put your half-eaten peach on the table next to your briefcase. “Leo. I’m sorry.” “It takes a bit more than that,” I said, and I felt the anger pressing on my skin. “I know that I was short with you this morning,” you said. “And I’m sorry about that. I really am. I have a lot of work things on my mind and…I know it was wrong of me to take it out on you. Do you feel better now?” I wanted to throw the peach at you, but I didn’t. I said, “I just don’t like it when you treat me in a way you shouldn’t just because you’re in a bad mood. It just hurts, that’s all. I just wish you could’ve apologized for it with your words first instead of trying to use peaches to get out of it.” You stared just past me at some spot on the wall. Then you closed your eyes and said, “When are you going to stop punishing me, Leo?” “What?” “When are you going to stop punishing me?” “What do you mean?” “I know that I hurt you before. I know that I did everything wrong before, but this is different now. This is me trying to be with you properly. This is me being with you for real, and you know that. You know that I’m not leaving.” “That’s the thing, though, Daniel. I don’t know that. I don’t know anything, okay?” “Leo, come on. It’s different now. This” – you stood up, spread your arms, and pointed at different parts of the kitchen – “This is ours. This is us being together. This is our house, and these are our things. I mean…I’m not leaving again. You need to believe me.” “You don’t get it.” I felt peach juice on my fingers. “I don’t know what you want me to get.”
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Max Luque | Apology Peaches
“You have no idea,” I said. “You don’t know what it was like for me.” “It’s different now.” “I know that, but…but you don’t get it. You just don’t get it. That type of thing…It really messes with me, you know? You were always like, ‘Oh, I’m back with my wife now. Oh, my wife is ending the separation and we’re not getting divorced. Oh, I can’t do this, because I can’t handle it. Oh, I love you, but I can’t be with you.’” “Leo.” “What? What do you want me to say? I’m not going to lie to you about this. It really, really fucked me up, okay? And you’ll never understand that. You’ll never know how it feels to be on the hook like that for so long, waiting and waiting around for you to be with me. I was, like, waiting for you to love me back for so fucking long.” I thought of all the times that I lay in bed and watched you get dressed and leave without looking at me. I thought of all the mornings when I woke up without you, when I didn’t know if I would see you again. You would leave me notes that told me not to call, notes that said, I can’t do this. I’m sorry. “Leo. Look at me,” you said. And I didn’t want to, but I did, because I always did what you asked. Then you said, “I always loved you.” “YOU BROKE MY HEART.” It came out of my mouth before I was aware of saying it, and it hung there in the air between us, loud and ugly. We stared at each other, a little breathless, and I wondered if you felt as scared as I did. I hadn’t yelled at you like that before. Slowly, you moved towards me, your hands out in front of you. You asked if you could touch me, and I nodded. Then you pulled me into you, wrapping your arms around me tight, until it was hard to breathe. You whispered, “You have to forgive me. Please forgive me. We can’t do this if you don’t.” “I’m trying,” I said, and it was true. “You know that I love you,” you said. You put your hands on my shoulders and made me look at you when you said it. “Of course I know that.” I let you kiss me, then I let you take the peach from my hand and throw it away. That night, we made dinner together, and though we spoke as though nothing had happened before, as though I hadn’t told you that you broke my heart, something was strained and different between us. We laughed a little too loud for a little too long, and
we were afraid of silence. We watched Food Network together, and not because we really liked it, but because we didn’t want to risk any kind of argument over what movie to watch. Sitting together on the couch, I rested my legs on your lap the way we both like it. You placed your hands on my knees. After two hours of watching television, you turned it off. You grabbed my legs and moved them off of you, then you took my hand and walked with me to the bedroom. It was something you hadn’t done before – taking my hand and leading me like that. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but before I could decide, we were sitting on our bed, your lips on my neck. I thought of that line from that song, the line that says, I don’t want to be your friend, I want to kiss your neck. I felt something breaking in my chest when I thought of that song, because it made me think of how it used to be. It made me think of the waiting, the waiting that seemed endless, but I still would’ve waited forever for you. And just as I began to wonder how I could’ve lost so much of myself, you were unbuttoning my shirt, and I found myself taking off your belt. “I love you,” you said when you were inside me. You made it last longer than usual, and I thought of all the things we’d never done together. We never danced together. We never went camping together. We never read to each other. We never went on vacation together – not really, not in the way that normal couples do. We never went to a wedding together. “What’s wrong?” you asked, stopping for a moment. “Nothing. I just…I love you, Daniel.” You smiled and started again, but you knew I was lying when I said that nothing was wrong. That’s why you held me a little closer that night when we slept. We woke up to your alarm at seven, and I felt your stubble scratch my cheek when you kissed me. I couldn’t look at you when you got up and walked into the bathroom. You closed the door, and when I heard you start the shower, I got out of bed and sat at your desk. Hands shaking, I picked up a pen and wrote you a note, then I placed it on your pillow. I can’t do this. I’m sorry. I love you. I put on some pants and a shirt, and then I went into the kitchen. The paper bag was still on the table, and I took one of the peaches. I went back into the bedroom and put it next to the note. And then I left.
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Ricky Garni | Costume | Prose
I ate a hamburger on Halloween and by the time I was finished everyone had dressed up into a costume and everyone had gone crazy. Not me: I went into a movie house instead and saw a movie about a crazy person dressed in a white shirt with a crisp collar unbuttoned at the neck. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that this was a costume. In fact, what I was wearing to see it was a costume. The movie theatre, also, was a costume. Those birds outside? A costume. Except for that one, walking across the street on Halloween, looking straight ahead as the cars begin to scream and honk.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan | Lord Hedge Yer Bets Leaves Another Speak Easy For a Government Posting | Poetry we were sitting there and then we weren’t the ashtrays overflowing with crushed out butts and someone took my chair but I kept sitting anyways on top of a washing machine full of spent shell casings alone, except for this goo that kept dripping from the ceiling eating through the enamel for father Interpol: no one beyond suspicion, the scurrying insect mind… and then we were sitting there again she drinking faster than I nervous ticks involving the impeachment process dalliances in buzzing honey trap motels toilet water armadas thrown over the face for luck and the bartender was a spikey Macaw named Stephen or Lord Hedge Yer Bets and our waitress was a broken coat hanger and the service was really bad and then it wasn’t.
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Sy Roth | The Murmuration of the Asp | Poetry Somewhere she dies alone No last words Only a muffled murmur, Hair left splayed like bloody splatter on her morning pillow. A cacophony of brooding silence follows. He meets the crisp morning, Mother’s ruby-luscious lips fresh image drags behind him. The wind waves a farewell to once-fulsome trees, Weeps of a long impending sleep. Fall’s smells fall under a frigid sun. Crisp air glides along Ruffles the fallen leaves. Glissando of giggling fingers slide up and down Along their spines, Rides them like a surfer held aloft on a wave. They revel in the gift of any early-morning tryst away from Lauer and the Gang and their daily buys. They all gather at the dance, The wives, the on-lookers, the brave Dr. Phil watchers Unbrushed and content in the hokum of their lives. They lift their arms in a Freitag stretch, Lust for toothpaste at the local CVS Run their tongues over their front-crusty teeth. Murmuration of hellos in a copse of phony smiles Amid morning Star headlines, And Chiron-streaming news on Fox Warning of fiscal cliffs, there on the flat screen in the 7-Eleven Amidst Isis Caliphates Their minds drawn away from the slithering, saturnine, sand castles That beckon them. An asp slithers in a frozen garden, beneath fallen bed of leaves Sibilates a silent message Lost, twisted in the synapses-tongue darting to test the morning air so promising in its infancy.
He runs his bifurcated tongue over his sandpaper teeth Spits at the world. A loudspeaker slices the glaciated halls. One assuages an innocent crown in the Gorgon-headed storm, Shoos the insistent boogieman Who conjoins them in his inferno.
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Dr. Mel Waldman | Coming HOme, My Beloved | Poetry (on reading Rafael Alberti’s poem Homecoming of Love Amongst Illustrious Ruins) Coming home, my beloved, to the phantom past that never dies we return to Manhattan gorgeous & glittering on a sensuous sultry summer night 2 decades ago near the end of the sprawling millennium & meet again at the St. Moritz on a dazzling dance floor beneath the swirling lights & bathed in opalescence you & I disappear in the swirl of the dance & whirl into the oneness of us & taste the blessing of the rhapsody & drink from the beautiful invisible the overflowing cup of
the ecstasy a cornucopia of love in yesterday’s landscape vanishing resurrected & everlasting & after our last dance we shall slow down & swirl into the stillness of invisibility & retreat & rest in the eerie remains of non-being & beckon all lovers to follow us find our secret path through the lost labyrinth of nowhere & listen to the voices of our vanishing visions & touch our otherworldly silence & travel to the lost city of love & travel where we disappeared in the swirl of the dance & travel into the House of Love & into the deep of the divine & into the deep of the divine
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Seth Ruderman | I stand outside of stonewall | Poetry I stand outside Stonewall On May 10, 2016 Daily News in hand Reporting the possible designation of this site as a national monument While I reflect on the monumental speech Loretta Lynch delivered yesterday to a nation Obsessed with bathroom rights but Blind to human rights. I stand outside Stonewall A straight man Raised in this city’s Koch-era of Willfull blindness To pain To suffering To silence To love To freedom To death While I sat in a high school Just a few miles away On this island Oblivious. I stand outside Stonewall Longing for a cousin Who loved me As he drove this five year old Through the streets of Brooklyn Shotgun in his red sports car Robin to his Batman Tom to his Jerry Until one day he was sick And then sicker And then sicker Without explanation Without answers With whispers That should have been shouts That should have been rage That were buried Never unearthed
Leaving me more comfortable in my minivan Than I would ever be in another red sports car. I stand outside Stonewall A father Thinking of my own two children at home Praying that this place stands Screams Shouts Forever So I can take them Right after we visit the lady in the harbor And let them know It’s OK To love Honor Cherish Whoever you want However you want That there will be no more family whispers. I stand outside Stonewall An ally.
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Jennifer Lothrigel | Forgot to Be Ashamed | Poetry I crawled into the burnt hollow of a thousand year old redwood tree, lay my head on her fallen arm, sunk my hips into her roots. On the ground at her feet, I loosened my blouse, wrote new memories with holy dirt across my chest, my breasts rested against a soft heritage. I forgot to be ashamed, my belly kissed her thighs, forgot to be ashamed, lay against her fire scarred trunk forgot to be ashamed, our tissues listened to each other’s survival stories.
Gordan Ćosić
Gordan Ćosić | Idyll | Photograph
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Christopher Barnes | Lord Byron Spellchecks an Application | Poetry Dear object that mall-rats pinch, feel, bag Though now of Love a two-a-penny Man at C&A-type suit To reconcile the out-classed fastidiousness in job interview ranks Thine image is taedium vitae, corporate, unproductively waged Glossary: Mall-rats: shoppers Man at C&A: unadventurous Taedium vitae - a dull life
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 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 seven years, and hopefully many, many more.
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Mark Myavec
Mark Myavec | Jam Session | Photograph