the
b’k
bitchin’ kitsch
7 Iss. 9 Sep 2016 Vol.
The Talent
Cover: “The Astronomer” by Anselmo Alliegro. Mike Andrelczyk Jon Beight Elena Botts Andy Brown Cathy Cavallone Gordon Ćosić L.D. Diem Laura Fairgrieve Daniel Ross Goodman Sasheera Gounden Gary Lundy Mark Mitchell Tony Roberts Thomas Rocha W. Jack Savage Sanjeev Sethi JL Smith Ethan Sturm Dr. Mel Waldman Phil Wexler Peabody Winston
20 10 11 19 3 30 18 8 12-14 15, 25 17 24 9 6-7 5, 21 28 26 4 22-23 16 27
Cathy Cavallone | Matter | Poetry we are matter – solid, liquid, gas corpuscles, innumerable, teaming for a place, a face – we are madder, madder than hell and we are not going to take it anymore because we matter, Black lives madder more than white – atom climbing atom cylindrical homicide of matter – tooth, hair, meat, bone, blood – dominoes of matter, then madder of course toppling, this cube of earth that diorama of diarrhea that thing that matters worth shit.
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Ethan Sturm | and one day you wake up and everything is unfamiliar | Poetry in the way a blank page never quite feels empty. in the way a book is never quite the same a second time through. in the way you hear your name and it no longer sounds like reassurance. like the moment you wake up in bed and it’s morning but you don’t quite remember lying down the night before. as if the choice was made for you. as if you were placed there unknowingly. as if all of this is a dream sequence that just keeps skipping ahead. one moment you are in a forest. through the canopy sunlight hits your face. all of a sudden you’re still in the same forest but it’s nightfall. every noise preying on uncertainty. and you crumble into the dirt as if it were routine. what makes a grave shallow they ask. is it the depth of the earth or the unjustifiable reason behind the death? notice how a black boy is always a thug when he comes out of the reporter’s mouth. look how an officer’s uniform has become synonyms with not guilty. notice how i did not say innocent.
w. Jack Savage
w. Jack Savage | A Confrontation | Painting
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Thomas Rocha | A Patch of Dirt, a Piece of Sky | Poetry You are not small. You stretch across the known and unknown universe. Stars engulfed in your every breath. World’s ending by the onerous blink of your infinite eyes. You wonder about morality and right, while the populations of planets plea for you to be still. What’s right is right, what’s wrong is wrong, just don’t kill us all. Not until my son has grown, not until I’ve touched the face of my grandchild again, not until I’ve finally fucked someone, anyone, just let me live a little bit longer. I know you don’t know me, but you’ve killed me so many times. I had a bowl of rice this morning. The grains, so white they hurt, they clumped there in my bowl. I sat staring at them, the first thing that I’d had to eat all day. The grains, little oblongs pearls of sticky starch, so beautiful. I salted the bowl with what little seasoning I could squeeze from my spent ducts. The universe spun around me. You stared at me from across the infinite space between us. You are not quiet. Your whispers shake the foundations of the stars. The galaxies shudder in their rush away from the last time you spoke. You talk about your plans in secret, and billions tremble under stretched out hands. I embraced my wife this morning, and I couldn’t let her go. We stood there, with your whispers ringing in our ears, and the vibrations shook us like rag doll caricatures of leaves. I held her, and she went to work. She held me, and I went to the grocery store. Across the divide, our arms stretched, boneless. Desperate. The spiral arms of the milky way entwined themselves with ours. You spoke to me as though I were a child.
You do not smell sweet. The retching masses gather in your cathedrals. They lean in close to smell each other, and only smell you, and think that they must all smell the same. The bloodhounds wander in the fields and forests, looking for the murderers that have disappeared into your miasma. I gathered all the wildflowers I could this day. Baskets and bushels of flowers shrugged at my demands for something, anything, to fill my nostrils but you. I ground them with my pestle: chlorophyll, damascenone, myrcene, ocimenol. I packed them into my nostrils, shoved them into my sinuses, wrapped bandages around my face to keep the smells where I wanted them. The stars streamed past my windows. You walked by me in multitudes, the breeze of your infinite passing grinding your broken glass scent into my olfactory nerves.
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Laura Fairgrieve | Boyscout’s Letter to President Reagan | Poetry Mr. Reagan, I think you’re really right, Detente is for sissies, and we all know that you got money where your mouth is you’ll annihilate them all. You see, I’ve watched Star Wars, so I know what this whole cold mess is all about I could spot a sith lord a mile away and let me tell you stick a hood on old Khrushchev and he’s a dead ringer for, a truly twisted twin of, yep- Darth Sidious he’ll harness that blue light and gun us all down with the lightning I know he’s got under his sleeve. Mr. President I’m aces at ducking for cover they ain’t throwing any people, and neither are we with no one pointing the gun, how bad could it be, no guys means no aim so I’m under my desk in a flash when the warning bells ring I’ll outlive any crappy bomb they could throw Just watch — I’ll boil a can of beans on a radioactive flare. I know how things go when the Evil Empire is blowing some steam, shooting its mouth off so since after all, In God We Trust I dusted off Dad’s old bible, checked it over real good for instructions on how to bat against ballistics how to build us the best electric fence, and shoot off a missile or two, for you know, defense and I swear God said it, Mr. Reagan you’ve got it — lick them good, right, before they lick you.
Tony Roberts | Submission Guidelines | Prose 1. Read all past copies of our publication. Write a 1000-word essay on the one you found most meaningful, including at least 55 footnotes. 2. Write a short biography (less than 15 words) including your mother’s maiden name, your country of origin, and the past six sexual relationships you’ve had. Be sure to write this in the first person plural. 3. Use Times New Roman font, double-spaced, justified, title in italics, 1-inch margins, black ink, on a dot-matrix printer. 4. Our submission period is from February 27 - February 29. Any work that comes in early or late will be thrown upon an ash heap where it will never be discovered again. 5. We charge a reading fee of $37 for the first submission and an additional $55 for each succeeding transmission. In return, should you be published, we will cut your piece out of our publication and send it in an 8 ½ x 11 envelope, pay on delivery. 6. You must submit unpublished work. No material previously shared in print, blogs, Facebook, e-mails, or with friends and family, including those within your immediate household will be considered. 7. We want to develop an exclusive, on-going relationship with our authors. All rights to your work, past, present, and future, will be the sole property of this publication. 8. Our response time is 1-2 years. Don’t contact us; we’ll contact you.
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Jon Beight | red Tide | fiction This morning I was up early from a dream that startled me awake. Soaked in sweat and needing fresh air, I decided to go for a walk along the beach as mornings there have always invigorated me. As I walked I tried to reconstruct the fragments of the dream. The gist of it was that I stood alongside God while we watched a pair of birds in a tree. I began to sob uncontrollably as I repeatedly told Him I was afraid to die. I’d hoped for some solace, but He said nothing. It was with the aid of approaching daylight that I first saw them, lying perfectly still on the wet sand, remnants of the ebbing sea. Scattered here and there, they looked stunned, frightened. Toward the edge of the surf there were more. Dead fish. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Victims of a red tide. All of them at the mercy of the waves that washed in and out. They were in the shallows, making the ocean seem slow and viscous. No longer masters of the water, they rolled and tumbled over each other as they helplessly rushed in with surge. A few of the fish came to a stop where I stood. Their large black eyes stared blankly while their gills and jaws pulsed in a broken rhythm. I wondered if they thought they were dreaming and were waiting for me to provide some sort of comfort. I had nothing I could offer them.
Elena Botts
Elena Botts | Untitled | Graphite on paper 11
Daniel Ross Goodman | Let the wild Rumpus begin! Alice in Wonderland in the context of world literature | Non-fiction When I was a child I read The Phantom Tollbooth. And then I read it again. And again. And again and again. Something about The Phantom Tollbooth, my all-time favorite book, spoke directly to something in the depths of my seven-year-old soul. If the Jesuits (“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”) are right, then the man whose words you are reading is actually a phantasmagoric Phantom of your imagination. (Which reminds me—I should add that I was also infatuated with The Phantom of the Opera, in all its iterations.) I don’t know exactly why I loved (and still love) The Phantom Tollbooth, and why I now love The Magic Mountain so much as a young adult, but each time I read these books, I experience mingled sensations of wonder, strangeness, and dreaminess. Perhaps I read The Phantom Tollbooth over and over—and perhaps I have now eagerly begun my ascent of The Magic Mountain—because, like the young Hans Castorp longing to hear his Grandfather tell the story of the family’s christening basin again, I also longed for these sensations again and again. Thus, it was with great delight that your dear narrator discovered that the most cherished novel of his childhood has deep roots in another strange, wondrous, dreamy bildungsroman novel, a fantastic work of imaginative fiction whose 150th anniversary we celebrated last year: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Little did I know then that the literary crucible out of which the most beloved book of my bildung burst forth came from that scintillating subversive star stoked many years ago by a man who called himself Lewis Carroll (né Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). Last year, multiple municipalities across the country, from New York to Los Angeles and Austin in between, commemorated Alice’s 150th birthday. The sheer number of Alice’s influences are astounding—far too many to chronicle here— from children’s books to movies (the 2010 Alice film is Tim Burton’s highest grossing film, which is saying something for the director of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and two Batman movies) to plays and toys and coloring books, but how about the actual book itself? I wonder if even half the people who saw Burton’s film or who have seen one of the dozens of televised or animated Alice adaptions have actually read the original. This is obviously unfortunate, and it’s a growing fact of life in our audio-visual-technological attenuated-attention-span age. But this unfortunate fact of human nature—that we are more easily captivated by pictures than to words, especially if those pictures are moving—is not unique to us twentyfirst century citizens. It was a dilemma diagnosed, ironically enough, by Deacon Dodgson himself. (Carroll was an ordained reverend who lectured in mathematics at Oxford and wrote fiction in lieu of entering the ministry.) Alice’s Adventures begins when Alice “peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had not pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’” Are we not all Alice? Be that as it may, the truly proper way to celebrate Alice’s 150th anniversary is not by being seeing the movie, and not even by attending one of the museum exhibitions
about Alice, but by actually reading the book. And when we do so, we, like Alice, quickly discover that reading—especially reading a work of elaborately imaginative fiction in which we stage Alice’s of adventures in our own minds—is the most exquisite palliative for boredom ever devised by human minds. What is revelatory for this rambunctious reader is that not only The Phantom Tollbooth but also The Magic Mountain are streaked with the sparkling stripes of Alice’s unmistakable influence. All three novels feature seemingly ordinary, young, mediocre anti-hero-type protagonists (Alice, Hans Castorp— demeaned as “mittelmäßig” [mediocre] by Mann himself—and Milo) who unwittingly embark upon strange, extraordinary, dreamy, wondrous voyages to romantic realms which appear at first merely benign—if quite “curious” (notice how many times people are “curious” in Alice and The Magic Mountain)—but soon become bewildering, unsettling, insidious, and eventually life-threatening. These anti-heroes are each ushered into these weird self-contained worlds by odd individuals who possess insider insight of these mysterious domains: the White Rabbit, Hans’s cousin Joachim Ziemssen, and a talking dog named Tock (called thus because his body bears a ticking clock). These unspectacular persons encounter eccentric individuals, confront peculiar circumstances, and engage in Odysseus-esque odysseys through their respective mad, uncanny, unconventional Kingdoms of the Shades. The exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat—“But I don’t want to go among made people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you ca’n’t [sic] help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all made here. I’m mad. You’re mad”—could just as easily have been had between Hans Castorp and Herr Settembrini. We are by now familiar with modern odysseys, contemporary hero-journeys, and various fantastic fables of this adventure-romance genre, but what may be unfamiliar is how radical Alice’s hero-journey was when it first appeared. Alice in Wonderland is as rooted in The Odyssey (as well as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) as The Phantom Tollbooth and The Magic Mountain are rooted in Alice; these newer literary stars were each formed out of elements that sprung forth from that original ancient literary supernova, and were further infused with particles and influences from another elemental literary journey through a shadowy underworld kingdom—Dante’s The Divine Comedy. But whereas classic, traditional hero-journeys always had a telos—there was a purpose to the hero’s journey (Odysseus returning home; Dante escaping inferno and reaching paradiso)—and always took place in a rational world with stable meanings and conventional morality, Alice is a hero-journey without a telos. And Wonderland is an irrational world without stable meaning and without conventional morality. Alice radically subverted the hero-journey genre of Homer and Dante, and literary odysseys have never quite been the same since. Indeed, what made—and still makes—Alice not only so revolutionary, but so lovable and so meaningful, is the paradoxical nature of the novel itself: Alice’s lack of meaning is what makes it so meaningful. Its vision of a world without a fixed set of meanings was radical in its time, and continues to be radical today.
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Daniel Ross Goodman | Let the wild Rumpus begin! Alice in Wonderland in the context of world literature Alice not only animates all subsequent odd hero-odysseys like The Phantom Tollbooth and The Magic Mountain, but also even influenced the quantum cosmic escapades of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics— Calvino admitted as much himself. Alice is less a character than an archetype who travels through her own absurd space-and-time continuum just as much as Calvino’s ageless Qfwfq is an impersonal archetype who courses through the absurd quantum chaos of the cosmos. And in his short story “How Much Shall We Bet?”, Calvino’s quantum wanderer even comes to a Carroll-esque conclusion concerning the absurd nature of his Wonderland—the cosmos: “a pasta (doughy mass) of events without form or direction, which surrounds, submerges, crushes all reasoning.” The absurdity of Alice’s adventures thus also anticipates Albert Camus’ literature (and philosophy) of the Absurd. Alice is an Odysseus without a telos, a Gulliver without a political consciousness, and a Qfwfq without immortality. And she is Maurice Sendak’s Max and Mickey of Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen, romping in the wild rumpus of their own wonderland-dreamlands. But she is also a Meursault without a murder, swept up by events out of her control, trapped in Wonderland as Meursault is in his cell—both of whom are trapped in worlds without any meaning except that which they create for themselves—unable to cope with the illogical logic, byzantine procedures, and absurdity of events enveloping them except by labeling them as utter nonsense, by screaming “you’re nothing but a pack of cards!” at those around them who confound them, which is what Meursault essentially exclaims to the flabbergasted chaplain at The Stranger’s dénouement. They started from different points, but the kindred-spirited clan of Carroll, Calvino and Camus all came to the same conclusion arrived at by a certain dark Shakespearean Scottish king: we live in a wonderland, full of absurd sound and senseless fury, signifying nothing. Alice is often thought of as one of the great works of children’s literature. Its influence can certainly be sensed in later sophisticated high-fantasy children’s literature such as C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, the work of Madeleine L’Engle and Ursula K. Le Guin, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and, of course, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. But make no mistake about it: Alice is not only a novel for children. It is just as—if not more—essential reading for adults. Alice speaks to adults who, like Camus’ Meursault, Mann’s Castorp, and Kafka’s collected characters, live in a world of absurdity and paradox—a world without any clear meaning, a world in which the only moral is that “perhaps it hasn’t one,” a world in which the only certainty (aside from death—an omnipresent reality ominously lurking in Alice’s “children’s story”) is the ludicrous fact of uncertainty, the reality of the surreal, and the existence of the ludicrous. Alice is no more “children’s literature” than Hamlet and Macbeth are “ghost stories.” That Alice firmly lays its roots in the hero-journey tradition of The Odyssey and sprouts forth offshoots which have seeded some of the greatest literature of recent history, like The Magic Mountain and Calvino’s Cosmicomics, should be evidence enough of Alice’s seriousness as a still-great novel deserving to be read by all serious readers. But its eternal message seals its greatness: that at the ground of all being is a presence that is utterly baffling—an essence which can only be understood by embracing non-understanding. Absurd? Of course it is. And this is the vitality of Alice: it teaches us that we need to preserve a sense of nonsense if we are to make sense of our nonsensical world. And it continues to teach us that the absurd fact of human existence is that our existence is completely, totally, utterly absurd. It is not Alice who’s in Wonderland—it’s us. You and me.
Sasheera Gounden
Sasheera Gounden | Dinner Guest | Oil pastel on paper 15
Phil wexler | Gap | poetry For years now, the seat cushions of the loveseat would not fit together no matter how hard or often they were fluffed and rearranged and turned upside down. This heart shaped gap between them where they touched the one piece back, and in that space every lamentation and yearning of the couple that tried but could not fit.
Gary Lundy | walk her outside. or imagine | prose alarm clock after four a.m. never rational enough to stop panic attack. a saturday morning coffee break. you get royally pissed automatically doing it. and you’ve written a horse before riding it. a guitar and lovely voice erased. it’s the cut of clothing lithe figurine. the ugly old miserable man has never wanted to put his fingers through a mans hair before. the crouching miserable old man blocks the way. looks you eye to eye. a first even at that age. while his two cohorts entitlement draped over their shoulders. worn as proud hats. an old divorce papers the air. construct world unquestioned real. the beautiful trans woman. no. the beautiful woman bludgeoned just because. he could. he might be found out. a man. a marine engages his dark secret. all over her dying body. at least you had a chance to see her briefly today. while latex creates its sudden curricular possibility. dust balls windowsills. stop it. just stop it. about the time as a boy you knock another boy down concrete stairs. all for brushing your shoulder with his. what it can mean. what it after all does mean. this never happens as such. this is never sexual which comes later. which means it is always sexual. genital day dreams. a small drop of moisture on the page blurs meaning. young boys already their miserable old selves. and so full of that fear. they might too be. just stop it. to represent dimension how to operate the machine. and another woman. another. another. to be attacked merely because.
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L.D. Diem | the secret | Poetry I never thought about killing myself until I imagined losing my daughter to some horrible illness seeing her deteriorate like I did my father — for eight years of his life it was something my 23 year old self would take years to process and even at 33, I still feel damaged My psychiatrist would say that these events contribute to the what if’s that swirl freely around in my head still, I run my fingers over her body each night checking for inconsistencies, scrapes-lumps I twirl locks of her fine blond hair as she forcefully jabs her tiny fingers on the IPad obsessively searching for her favorite video on You Tube an inhabitant of her mama’s OCD my husband tells me she will be fearful of the world of sickness of taking risks my small, fierce girl I am not worried — you are a force to be reckoned with don’t they know?
Andy Brown | Seeing Tide Turn | Prose I blew a kiss to the policeman who I thought had waved to me from the other side of the road. At traffic lights I saw on my left a pretty blonde PCSO* wondering how I knew her man; if I was a threat. She had followed me from Gordano Services roundabout although she had been in the wrong lane. I watched her in my rear view mirror for a few miles until we stopped side-by-side and she indicated left at LIDL’s; that was when I saw the policeman on the opposite side wave vigorously, maybe to the PCSO. I responded well, drove to the seafront, watched Wales wither within sight of soft, silent, tide. Houdini sleight of hand magic conjured cloned poodles along with manufactured moaning mistresses. I asked if dog-walking was slimming. Then all was still, nothing stirred, my ninety-six-year-old mother complained it was too hot in the car. Wound-down window allowed slight breeze, beckoned attention to peripheral action, to the left emboldened fish flotilla flew out the cafÊ door, licked lips, skimmed mudflats, held an airborne agenda meeting; unusual as they had been known as a chaotic breed, land-bound, safe, never leaving dry dock. To the right an exclusive packed lido, unconcerned chatter, full, fat bodies spring-boarding to death. Mum smiled, spoke of having previously seen tide turn. *PCSO - Police Community Support Officer
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Mike Andrelczyk | A Rupture | Poetry The last star in the almost pink dawn disappears as the largemouth bass surfaces, rolls back into the rippling stream, fades into dark green weeds The last tsar denies he’s the tsar, slumps beside his broken Saab, swears to Christ under a pink moon, mouths a promise to a sleeping sister At last rats gnaw on shredded rubber tires, teeth sharp as the silver water that wears away the stone guarding the oily pink tomb The last arts of the masters of pink marble, enliven dead eels to a final samba, crown the sobbing kings of tar, thumb back the miles on stolen odometers
w. Jack Savage
w. Jack Savage | Watching It Burn | Painting
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Dr. Mel Waldman | Inside the Theater of Perception & Through the Window of My Mind I Look out & You Look in At The Light of Unreality | Poetry (on reading Denise Levertov’s poem — The Gypsy’s Window) Inside the Theater of Perception & through the window of my mind I look out at the rushing waves of illusion spilling unholy humans, eerie objects, & bestial ghosts into the mournful streets of existence & with battered breaths I watch the wild flow unfathomable uncanny & listen to the roar of gunmetal holograms so strangely familiar & foreign & when I look out, you look in at the light of unreality of my vanishing being & mystery & swallow a glowing evanescence & in the mirror of your haunting eyes, what have you captured? What do you cradle in your sweeping evanescent vision? What do I see?
I am the centerpiece in an open window, a still object that you observe on the Lilliputian stage-of an unreal room of lacerated luminescence, swirling & spinning away-looking up from a bruised, broken sidewalk of Brooklyn, gazing at me & my double & my ghosts through the aperture of my universe, licking & lashing a lost ephemerality; trapping, engulfing, & letting go of the unfathomable me, until you look again, from afar, at the fixed frozen object on the window, encircled by a ring of still life, as real as the chimerical self & the fantastic kingdom of non-existence, & in the black hole of your harrowing eyes, you hold a terrible truth. Do I see the fluttering black wings of everlasting death swooping down from the black skies of your ebony eyes? Or do I witness a beautiful alchemy-a sweeping shroud of darkness becoming unbearable light? Inside the Theater of Perception & through the window of my mind I look out & you look in at the light of unreality. What do we see? What do we become? Within the circle of still life that swirls around me, I am not alone. & we are one.
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Mark Mitchell | Shipwreck | Poetry after Jules Supervielle A table quite close, a lamp very far that won’t be joined in irritated air, and as far as the horizon—nothing but empty beach. A man in the sea is waving his arms, crying, “Help!” An echo’s replying, “What do you mean by that?”
Sasheera Gounden
sasheera gounden | split | oil pastel on paper
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JL SMith | wonderful liar | fiction She asked me how she looked tonight. I was caught and I knew it. The bedroom light dimmed as she sat before her brass vanity, hair brush in hand, paused mid-stroke, waiting for my answer. My mother waited eleven years before she started dating again. Eleven years after I was born and my father left. Five years after her mother, whom she nursed through terminal cancer while she raised me, died. That same mother who told her teenage daughter she was not beautiful. The one with the dark, wavy hair in the black and white picture I found so long ago. The one who was a pinup in the 1940’s for overseas GIs. My mother had worn her hair the same way for over ten years. She changed only the hue over time from brunette to blonde. However, the makeup was heavier and darker than her fair, ruddy skin needed. The same skin she despised in the summer as too white, too pale. The same skin she soaked in iodine and baby oil and baked in the sun for hours as I stayed inside, worrying about skin cancer and the lack of appropriate SPF. I wanted to be truthful. I wanted to tell her that I wish I could strip her down like a Russian matryoshka doll. Down to the core. Down to what she was really was like, not how she wanted to be on the outside. The tiny bit of her that could be happy. Instead, I thought of the Eric Clapton’s song “Wonderful Tonight,” and how he was able to convince his lover that she was beautiful no matter what, but I knew I was not that good. I knew it won’t matter if I answered in the affirmative. It is not the same as a lover’s, or even, a mother’s approval. And, at fourteen, I did not risk answering such a loaded question in the negative. So, I smiled as wide as I could. “You look great!” “You are just saying that,” she said. She held the brush out and I feared a lashing. “You don’t really mean it.” She then turned away. I insisted through hidden tears that it was true, but she was right. I was a liar, and it was okay. The subject changed, and she left me to find a new audience.
Peabody Winston | Clean | Prose Under the same sun, with solar winds blowing, the same clean smell of what grandma’s and mom’s were knowing: That the clean energy, was the best energy. Blow the shorts, and the shirts, and your husband’s handkerchief in that hot Arizona sun, in that cleansing fresh breeze of just cut lawns, or irrigated. Just add water, a minimum of water, a little taste of soap, and hang these pants and ladies underthings on that rope, stretched across the desert sky for all of nature and God to see. God likes the smell of fresh laundry hanging on the line. Clean, heavenly, nice, with the sound of birds and shirt tales snapping. I have brought the sensibilities of the mining town with slag fireworks at night, and the 24th street Phoenix of renewed life----each piece of laundry to come out fresh from the fires of the sun, and the magic clothespin. The Phoenix work clothes disguise, to drape himself on your cleansed for work, coffee’d up body, to tackle another day. I have brought the Arizona old school, to the volcano Pele new school of this Kingdom island, and this fresh breeze, 82 to 88 degree perfect smelling with just a hint of salt water Pacifica added to the mix. From our palm trees to yours, the sun travels the generations, the sun travels in righteousness, the sun, wind, and waters are still clean. Our souls and characters have a way to go to get back to that time when innocence was not taken away by the single stroke of an application. Back, to the magic of the clothespin. To clean. Clean.
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Sanjeev Sethi | Offertory | Poetry
Skeptical of unveiling a veridical sketch I spawned portraits that did not concur with my situation. Visualizing my soon to-be station, I could sense a revision in your cues. It wasn’t an unchaste reflex. It wasn’t heartache robed in resentment but grief that sometimes grips us when we wonder: why not us? Conscious of this I couriered you a hamper. You’re convinced I do things for plastic points.
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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Gordan Ćosić
Gordan Ćosić | Oasis | Digital Art