INSURGENT
ART
ISSUE II
FEATURING:
NICHOLAS GALANIN/SAM ROXAS-CHUA/CASSANDRA KESSLER/ CONSTANCE CHAN/GUILLERMO ADRIAN/RICARDO ESTRADA/ CALLUM SIMMONS/VOTAN HENRIQUEZ/CONSTANT L. WILLIAMS/ TOM SANFORD/NATALIE STAMATOPOULOS/MORGAN DEZURN/ KRISTEN SIMON/THIBAULT CLAIRIS-GAUTHIER/JILLIAN BAKOS/
COVER ART BY NICHOLAS GALANIN
INSURGENT ART ISSUE II *
I am signaling you through the flames.
The North Pole is not where it used to be.
Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.
Civilization self-destructs.
Nemesis is knocking at the door.
What are poets for, in such an age? What is the use of poetry?
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a nonAmerican, you can conquer the conquerors with words.
FERLINGHETTI“POETRY AS INSURGENT ART�
OVERTURE SAM ROXAS-CHUA
And then a pig rises out of the smoke and sings in the middle of the bombing—these gray metal fruits, sons of so and so.
And then a little girl holding flowers in her hands, loses the color of their compositions, forever. She was found with her eyes open, a pendant of shrapnel in her left cornea reflecting an image of her mother running to cover her. Both bodies smell of sweet clove and cinnamon.
And then a girl’s hijab is yanked from her head because of a white boy who was taught to part his hair to the right. A boy who was taught that there is only one word for prayer and it is in English.
And then a mother mixing rubble-flour will serve her family chalky prayer bread and her husband will throw a shoe at her. Her sons will pierce her belly repeatedly with plastic forks looking for her last eggs.
And then somewhere in the constitution of mountains have buckled us here, we hear the Orange curtain will replace our sunset. A storm will come, carrying the taste of lost suitcases, cameras, and dried skin of journalists from everywhere.
And then the pig will sing a requiem as the storm wails above teenagers huddled under a tent with traces of soot in their voices.
And then their fathers will drum their fingers on their throats, ask them to dance the pitik-pitik before the journey, the kill, before the gloat. Heaven is closed until further notice. And they will refuse.
And then the cantaloupe will be offered in a dream, my dream, where my trumpet calls to continents made of throw-bones. Under the mouth of my trumpet hangs the head of the pig.
And then like Goliath I am struck down, my cantaloupe falls and is coated with sand and teeth—my dream fails.
And then there will be peace for a day, lungs stitched, hearts replaced by smaller hearts, faces salved, bones hung on flags to remember peace.
And then it will rain and no one will remember what wet is like or how sand surrenders to rain—how gunfire does not echo in the rain, how one wound will give itself many names—
Soldier. Warrior. Defender.
And how another girl chewing seeds will have to tuck her garden away. In that garden, desert ants will find a home, drum their chests on the ground—a broadcast of echoes �in a valley made of shard.
And they grind their teeth, these ants. They begin to speak, make flags, learn a language, lift gold books in the air and say It has
been said and so it shall be done. Make America Great Again. The Price is Right. The Girls are Golden. White is white is white is white is white is white is white is white is white is white, white trump white trump white trump white trump white trump white trump white trump. They come marching.
And at our Sunday home, I hear Pastor Frank say that God had his womb removed. That night I put a black sheet over me and pushed my penis inside my boyless body and I sang and sang the songs of my dead friends who spoke in pink—those words the color of lesions, of wounds, of tongues that demanded medicine. Where are superheroes now?
HAIR CONSTANCE CHAN You find the black filaments choking your drain, clinging to shower walls like inscrutable calligraphy, when extracted, a drowned pelt stranded on enamel shore, small black wreaths of melanin nesting in corners. When I was twelve, I blanched my hair beach blonde, the bleach stinging my hair like a hundred fluid bees, combed out Clairol 7th stage chiaroscuro— I’ve heard Michelangelo went nearly blind from years of toxic dyes and solvents, wings of angels dripping into his eyes. I too had such a vision: song girls in maxi dresses that were white white white, Scandinavian kings, peaked helmets melting into gold braids, gleaming in front of funeral pyres. I stopped dying my hair the day I learned about Chinese workers building tunnels in the Sierra Nevada, a hundred bodies black with coal and the gutted sides of mountains swept underneath the clean death of avalanche, twenty thousand nameless bones on a China-bound ship in the pale bald air of morning.
I stopped dying my hair the first day I was called a Chink— or was it the seventh—or the seventy times seven— the day I tried to speak more white, just a hint of Southern accent, just a sliver of salted butter, just a tablespoon of cold pressed kale or your daddy’s Jim Morrison records, these acquaintances catching onto my tongue like hooks. I stopped scorching ivory Americana into my scalp, afraid, yet again, of erasure. Somewhere Nietzsche stirs in his sleep among charred poppies, dreaming of My noble race, My Alpha my avalanche My mouth protruding from the red white blue podium My hair falling to my waist like a rope My hair blowing behind me in the winds behind Union Station like a black banner, black black and beautiful
MORGAN DEZURN
NICHOLAS GALANIN
RICARDO ESTRADA
TOM SANFORD
CALLUM SIMMONS
VOTAN HENRIQUEZ
VOTAN HENRIQUEZ
CONSTANT L. WILLIAMS
101 FREEWAY NEAR ALAMEDA STREET, NOVEMBER 9th CONSTANT L. WILLIAMS
Inmates pounding rhythmically on ashen walls. Flickering slivers of light cast through cell window-slits. A flurry of flesh rounding the corner of an on-ramp, haloed by the silken outburst of outlawed stars. A masked shadow paces tentatively out of sight, trailed by hundreds of invocating lips. The bridges are laden with dilating pupils. Throngs of shirtless silhouettes scatter across walls. Flashing sirens. A stained-glass tint of coral and viscous sea-blue. The freeway cleaved in two. One side—passengers holding phones like crucifixes and sitting silently in the briny pews of stationary cars, spellbound at the sacrilege manifesting before them. On the other—a long stretch of day-gray void. Blue freedom. Nakedness. A stampede of foals loosed wildly into the myrrh-scented entrance of a basilica. Such emptiness, a rarity. A blessing. The priests arrive, drenched in crimson chrism. They are robed in black padding, loose masks. Most are mute but some shout Hail-Marys, and drag wriggling stragglers into the darkness. And despite the roaring litanies fired at fleeing feet, despite the torrid love affair between stone and glass, despite a car rocked from side to side like a thurible, a circle is formed by kaleidoscopic clasped-hands, a car drives away safely.
CASSANDRA KESSLER
CASSANDRA KESSLER
UNCLE TRUMP KRISTEN SIMON You tell me your way is right, Mouth closed, Restrict my freedom, Be lethal With my people, I see all those lies you try and feed em' I see in your eyes you have no reason, You can't relate with the weight on our shoulders when switching seasons, You ain't never had to duck on the floor when they pull trigger and watch the bullets leave em' You don't know, But you know how to erase all these mistakes? You believe if you not convicted then it couldn't possibly be rape, You building walls just to keep them away, We are small on your scale, But if we don't like it we should move to Canada eh? You wanna reach my people, Look at us as your equal, You wanna make American great again? I fear to see the prequel, I fear to see you stronger watch you conquer everything that we have worked for, Uncle Trump, Uncle Sam, Uncle Bush, I don't know which one hurt more, You don't care to see us dirt poor, You don't care to see our daughters being slaughtered by the work force. And you don't care that our sons love a son, They gon' have to get a divorce or ridiculed and discriminated by your hatred that don't understand the meaning of being free, You wanna make America Great again? Fuck wit us and then you'll see.
THIBAULT CLAIRIS-GAUTHIER
NATALIE STAMATOPOULOS
GOG, MAGOG, DEMAGOGUE GUILLERMO ADRIAN my american pals it is i your friendly foreign internet poet i have emerged from the jungles of South America like the ghost of christmas to come to jerk you off but first, like all proper sexual encounters, a lecture on demagoguery i am sure you understand the basic human horrors of persecution and corruption that will come from a so-called, so-promised revolution offered by that political aberration that comes to life in the dark unpluggable cracks of the democratic machine i am fairly sure you understand you’ve seen documentaries and read articles, both wikipedia and otherwise about the tough time some other people will have to endure and this constant exhumation of human suffering wrought by what you have all resuscitated will help no one, it’s been too long and we’re too numb for it to matter and after all, it’s their own fault, the retards they wanted this so let them have it you and i know they will not be spared so chuckle we know of the ancient horror they’ve summoned for we have read the Ancient Greeks (in the original of course, what are we, plebes?) and their warnings about demagoguery
and what is there to do, but say, oh well, fuck them. is there a good-ol’ liberal democracy left to where we can fashionably exile ourselves? but since humans don’t really strum our heartstrings anymore let me tell you of a subtler threat brought about by demagogues it’s a symbolic one (get your essay paper and hand lotion out): What the Republic lost when they became an Empire wasn’t the rule of law or of the people, it was a loss of symbols: When you give into the base pragmatism that the demagogue tempts you with— following the law to its letter rather than its spirit— when the sacrosanct aura of institutions is publically allowed to be disparaged, then you have a banana republic. Or what do they call it, when it happens in the west? A failed state? Third Reich? A decaying Empire? The Sick Man of North America? Forgive me, Godwin, I couldn’t help it, but I don’t think it counts this time around. Do not misunderstand me, my overeducated friends, I am not asking you to grow compassion for Nazis— I’d much rather you readily scalp them, if you have time between grant applications for knife sharpening— but you need to know that the apathy bred by contempt for the hoi polloi is what the demagogue counts upon for his rule to grow, after all, who’s there left to oppose when those who would are too indignant to try to keep at bay the rot? The resistance to the erosion of symbols is rhetorical, necessarily. talk. tie yourself to the truth and plant yourself there and your words will resonate once the machine becomes exasperated and executes you in public: this is your job, to expose until you can see a glimmer of recognition of the social utility of empathy and law and the abolition of Machiavellian logic and eventually as the horror extends around them you will have made an ally in those who have been once again fooled and violently fondled by this old enemy of democracy expose the demagogue for the kleptocrat, unravel their populist consolations with the logic of pragmatism that the demagogue craves applauded: disrobe their empty aesthetics and mock their penises.
It is a struggle you can win if you can be fucked to try History hasn’t ended yet resignation to the inevitable is a self-fulfilling prophecy, you can still prevent his name from ending with First of the Empire and Last of the Republicans. revision: my eunuch editors have told me im too angry that i'm inciting the very same sort of relentless radicalization that brought us back to this ridiculous point in history and that threatens to consume us in an undifferentiated ball of rage and that to call forth a second terror isn't really an answer to the first one this is all quite true and very insightful of them but don't pretend you don't get hard when i yell at you about scalpings and gulags editors note: i do have balls
***
JILLIAN BAKOS
SAM ROXAS-CHUA – http://samroxaschua.com/ CONSTANCE CHAN – X MORGAN DEZURN – (IG) @shutup.morgan NICHOLAS GALANIN – http://galan.in/ RICARDO ESTRADA – (IG) @ricardoestrada323 TOM SANFORD – http://tomsanford.com/ CALLUM SIMMONS – (IG) @piicasa VOTAN HENRIQUEZ – https://www.facebook.com/Votan.art/ CONSTANT L. WILLIAMS – constantwilliams.squarespace.com CASSANDRA KESSLER – (IG) @miscaskes KRISTEN SIMON – (IG) @kriszn35 THIBAULT CLAIRIS-GAUTHIER – https://soundcloud.com/wdlnds NATALIE STAMATOPOULOS – www.nataliestamatopoulos.com/ GUILLERMO ADRIAN – 1c7.tumblr.com JILLIAN BAKOS – msjillyjelly.tumblr.com
TO SUBMIT TO FUTURE ISSUES E-MAIL CONSTANTWILLIAMSPOETRY@GMAIL.COM
_______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________ _______________INSURGENT________________ ___________________ART____________________