Dash Final 2012 by dashliteraryjournal

Literary Journal

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF G. Ehring EXECUTIVE BOARD Matthew Berger Joseph Blair Matthew Corcoran Maureen Fox Mariam Galarrita Josh Korn Jenni Marchisotto Phillip Trad Calli Welsch EDITORS Nicole Bailey Randy Bravo Hannah Diaz Kendra Dixon Stephanne Duran Kimberly Farley Dani Flint Stephanie Flint Brian Fulsom Michelle Greer Christopher Hamilton Charity Hammond Alex Hamo Dan Hogan Raina Karim Lindsay Kerstetter Nadia Kijanka Emily King Tara Leederman Judith Levy Allison McKnight Ammanda Moore Dora Mora B. Neis Christine Nguyen Alexa Oliphant Matthew Pelle Katlin Ritchey Daniel Sadnik Skyler Schulze Katrina Schwerdt Shannon Takeuchi Amber Tavasolian Daniel Turrubiartes Patrick Vallee Charmaine Vannimwegen Emily Wagner Anne Marie Walker Brianna Whitehall Duke Yang Cameron Young FACULTY ADVISOR Steve Westbrook LEAD DESIGN AND FORMATTING EDITOR Skyler Schulze LEAD AESTHETICS COORDINATOR Hannah Diaz COVER ARTISTS Hannah Diaz (front) Skyler Schulze (back) LOGO DESIGN Hannah Diaz and Martin Salyer

www.dashliteraryjournal.com www.facebook.com/DASHJournal • twitter: @DASHJournal Sponsored by the California State University, Fullerton Creative Writing Club and the Department of English, Comparative Literature and Linguistics.

table of

CONTENTS Where Dust Mites Fear to Tread: A Letter From [One of] The Editor[s] G. Ehring

FICTION Finally Coming Home: An Interview with Featured Author Ben Loory

The Island Ben Loory

The Twin Cities of Experiment: Las Vegas and Detroit Matty Byloos

An Oncoming Car on the Freeway Matty Byloos

Dispatch in Which You Panic Kit Frick

Cosmology Incompleteness Memory 5 Michael Kearns

Friday Morning Blues Diane Vanaskie Mulligan

Love Me. Love My Umbrella. Lincoln McElwee

Boom Charles Ardinger

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the End of the Word and This Time We Really Mean It Jackie Ryan

POETRY Lucky Enough to be Poorly Supervised: An Interview with Featured Poet Brendan Constantine

10 Alternatives to Diagnosis Brendan Constantine

Phototaxis Brendan Constantine

En Route Brendan Constantine

The Smaller Truth Adam Wilson

Scottish Countryside Marsha Mathews

Flesh Pact Eric L Cummings

de sorry Eric L Cummings

Cryptic Endearments Howie Good

Supermarket Howie Good

TABLE of CONTENTS

CONTINUED

Show Me All Your Scars S. M. Abeles

Mirror on the Floor John McKernan

Donovan Goes Electric Anthony Nannetti

Hurricane Carla Anthony Nannetti

Pillar Talk Anthony Nannetti

Sacrifice Ammanda Moore

6,198 Miles Away Terence Crump

Do Androids Dream of Electronically-Deposited Unemployment Checks? Shawnte Orion

Occupation Deborah Hauser

Imagine Revolution Paul Sohar

Rebellion Lynn Elwell

The Man Who Kills Bees Matthew J. Spireng

This We Call Many Things, One of Which is Evolution Charlotte Pence

AFTER LNAPRK BY JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT 1982 Carrie Seitzinger

Alyssum Hilary Sideris

Anything But Birds Monica Storss

Assuming Telegrams Could Somehow Still be Relevant Joseph Blair

Homeless Hannah Diaz

HYBRID The Magical Three: An Interview With Featured Artist Tara McPherson

Artwork by Tara McPherson

The Practice of Female Dispersal Kelly Nelson

Victory Defeats Victory Rita Ciresi

Copy Edit Brianna Whitehall

Death Certificate Dani Flint

BIOS Six Words to Say (ALMOST) Everything

Where Dust Mites Fear to Tread: a letter from [one of] the editor[s] Spring 2012 Dear Reader, You hold in your hands the result of a truly collaborative effort—that between English Department students and proctoring faculty, between a campus Creative Writing Club and writers from around the world, between a gracious local community and an international collection of artists. Nearly a hundred individuals share credit for the content herein. DASH Literary Journal is the specific product of a Cal State Fullerton graduate seminar entitled Professional Journal Editing and Production, a course that has grown in popularity year after year, as has the journal that is its principle purview. For this reason, our editors now far outnumber our contributing writers, and so the final form this journal takes is evidence also of democratic principles at work, and to the temperance these necessitate. As iron sharpeneth iron, so are grains of sand smoothed. Or something like that. Just as the journal itself is inextricable from the classroom, so too is it attached at the hip to our campus’s Creative Writing Club, which was conceived of and inaugurated at the same time as the journal, both by novelist (then student) Corrine Jackson, to whom much credit is due. Now in its fifth iteration, this is the fourth time DASH has been produced as part of the aforementioned graduate seminar, for which many thanks belong to faculty advisor, Dr. Steve Westbrook, who had the forethought to devise the course and the temerity to wrench it into the curriculum. Square and floppy as many of its editors, this is our third issue printed as a split release with Hibbleton Art Gallery. This is the second edition in which we have invited and featured artists whose work embodies the precise aesthetic we seek (which sections are clearly demarcated as distinct from our blind acceptances), and given our growth, perhaps this is the first issue you, dear reader, have seen. So, by way of introduction, a small irony: despite the verbosity, we’re all about immediacy. Our call-for-papers— plastered across our Fullerton campus, posted at the UPenn site, and advertised in Poets & Writers—included a solicitation for “short, emphatic original creative pieces,” and our fifth line-up of these was finalized according to this ideal, which most effectively couples brevity with impact. We are, after all, a room full of English students who

prize succinct articulation, so it’s no accident this would extend to the stated mission for our journal. With regards to this process, one of the great strengths of DASH is its commitment to the double-blind review process through which our inclusions are selected. Great care has been given to every submission, of which during this cycle we received in healthy excess of 1000, most of them excellent, and we were burdened with limiting our selections to an appropriate few. With some degree of pride, we can claim we’ve turned away bigger names, made anonymous by this process, in favor of those you are about to read. Mindful of our collaborative and aesthetic intentions, we hope the tangible result of our collective efforts might take some similarly accessible station on your bookshelf, within easy reach, where dust mites fear to tread. But enough crazy talk. We turn this issue over to our writers, whose words wowed us—anonymously—to speak, emphatically, for themselves. Many sincere thanks for your time and consideration. G. Ehring Ed.-In-Chief Pres., C.W.C., CSUF

FICTION

DASH Featured Author

Finally Coming Home: an interview with ben loory Your short stories are very, well, short, but they still provide strong characterization and plot. How do you approach short stories to create such brief but impactful fiction?

fancy. I just try to focus on what people want until conflicting desires are reconciled.

There’s a difference between character and characterization; I deal exclusively in character, which is internal conflict. That internal conflict in turn creates the story through the interaction of the character with the world (which arises as plot). I always think it’s funny how people think stories have to be long in order to be complete. I mean, we all tell each other stories all the time, every day, and most of the stories we tell are pretty short. They also are entirely based in character and plot. What they don’t have are a lot of extraneous detail. When you tell someone the story about the strange thing that happened to you today at the grocery store, you don’t spend a lot of time describing the scenery, or what people are wearing, or what happened to you that one time when you were five, unless somehow those details matter to the story of the strange thing that happened to you in the grocery store today. But somehow when people write stories down, all these extraneous details start getting jammed in there. Suddenly “verisimilitude” and “characterization” and “atmosphere” appear and stories start getting longer and longer. So all I tried to do was eliminate all that and just focus with no distractions on the story itself. That keeps the focus on the emotional journey and keeps the impact from being diluted. It’s pretty simple, really; nothing

The most important thing is to find your own voice, and that’s something no one can teach you. You have to write out loud, you have to listen to the words, and you have to stand behind every single one of them. Don’t try to write like other people, don’t try to write “like a writer,” just write the way that feels right in your chest and that communicates actually who you are. That, I think, is the most important thing, and you have to find it on your own-- everything else can be learned. Also: don’t rush to publish, and don’t stress about “the business.” When you find your voice, the business will find you.

Any advice for emerging writers?

How did your schooling prepare you (or not) for life as an author? My MFA was in Screenwriting, which is weird but was actually helpful because it’s all just structure, structure, structure. No one tries to force your prose into any certain style and you’re encouraged to be as imaginative as possible. You also can’t breeze by on pretty sentences alone; it’s all about character and drive. It was hard for me at the time because I came in thinking as a director (which was what I eventually wanted to be) and my focus wasn’t on story at all. It eventually completely changed my mindset. It didn’t actually prepare me at all to be an author, but it did teach me how stories worked.

DASH Featured Author Was the transition from screenwriter to short story writer difficult?

If you weren’t writing stories, what would you be doing?

I was never a very good screenwriter, to be honest; the medium never really suited me. My instincts were always to compress, compress, compress-- so moving into short stories was like finally coming home. Suddenly all the things I wanted to do made sense; I became free in a way I’d never been before. Plus I never liked outlining and thinking things through; it’s the joy of discovery that I’m after. Writing short stories lets me focus on what I’m good at, and it keeps me from getting bored. Plus the influence of screenwriting trained me to think in terms of pictures, which is one of the defining aspects of my stories. In retrospect, everything worked out perfectly-- it almost seemed to happen by design. Of course, at the time, as a screenwriter, I was miserable, couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I was doing wrong.

Realistically, I have no idea, as I have no other marketable skills. My original plan was to become an astronaut, but it’s probably too late for that now. Sometimes I dream about becoming a gardener-- or a plant doctor, something like that. Like, I’d have a little black bag and I’d show up and save the day when your favorite cactus got sick. Of course I don’t actually know anything about plants, so it’s probably best I don’t do that.

What authors have influenced you the most?

Thanks, Ben! You’re welcome!

What are your plans for the future? I try not to make plans; plans tend to paralyze me. I can only write when I have nothing on my mind. As soon as I make plans it all becomes homework and then I lose interest and walk away. So basically my plan is to just keep writing and hope everything continues to work out.

It’s hard to identify your own influences, I think, as so much of it happens unconsciously. But if I made a list of my guesses it would probably look like this: Aesop, Kafka, Hemingway, Roald Dahl, Henry James, Philip K. Dick, Richard Brautigan, Shirley Jackson, Ionesco, Beckett, Borges, P.G. Wodehouse, Dr. Seuss, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, Stephen Crane. That’s bookwise. Movie-wise it would be Buster Keaton, Howard Hawks, Herzog, Bergman, Lynch, Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, and Hitchcock (I’m more about directors than screenwriters), and then above all it’d be the geniuses who made the old Warner Brothers cartoons, plus Gary Larson’s The Far Side comic strip, and The Twilight Zone.

DASH Featured Author

Ben Loory

The Island The captain has a map. He tells the men. There is an island. There are diamonds, rubies, emeralds. There is gold, there is silver. There are women, beautiful women-- women like angels-- and so many birds, the trees are like rainbows. The crew sets sail. They sail for many months. There are storms, gales, lightning, thunder. There are pirates, there is sickness. They run low on food and water. They lose their way. The stars are no help. At night, the fog whispers in their ears. They are all going to die. Then, one day, they come to an island. The natives welcome them ashore as if into a dream. There are castles made of diamond and towers of ruby, rising into the air. Food and drink, the likes of which the men have never seen, are brought to them in cups of gold and bowls of silver. There are women, beautiful women-- women like angels-- and so many birds, the trees are like rainbows. Only the captain is unmoved. He calls a meeting. This is not the island, he says. The men are confused. We must sail on, the captain says. There are no emeralds here, he says. The men stare at him in horror. The captain turns away. In disgust, he sails on alone. The men watch him go. They live their lives in paradise. In time, they make maps of their own.

DASH Fiction

the twin cities of experiment: las vegas and detroit

Matty Byloos

Parts of Las Vegas overlapped the old borders once dividing California and Arizona, Utah and Colorado. The idea of the casino was a cancer, swallowing up land in hundred mile stretches and coughing up nothing besides hotels and attractions. All the way to what used to be Missouri and Iowa, a person could see buildings, some of them populated, most of them empty. And every one of them, a different theme – some new-fangled take on reality, or fantasy, but mostly just the horrors of boredom and disuse. Abandonment, in its purest form. Every fifteen minutes by car, a person could see Paris again, but that was only if they were driving in a straight line. Or if they were maybe trying to get away from someone, something. But not from The Motorcycle Gang. His was an infinite presence, a thing so right there among them at all times since the first moment he had decided to show his face, that they all knew there was no getting away anymore. And news had spread as far as Detroit, as far as the country’s eastern border. When it came up for a vote during the last round of national elections, the people had all agreed that the pyramids of Las Vegas were better, so they officially refused to recognize Egypt as a viable entity any longer. This is what they did to themselves. A kind of grand “turning inward,” the religious among them all cited within their empty sermons to emptier churches. Last names were removed from the telephone book and all of them washed their hands of it. Their society was a threadbare quilt, the stitching of which was falling apart more and more every day. And all this had somehow lead to The Motorcycle Gang. In Detroit, theirs was a polite experiment, a return to a simpler time, when humans could acknowledge their own animal existence. They agreed on one thing: the folly of human existence was a thing they had all called civilization, or society. So they shed everything and opened up the cages, let the animals out to live among them, and then congratulated everyone around them for what they had done. Nothing less than a tourist attraction, Detroit was considered by its inhabitants to be the last refuge, the last hope for anyone who considered life still worth anything of value. The city of Las Vegas, and its surrounding casino cities, in one form or another, employed many of the people still living there, and still others who showed up every day, believing in the power of luck.

DASH Fiction

And the rest of everyone else was living in the zoo in Detroit, unapologetically. Both sides figured they had it right. Whatever they considered to be powerful. The things they had assigned worth to. Las Vegas had been capable of holding on to the claim of being the capital city of the country at that point because so many of the people had made it their last stand. It was a futile attempt at numbing out the pointlessness they all now faced. They did this in the face of desperation, before he had even shown up. And now, things were suddenly worse. This had always been a town defined by luck. By possibility. And luck was a thing that many of them still clung to. It was a final truth, an answer. And so they built and built and then built some more next to that. A casino for every city, and one for every country. Rich people built casinos for distant memories, or they erected casinos for loved ones who hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t yet died. In Detroit, there were other things that they had felt worthy of their effort: sharing, freedom, and brotherhood. They conferred these ideals on the animals, and raised their children to do the same thing. They laughed at Las Vegas, at its hopeless citizens, all of whom they believed had done nothing more than abandon reason for the flip of a coin. There were heaven casinos and casinos built entirely of live puppies stacked on top of even more puppies. Some casinos were questions, and others were totems to pure math. There was a casino of green water. There was a casino of all December holidays. There was a casino made of gingerbread and all the people living inside of it ate their way to nothingness, a little bit more each day. And in some strange way, all of them everywhere did exactly the same thing, whether they ate their own houses or not. Detroit was just as futile a gesture as that. And so Las Vegas grew and grew, and like a fattened pig, continued to grow until the day that everything changed. And the people of Detroit planned out the future of all civilization, made camp in their capital city, and hunkered down for the end of the world, when they figured theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be the only ones left alive.

DASH Fiction

An Oncoming Car On The Freeway Matty Byloos A man in a car on the highway at night, the black sky above him, an inky, starless wash. He wasn’t going anywhere, specific, just driving.

The world, inside his head. Every conversation being had by every person in the country, including this man in a car. And he was getting closer every second.

The Motorcycle Gang was on the same highway with nothing above him and no moon. And black eyes beneath his glasses. And the man in a car approached him from the opposite direction.

Impact, but no explosion. He saw the last flash of the motorcycle’s headlight, and then, he was gone. He looked at his own reflection in the glasses on The Motorcycle Gang’s face, saw nothing, and knew it was the future.

The Motorcycle Gang was in the man’s head with the man’s own voice. He could hear him thinking to himself. The man said to his brain, “I have to make a joke in order to feel comfortable enough to kiss her at the end of the first date. And I don’t feel like I’m in love, I feel so bored. I should turn on the stereo in the car.” He did this and the radio came on and a beat played backwards. He shut it off again, and it was silent. Silent, except for the vibrations on the highway, volcanic and everywhere around him.

He sat in his car, parked and still, resting on the faceless highway. No other cars, no sign of The Motorcycle Gang. He closed his eyes, prayed for some kind of sign, a flash of lightning, a shooting star, something to prove that this had all just happened, and that he wasn’t dead.

Without doing anything, the radio came back on, a phantom voice in the car there with him, whispering something about death, how close it was to the end. Then he saw The Motorcycle Gang coming from the other direction, coming right at him.

DASH Fiction

Dispatch In Which You Panic

Kit Frick

You take the train marked Fulton Station, which is not the train you need. The neighborhoods grow increasingly strange. Houses flattened to the ground. Soot-pricked stalactites on the air. Empty platforms. You don’t need the map to tell you—you’ve made this mistake before. You must get off the train. You beat your hands against the thick pane. The neighbor boy carries your cat across the lawn. You are home somehow, safe somehow. Yet the cat hangs limply in his arms. As he approaches, blood on the fur. “The gray one is back there too,” he says. The distance from the back door to the back of the lawn extends indefinitely. It’s never been so difficult to run. Your legs move as through water. You call the vet. You lean heavily against the kitchen counter. The vet is about to leave for the night. You tell him patches of fur and flesh are gone, insides are turned out, he must help! Time thickens the air in the room. You can’t move through it fast enough. You are slicing onions at the kitchen counter. You have to get the cats to the vet, but there are so many onions. You bend over the sink panting we have to go we have to go we have to go.

DASH Fiction

Cosmology Incompleteness Memory 5 This morning at Schillerplatz C does or does not slip while running to catch the trolley and lurch into the path of a speeding green late-model Opel, M does or does not stop or swerve in time to just brush her shoulder as she falls then slides to a stop leap out and rush to her side as she sits up slowly or does not, the earth does or does not lurch infinitesimally as it passes through a microdimension which only someone like C can or cannot sense as reality not merely intuit and ignore: a mere thirty-two binary possibilities but any one of them rife with the infinitude of points between zero and one such that everything at this singular indivisible instant in Schillerplatz is poised to happen infinitely often with infinite variations to infinitely many rushed young women and flustered drivers but no closer to everything than Schillerplatz undisturbed by a midsummer sunrise before time. In this universe C does slip, M is not driving at all and so does not help her up, does not with unfeigned concern ensure that she has not been injured, she does sit up slowly surprised at her good fortune but is not aware that the earth did not lurch when she fell.

Michael Kearns

The conductor is holding the trolley, getting out of his seat and staring with concern in her direction, so she smiles, pushes to her feet, and walks quickly to the door, thinking that any moment can take any direction but once a direction has been taken that one tangible direction carries full conviction. M drives an Audi not an Opel and could only have swerved had he been driving in Mainz which he would only have done on a business trip nor could it have been a C and M event because they will only meet eleven days from now when there will be neither trolley nor slipping, a meeting that will initiate a very large but not infinite sequence of possibilities.

DASH Fiction

Diane Vanaskie Mulligan

Friday Morning Blues

What does he know about the struggle, the sorrow, the desire behind the dark eyes of an old teenager on Friday morning when one after another they tell him they don’t have their books, they don’t have their homework, and there he is, in his wrinkled shirt, his stained neck tie, regretting the last two beers he had the night before when all he had wanted was to be a carefree kid again, so he starts his usual speech— What do you say I call your mother right now and tell her?—and Nick, Nick who is usually cooperative in an unenthusiastic way, stands up and says, Fuck you, asshole!, and grabs his bag and heads for the door, leaving the teacher standing there, open-mouthed, everyone in the room silent, until Nick’s friend says, His mother is in the hospital; his mother is dying, and the teacher takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes and says, Oh, because what the hell does he know about Nick’s dying mother, about James’s father out of work, about Becky’s boyfriend who says that if she loves him, really loves him, she’ll do it already, about all the things that seem more important than the sad lives of some guys dead four-hundred years; what does he know?

DASH Fiction

Love Me. Love my Umbrella.

Lincoln McElwee

Breath bites fiercely, chest compressions violent in the cold, on the bridge, in the sleeting rain. Anantha standing in a swirl of sweat, sleet, rain, tears: liquids pooling, pouring forth from his body to the lipping lake below. One leg left of this journey, touching down, losing strength by the minute. The other leg floats in the rain like an airborne bird indignant to the gale-gusts of wind. The boy faces uncertainty. What will be seen on the other side of this next step? An eternity, endless vacancyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a hell of a lot of pain, and then? Anantha shaking his head: it must be done, it must be done. To fall like a beautiful shade, a painting, panting. To fall like a beautiful shade: umbra, bella. To fall, umbrabella, and then splash, water-colored. Steadying his back against the railing, he lets one cold palm travel up the metal pole until it clicks. . Anantha smiles at his act of creation. To be the umbrella that blooms at the touch of a hand. The umbrella wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t save him, he knows. Just another bridge, concrete constellation, useless in the deep dark. But meaning moves. And so the wind gusts up from the lipping lake and the umbrella upturns, catching now sleet rain in its fragile fabric cup. Stemming meaning, Anantha holds the handle tight, smiles, and then leaps. The umbrella is found days later, crushed like a flower plucked of its love me, love me not. And Anantha never found, save by Anantha.

DASH Fiction

Charles Ardinger

Boom

When a nation, watching the car across the street emitting steam as morning evaporates last night’s condensation, wondering what that miniscule action, the soundless ascension of hundreds of millions of nearly identical drops, might signify, and considering the process of simple physics that, first, lets the cool of every night separate the sky’s invisible water into individual objects of contemplation, each perhaps containing a habitat for whole species of microscopic organisms, then, as the sun excites all the air’s molecules into motion, reassembles those tiny worlds into something no inhabitant of any of them could understand, something resembling the trail of a cartoon ghost as it fades back into the assembly of the almost forgotten, begins to notice itself in that act of investigation that stills the perfectly ordinary moment, the daily event’s repetition enforced by nothing more than weather, for analysis into its constituent milliseconds the way a movie breaks down into a hundred thousand photographs that look so nearly the same that, when they speed past a projector, the motion unifies them into a magician’s dance, it starts to recognize in the light reflecting as rainbows of self-portraiture from its myriad of eyes, in the buzzing song its voices can’t help composing from the harmonious discords of their various frequencies, an identity vast as an atmosphere, comprising every proud but lonely cell relentlessly policing its semi-permeable membrane into a being whose rise inevitably creates the new world every single day.

DASH Fiction

It’s The End of The World and this time we really mean it

Jackie Ryan

Dear Friend,

I am contacting you with very happy news. You are been chosen to be taking part in the glorious Rapture. To secure your place, please deposit $2000 into the account of details listed below. Thank you and go with God (you will be!).

Regards, Vice Principal Executive, Rapture Team It’s comforting to know that these fellows are still doing what they do. I think it shows genuine commitment.

Dear Vice Principal Executive of the Rapture Team,

Thank you for your email advising me of my ascension. Is The Rapture taking place in Nigeria?

Regards, Candice. It’s never been much of a challenge to find someone who thinks it’s the end of the world. Every now and then a prophet of doom bumps up against a slow news week and gets a bit of press.

Dear Candice Friend,

The Rapture will be a world-wide event which is why you are able to be saved. Our technology teams operate in Nigeria as through scientific research we have decided that Nigeria suffers the least

DASH Fiction

technological interference from rapturous events. Basing our operations here is the better way to be sure your ascension will continue uninterrupted. Please be sure to send your money soon or we can not be holding your place for long.

Regards, Vice Principal Executive, Rapture Team Not sure why it’s different this time around. A better social media campaign, perhaps. Hollywood films. The fact of it actually being 2012.

Dear Vice Principal Executive of the Rapture Team,

Thank you for the scientific explanation of your whereabouts. Would it be possible to take my little dog with me during my ascension? She is very pure.

Regards, Candice. December 21, 2012. That’s the big send off. The Maya civilisation tells us so. Some people call it the Apocalypse, some call it The Rapture, others call it rubbish. Me? I let myself get distracted by the little things. Like Nigerian scams and ironic t-shirts.

Dear Candice Friend,

All animals are pure and are thus eligible to ascend. The ascension of a small dog will be costing $1000. Please add this to the moneys you already owe us.

Regards, Vice Principal Executive, Rapture Team End of the world merchandise has been something of a growth industry in 2012. There are a lot of ‘Team Apocalypse’, ‘Free Doomsday’ and ‘What would Armageddon do?’ t-shirts out there. I have one with an arrow pointing straight up that says ‘I’m with Rapture’. I’m also partial to the bumper stickers ‘Annihilation Happens’ and ‘Ascend This!’

DASH Fiction

Dear Vice Principal Executive of the Rapture Team,

Thank you so much for allowing my little dog to ascend! I have another question for you. I have not yet decided whether I am prepared to bring a child into this ending world, but if I do will my child be able to ascend with me? I realise there is not much time left in which to make a child - I’m really just asking in case there is some sort of Doomsday delay. Should The Rapture occur while my child is two years old or less, can I carry it with me at no extra charge like on an airline?

Regards, Candice People were generally ambivalent about the Doomsday prophecy in the years leading up to it. They tended to be a little less ambivalent as early 2012 moved into mid 2012. When we hit July there were fairly significant increases in Church attendance and religious conversion figures. Doomsday cults have had a pretty big membership boost, too. There have been a few half hearted riots but they haven’t really caught on. People seem to be leaning more towards apathy, breakdowns and despair. Some have been living like there’s no tomorrow.

Dear Candice Friend,

Your child will be an innocent and so will have a place in the glorious ascension. However, all souls weigh the same so it would still cost two thousand dollars to ensure the safe ascension of your precious child – even if the darling one is still in your belly.

Kindest Regards, Vice Principal Executive, Rapture Team

It’s August now and optimists are focused on the bright side of the end of the world. If it’s via the Judgement Day exit some folks might manage a death without a death in it. Those who make the purity cut get to keep on keeping on. Not a lot of sinners out there any more. It’s easier to resist temptation if the eternal consequences are imminent. The least holy thing I do these days is sport with Nigerian scammers.

Dear Vice Principal Executive of the Rapture Team, It is of great comfort to me to know that you will help me care for my child – should I have one – during the ascension. I do not currently have a husband but if I want to have a child without adding to my sins

DASH Fiction

I’m going to have to get one. I am wondering if I should plan for his ascension now in case I get so caught up during The Rapture that I forget to make arrangements then. Do you offer a family discount?

Regards, Candice Soooo. September. The stock market is looking a little shaky. Futures, anyone? Investment properties and collectables have lost their sheen and historians have lost their drive but there have been no significant power shifts and less chaos than might have been expected.

Dear Candice Friend.

You are wise to plan ahead. As you have not yet finalised your husband it is difficult to know how dirty his soul will be. However, the purity of the soul of the child he will possibly have with you should help him overcome his filth. We can ascend you, your little dog, your possible child and your possible husband for the family rate of $7000. Please deposit this money to us quickly if you are wishing to take advantage of this incredible offer.

Kindest Regards, Vice Principal Executive, Rapture Team

October. Society hasn’t stopped. Regular jobs and pastimes continue to exist - though I admit I’m a little behind in my studies. I spend a fair amount of my time reading self-improvement books and volunteering at charitable organisations. Most people volunteer somewhere.

Dear Vice Principal Executive of the Rapture Team, This is wonderful news! Thank you so much for all your help! It would be difficult for me to access that amount of money just now. I do, however, have a life insurance policy that would cover this. Is it possible to arrange to pay you from this policy after my death and ascension?

Regards, Candice

DASH Fiction The countdown to the end of the world has been quite lovely, all things considered. Here we are in November and everyone is being just darling to everybody else. Crime rates have plummeted and donations to worthy causes have soared. We’re all rather keen on attaining a higher plane.

Dear Candice Friend,

This would be most terrible! We must have your money soon or we can not make guarantee of the safe ascension for you, your dear little dog, and your possibly precious child and husband. Please do not place your loved ones in more danger with these delays.

Kindest Regards, Vice Principal Executive, Rapture Team

Did I mention we’ve also attained peace on earth, ended starvation and taken significant steps towards achieving worldwide freedom and equality? It’s kind of like living in classic Star Trek.

Dear Vice Principal Executive of the Rapture Team,

Hi, Friend. Thank you for your patience with me and for answering all of my questions. I have deposited $7000 in your account for the safe ascension of myself, my possible husband, my possible child and my little dog. See you on the other side!

Kindest Regards, Candice. Don’t judge me. That’s what December 21 is for. You really can’t take it with you, okay? I still have my ironic tshirts and favourite bumper stickers but as we enter the final month of 2012… well…you know… just in case.

DASH Fiction

POETRY

DASH Featured Poet

Lucky Enough To Be Poorly Supervised: an interview with brendan constantine You published your first major book-length poetry collection, Letters to Guns, with Red Hen Press in 2009. Since that time, you’ve released two additional books—Birthday Girl With Possum and Calamity Joe. How in the world are you so prolific that you average roughly a book per year?

What sort of advice would you offer younger poets about getting their first book published? Think big, take lots of risks, never stake everything on one piece of advice. Ask yourself, “When was I planning to make a fool of myself?” This is the time to go wild. Hurl yourself at chance. Know that you’ll make huge mistakes and then go make them.

Well, it helps to get a lot of encouraging rejections. That way you can keep thinking your big break is just around the corner for ten years. Then you just pile up manuscripts. Two of mine (Letters To Guns and Calamity Joe) were finalists for a slew of awards, sometimes the same award in the same season. I didn’t write three books in the last three years, I got them published!

Having performed regularly at numerous venues large and small, you’ve become quite a fixture in the SoCal poetry scene. In fact, I think it’s fair to say you’re often recognized as a bit of a celebrity. Given this status, how close are you to Kevin Bacon? Do six or fewer degrees separate you?

How important was the publication of Letters to Guns to the burgeoning of your career?

I have been very lucky in how my work has been received. It’s all luck, in fact. I get asked to read a great deal and tour for months out of the year. Indeed, one of my publishers recently received a grant through the James Irvine Foundation to send me on the road in June. I’ll be hitting schools, prisons, theaters, and coffee houses all over our state for a month. I can’t believe I get to do this. It’s a cosmic frame-up of some kind.

Having a book is huge. In an environment where poets must be increasingly more involved in creating their own ‘buzz,’ the fact of a book, the thing itself, is an incredible tool. Every time we publish our work in magazines or online journals, we experience another aspect of Celan’s analogy of the ‘message in a bottle.’ We never know where our work will ‘wash up,’ and that’s very exciting. But to have a collection offers us more control, more influence over where it will land. I think of Jack Grapes’ image of a traveling rodeo, one that you can put in someone’s hand. A book is still a matchless show.

I should add, however, that neither poetry nor teaching pay me a living wage. Much of my work is on a volunteer basis and I never expect reading fees. In fact, I have almost no savings. Fortunately, I’ve had a part-time career with the Academy of Motion

DASH Featured Poet Pictures (in the theater department) for the last 15 years, and they allow me to live like this. A few days a week you can find me at one of the Academy’s venues, helping to run a screening or exhibition. As to your question about Kevin, we did meet once but he wouldn’t remember!

After Perelman comes Somerset Maugham, Flannery O’Connor, Patricia Highsmith, Eudora Welty, Shirley Jackson, Raymond Chandler, W.H. Auden, Charles Dickens, and the amazing Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Then there’s the music of Brian Eno, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Nico, Iggy Pop, The Cramps, the usual roll call of short-lived punks and everyone who influenced them. Igor Stravinsky was a game-changer for me. So was Laurie Anderson.

Could you tell us a little bit about how surrealism has influenced your poetics? The perception of the surreal is not a philosophy, though it was treated like one at the beginning. Breton seemed to see in it everything he’d hoped Dada would be and wasn’t. But it’s really just a 20th century name for something as old as society itself. Surrealism is just part of the super-associative nature of societal thought. It begins in the para-consciousness of infancy and if you’re lucky enough to be poorly supervised it becomes instinct.

What other people or things—gurus, animals, appliqué patterns, ice cream flavors, military industrial complexes, amoeba, meteorological phenomena, etc.—have had significant influences? The tiny ‘shepherd moons’ of Saturn are pretty wonderful. They’re named Prometheus and Pandora, and they keep the rings in place. They actually switch orbits every 28 days without fail and that totally floors me.

What particular artists and writers have affected your work most immediately?

In some of your poems, you allude to your identity as a teacher. Could you tell us a little bit about the different venues in which you’ve taught, what you like about teaching, or maybe how teaching affects your writing life?

Well, it isn’t a short list, I can tell you. I’m intrigued by artists who are able to surprise me with the ‘first’ ironies: The fact that people exist and consider their thoughts/tastes/inventions important. You can pretty much start with Sappho and then make a very large list, indeed.

Teaching scares the crap out of me. I’ve taught pretty much every age group, from very young children to the elderly. I have a residency at the Windward School (a college prep in LA ) where I’ve been teaching poetry for about eight years now. I also regularly work with Hillsides, a foster care center in Pasadena, and with a volunteer organization called Art of Elysium, which brings artists to hospitals and assisted care centers throughout the southland. I do a lot of it.

My earliest influence was the essayist, S.J. Perelman. He is largely considered a ‘humorist,’ but I prefer this quote from one of his books: ‘’If I were to apply for a library card in Paris, I would subscribe myself as a feuilletoniste, that is to say, a writer of little leaves.’’ I think this is a pretty good description of the poet trade, too.

DASH Featured Poet

As I say, teaching terrifies and exhausts me, but it’s also hugely energizing. There is nothing like being in the company of people actively discovering their own art. I remain engaged and yet perpetually reminded of my own unimportance. Keeps me working.

But it’s ALL up for grabs. Indeed, there is no profundity so absolute that it can’t be trivialized. And what -ever you may currently regard as stupid or banal, be prepared to see it celebrated as genius in your time. What projects do you have on the horizon?

The characters on the T.V. show Portlandia have espoused the philosophy that nearly every object of human creation can be improved if you simply “put a bird on it.” Do you agree or disagree with this advice? And how might it apply to the craft of poetry?

Just now I’m well and truly lost again. I’m trying to do things that are unfamiliar and even scary. But I have no agenda beyond that. I had a large project in mind last year, but it fell apart. I was going to write a series in the voice of a famous murderess from 20th-century fiction, but the author’s estate wasn’t crazy about it. I don’t want to name names, but I was such a fan of this writer and I didn’t want to embark on a project his survivors would think lame. So…I scrapped it.

Oh dear. The things on which I’ve slapped a bird! Damn. Yeah, they nailed it. It makes me think of an essay by Howard Nemerov in which he describes an accident he had in Austria. He then comments that there was no practical reason for mentioning Austria except that he knows the word will lend the story a flavor, a mystique. Austria, for all of its exotic associations, is an adjective.

Lately I’ve been messing around with punctuation, trying to come up with a new kind. What questions do you wish the editors of DASH Journal had asked you?

The bird, as observed in the Portlandia skit, is a modifier. But more than that, its absurdity demonstrates the temporariness of vogue. Poets ‘spice’ their work with ‘cool’ words all the time and (deny it if you dare) it isn’t a cheat or shortcut, it’s almost the whole game. What can happen, of course, is that a larger audience will start to notice when a word becomes too charged, too used. At this point it can actually seem to change its meaning. Like “heart” or “soul,” it comes to epitomize its overuse. Look what happened to unicorns.

Well, there’s a question I always love to see. In fact, I wish we saw it more, on everything from the electric bill to voter registration, and it is this: “Who is Boo Radley?”

DASH Featured Poet

10 Alternatives To Diagnosis Brendan Constantine 1.

Tell lies while jumping rope

Sleep on a queen-sized photograph of an orchestra

Read your resume to a dog

Descend stairs in place

Fill your pockets with seawater & walk into a quarry

Pay someone to gift-wrap the rest of your money

Have your mail forwarded to an orphanage

Learn to read Braille with your cheek

Applaud the progress of shadows

10.

Set your watch to the hour of your birth & remove the battery

DASH Featured Poet

Brendan Constantine

Phototaxis light is nearsighted / relative to size / to purlieu / hardly the first time youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve stood like this / reading something / thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no word rare enough to make it interesting / no explodable tranquility / maybe a moth / a big moth / built to snuff the halo in a lantern / tell yourself not to brood and it counts as brooding / only night sleeps and poorly / moths have incredible hearing / tuned to the muttering of bats / theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re good with names / too / cross talk / the different porch lights on this block / they hum along / who needs adjectives for darkness / their wings are made of human dust / wait for the emergency plan / this is the emergency plan / the lamps inside us are all the way up

DASH Featured Poet

Brendan Constantine

En Route I have a hard time with Hope, with the ‘ope’ sound of anything; it tends to involve a lot of waiting. Especially Dope. Does a book of poems ever say, I’ll be with you right away? Nope. It says, The bell tolls deep in autumn’s hinterland. I have a hard time with that. Mostly I have a hard time with ‘hinterland.’ It means the land behind, which is totally fine. But ‘hinterland’ sounds like a theme-park for people who can’t come to the point. My point is that I have hard time living with the unsolved: love, the myth of money, those bells that toll deep in my bed. They’re hopeless & that gives me hope; unfounded, unreasonable, uncapitalized hope I’ll discover or remember that the world isn’t the world, but a story of the world, shared before we land.

DASH Poetry

Adam Wilson

The Smaller Truth Here’s the kind of day it’s been: you turn that wine glass in your hands as a rabbit runs across the yard. Somewhere, God’s in a rocking chair stringing wax thread through a needle to sew up the tear in a baseball mitt. The valley’s coyotes are howling; they’re always smaller than they sound. Spent moonlight falls off the side of the neighbour’s house, transecting the window whose slats shade a cross on the wall where your crucifix used to hang. On Sunday the stuccoed cathedral waits for the caretaker to ring the bell. Meanwhile, God’s in his rocking chair, sewing small white stars to the black fabric of a newly-knit universe. A coyote catches a rabbit. You don’t feel doomed but you are.

DASH Poetry

Scottish Countryside On the highway, a charred car, choked with black reptilian scales. Human skeletons not quite touching the ground Authorities walk to and fro, plotting in their notebooks.

Marsha Mathews

DASH Poetry

Eric L Cummings

Flesh Pact Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s buck and sting. I want to feed all your horses to my bees feed all my bees to your untamed harras. Clause by clause. Your god stag. My god queen. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s roll as sand in honey two birds stuck in the attic flesh knocking at the roof. Pact of dust on forgotten boxes two species secretly slipping into a thing succinct. Confined to our cortices as we watch from the top of this tall maze our etiologies wrestling their winds. Our air struggling in our efficacy.

DASH Poetry

Eric L Cummings

de sorry humid, they reign. de rien. It is not spring. the rain, de rien, the rain. A flushing. de rien, down: de rien, we reign, flying fleuves, the rain or wet et drained. ImbibĂŠ. In vein of vain la ville dies

DASH Poetry

Cryptic Endearments My motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s maiden name, Sternlicht, translates as starlight. An octopus has three hearts. Waves closed over me. I rang your doorbell & ran.

Howie Good

DASH Poetry

Howie Good

Supermarket The young pretty cashier ignores my hello as if under the fluorescents it isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t twilight & Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not full of fireflies & unconventional notions

DASH Poetry

Show Me All Your Scars Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll give them funny names and laugh at perfect people

S.M. Abeles

DASH Poetry

Mirror On The Floor I like being tiny 300 pieces at one time A fiber optic Long distance phone call To the sand pile For years I ate A bowl of shredded shadow For breakfast I loved best the flavor of Yesterday Not many of us Get to change our lives One man to a cage The guard keeps whispering Think of it as a birthday present

John McKernan

DASH Poetry

Donovan Goes Electric Who loves the sweet rhythms of autumn, the drives in the country never minding the time, more than Hurdy Gurdy Man doing 30 at the wheel of his Prius 4x4, quite rightly tuned now to talk radio?

Anthony Nannetti

DASH Poetry

Anthony Nannetti

Hurricane Carla They say itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s old timerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, but I remember alright. Matagorda, 1961: Fair tent lifted from its moorings, like a pterodactyl soaring above the crowd. It was storming popcorn and cotton candy, and I circled the earth before John Glenn in a Porta Potty.

DASH Poetry

Anthony Nannetti

Pillar Talk She published her hypothesis, and from an outpost far away I offered my rebuttal, contending that A is to B as B is always the second-place finisher. And the resonance of that analogy, so acclaimed or refuted nationwide in scholarly biannuals, became something to hold against one another.

DASH Poetry

Ammanda Moore

Sacrifice Unconscious acts reveal his Loveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s depth; he offered His shirt to catch my vomit.

DASH Poetry

Terence Crump

6,198 miles away glorious sunrise white crosses standing erect cast morning shadows

DASH Poetry

Do Androids Dream of Electronically-Deposited Unemployment Checks? Job security isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t manufactured on this assembly line. It might sound technical but I basically press buttons on a machine while they invent a machine to press the buttons on my machine and I can only hope this new machine will have its own buttons that also need to be pressed.

Shawnte Orion

DASH Poetry

Deborah Hauser

Occupation It is difficult to translate his body of work. The syntax of his language unpronounceable on my tongue. I re-gender the nouns: his table masculine; my sofa feminine -- grammatical codes that donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist in my country. My body maps no neutral territory -- every state occupied and named, local custom yields to the empirical. The path he burns is familiar and strange. My heart has not found true north. I call for the physician -- he offers a sextant, dispels my lighthouse fallacy. The beacon flashes once -I dive into the horizon, revising my topography.

DASH Poetry

Paul Sohar

Imagine Revolution Crooked streets will run straight and stately boulevards will crumple into squares stores will rush outside to join the shouts of the crowds and banks will disgorge banknotes under the marchersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; feet even wine bottles will lose all restraint having no reason to hide their intoxication theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll leap off the shelves and march out into the street in a drunken dance and holler lewd catcalls at sober windows but whiskey bottles will go all the way hurling themselves at traffic lights and the bacchanal will roll in its own light champagne bottles will ravish windshields and drive cars crazy with their nectar in the gas tank straight lines will be abolished and double images will bloom one unreal and the other imaginary

DASH Poetry

Lynn Elwell

Rebellion My wife has introduced Shariah Law into our kitchen; spices arranged in alphabetical order, the sighting of a solitary ant invokes a dusting of blue powder over every square inch of exposed counter space. As a protest to this Jesuitical rubric, I began to over-dilute the frozen orange juice. Modestly at first, I worked my way up to adding a half can of water over the stated recipe. One morning she asked: Does this orange juice taste a little weak to you ? I confessed my treachery like a flummoxed schoolboy caught with the swimsuit issue of Playboy. Months passed without incident when -for no obvious reason -- I resumed my clandestine dilution scheme. Several days later my wife asked: Are you doing that orange juice thing again ? This time, I denied it.

DASH Poetry

The Man Who Kills Bees Arthritic, he picks bees from a jar with tweezers and invites them to sting, which they do, leaving their stingers stuck from his knuckles, sacs pulsing as they die, his hands better for it, the pain of the stings quickly gone while the long dull ache that torments him is flushed by whatever in him rushes to flush the poison of stings, bodies of bees piling up.

Matthew J. Spireng

DASH Poetry

This We Call Many Things, One of Which is Evolution

Charlotte Pence The point is not that I was hemorrhaging in a gas-station bathroom. (Abortion gone wrong.) The point is I wanted to return. The dog waited for me in the rental car. It was August. Texas. Windows one-inched. I loved neither where I was driving from nor to. Neither the boy-husband Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d married nor the non-job I occasionally worked. Even given these circumstances, I still wanted to live. Like my homeless father who wanders the streets terrified of the nothing thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s following him. No one wants to live less than anyone else. These bodies are built to return to the mediocre, the unknown believed better than now. This desire we call evolution, survival of the fittest, genetic drift. Or stupid hope.

DASH Poetry

AFTER LNAPRK BY JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT 1982

Carrie Seitzinger His hat is always on, whether sun or middle of night, every day lives by the same red circle, watching the cows with their two organs, heart and stomach, the bulls and bessies, slowly becoming mad, making music with the banjo or rifle, walking down the hill to school, past the shrubs that grow in the shape of tiaras, past the hot crow melting on the sidewalk, watching the teachers write the same thing on the chalkboard, numbering it something else, coloring over it, eyes grow crazy and windmill, released to the world and ready to eat the way home, the blind luster of concrete, the Douglas firs like tongue compressors, the stars coming out, waiting the calm after the calamity, waiting the moon.

DASH Poetry

Hilary Sideris

Alyssum Is you is in nurseries of the hoi polloi, or is you ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ho-hum to hoity toit? Fistful of mauve, your lookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the kind simple minds adore. In a nutshell: more sun means more flower.

DASH Poetry

Anything But Birds Poetry in poems, but not butterflies. Butterflies in poems. Yes, more of that. Cave dwellers. Laundry lines And lists, but not butterflies. Not enough butterflies. Aubade, matin, vesper, but not butterflies. Kisses, flesh, but not butterflies. Jungian archetypes, dream songs, rage But not butterflies. Not in a long time. Butterflies like when the boy you liked Would sit with you at the lunch table Or the first interview for that job you really wanted. Shirt on sale, free mocha latte, camp out to see your favorite band Butterflies. First time to ocean butterflies, first Falling star in a meteor shower butterflies, first Snow after the longest summer butterflies. Meet a kindred spirit in the conference coffee line And start a lifelong friendship butterflies. Up-all-night sunrise talk, crazy turquoise, wine drunk Hand song tattooed story bonfire bottle at the moon Butterflies. Amistad, politik, pop-cult Bukowskiworship bullshit But not butterflies. But for Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sake people, no more birds. No king fishers. No meadow larks. No Storks is Strasbourg. No jays, swans, pigeons, doves, crows, or ravensâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; In fact, not any bird of prey, water fowl, or nesting thing. No winged feathered thing that shits on your Sunday suit.

Monica Storss

DASH Poetry

Assuming Telegrams Could Somehow Still Be Relevant

Your searching gaze stopped Stop As mine for you Stop Now telegrams are quaint and faded Stop So this feels stupidly juvenile Stop Yet I write this note Stop And you cannot see the wine ring on the page Stop So you will never Stop ever Stop know if I miss you Stop Not that youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d ever believe Stop Not that you ever believed any of my bullshit Stop

Joseph Blair

DASH Poetry

Hannah Diaz

Homeless

HYBRID

DASH Featured Artist

The Magical Three: an interview with tara mcpherson Elle Magazine dubbed you “The Princess of Poster Art,” and your poster art work for bands and rock venues appears to have been a staple throughout your career. Was this something that you actively pursued early on?

graphic novels. I like when they’re all collected and ready to go. Then I can sit down and read one. I’ve been wanting to reread a bunch of them, like Preacher. I guess the most recent one I read was Fables, because I worked on that about five years ago.

I actually didn’t actively pursue rock posters. I kind of fell into it. I had always collected rock posters when I was younger and in art school, and I always had an interest in them and thought they were really neat, but I always wanted to be a painter. I never thought I could do that as well. But after I graduated art school and I had time to be in a band, of course it was my duty as the artist in the band to make the posters, and so then it kind of just fell into place from that. And then looking back, I knew I could totally do this, and it was really fun to make rock posters. So when it happened it felt natural and fun and enjoyable. Being able to make posters for bands that I love is the perfect marriage between art and music for me.

Incidentally, Dark Horse published your art collection, Lost Constellations, and more recently, Bunny in the Moon vol.3. How has the publishing process been for you? Well, I design the covers and design the whole layout of the book, but I don’t physically lay it out. I do a sample mockup of, like, 16 pages, and say, “I want the interior pages to have this format and look like this. Here’s my cover design, inside cover, back cover…” So I give them a lot of art direction. But when it comes to actually laying it out, they handle that all for me. Dark Horse has been amazing to work with. They’re really supportive – really proactive about putting the books out with me. All the people who work there are really lovely. They love the art, and you can tell that. And they pay the artist well. They are definitely pro-artist and are not trying to screw the artist over. That’s very important to me. Some companies are so greedy and I don’t feel that way about Dark Horse at all.

You’ve also lent your talents to comic books. Are you a comic fan? I really don’t read too many comics now, but I used to. I used to read a lot of the Vertigo Comics and a lot of the indie comics. Dan Clowes’s stuff and Chris Ware. There are lots of neat ones, but now it feels like I don’t have enough time to read, which is everyone’s problem, but I want to read more. I go towards the

DASH Featured Artist So what would you say to anyone who is interested in publishing art collections – primarily to look for a company that loves art and isn’t greedy?

and pop surrealist movement illustrators too that were really influential to me when I was going through school.

Definitely. I talked to a few different publishers when I wanted to publish my first book in 2005, and some of the offers were so low, it was like, “That can’t be right. It doesn’t seem fair.” And it’s important to negotiate as well. They are going to get the right price for them, and it’s important for you to get the right price for you.

Tattoos of your characters appear to be a growing trend. Does this permanent expression feel more or less rewarding than someone buying an original piece? Definitely more rewarding. It’s the ultimate compliment if somebody wants to get my work tattooed on their body. That’s totally amazing. I love it. I love when that happens.

Even before your success as an artist, you were an intern at Futurama. Did this have an influence on your style or career goals?

Your painted art has led to the design of toys. How was the transition process from canvas to figurines?

Working there definitely influenced my art – more in my line work. I really learned about drawing a cleaner line, kind of like they do with their character designs. That definitely influenced my work and my approach in things like poster art where I’d say 99% of my line work is in pencil, not in pen, because I like the softness and the line quality that you get with pencil, and I think that works well with the bright colors and flat colors of silk screen.

Really fun and really natural. I think it’s a logical evolution, creating a character in 2D who lives in a universe I have created, and to see them function as a 3D figure. I want to see that for all the characters that I make, and I always have. I used to work at a Japanese toy store before college, before art school, and that’s what really got me excited about wanting to do that. Seeing these crazy art toys that we would sell by Japanese artists, they’re amazing. I have always collected them too. It has and always has been a goal of mine to get into making figures at a certain point. A lot of artists have been doing this. Taking it from a vinyl toy and making it in fiber glass and resin and taking it to the MoMA. That has a functionality now as well. I’ve made some life-size fiberglass resin sculptures for my Lost Constellations show at the LeVine Gallery.

Who or what else has influenced your work? I’m really influenced a lot by old Japanese wood block printers. I love that type of stuff – Yoshitoshi, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi. And then early Renaissance painting and high renaissance like the Flemish painters – the real super rendered. I also like a lot of the Viennese Secessionist artists like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. That sort of painting I love – I love love. All that stuff really inspires me. Then of course there’s a slew of modern painters that are doing wonderful work,

DASH Featured Artist The Cotton Candy Machine is your relatively new art boutique in Brooklyn. How did the idea for this come about?

show called Tiny Trifecta, which was our grand opening event last year. We actually had people camping out for that one, so we decided to have it during warmer weather this year. So last year the Tiny Trifecta was 100 artists on the 100th day of the year doing 100 dollar art. But since we didn’t have the 100th day of the year line up, I thought, “how can I get this magical trifecta to happen?” So this year we’re having each artist do 3 tiny 100 dollar pieces of art, so we still have that trifecta happening. So it’s really affordable pieces by some really amazing, amazing artists we have set up for the show and it should be a really fun event. Otherwise, we sell a lot of art books, and we sell t-shirts. I didn’t open the store to create an outlet to sell my own artwork. I still show at the Jonathan LeVine gallery, I still have my New York gallery that represents me, but the specific function of the store is accessible affordable art for people like you and me because galleries don’t really cater to that.

We had the one year anniversary yesterday. The first year was amazing. We’ve had so many wonderful and fun events with amazing artists that I love and are my friends, and some that I didn’t know that well who became my friends. It’s been creating a very nice environment. It’s a storefront space, that used to be my actual art studio where I painted, and a bunch of friends asked me if I was going to open it up and turn it into a store, and I told them, “No, I can’t deal with that while I’m working. It would be too much.” So that kind of got left by the wayside. Then, when my boyfriend Sean and I started going out, he sort of rekindled the idea, and it seemed possible. He used to work with Alex Pardee doing Zero Friends, running pop-up stores for them all over the country, and that’s his expertise. When he said, “We should turn this into a store,” it seemed totally feasible, like we could do this – now that I had my soul mate power partner. And so I moved my art studio about five blocks away, and worked on converting the space. Of course we put a lot of love and work into it.

You’ve genuinely earned your success, and aspiring artists dream of such achievements. Do you have any words of advice, encouragement, discouragement, enlightenment, et cetera? Well, I really feel it’s this “Magical Three” – three things you need. You have to have the talent, obviously, but you also have to work your ass off. And I mean work your ass off. You have to be really diligent, and it’s hard to say no to your friends when they want to go out to a party or out to dinner or just go out to lunch. “No” is a very powerful, strong word, and unfortunately you have to use that a lot if you have a lot of deadlines. The rewards and the payback will come later for sure. That’s the second key. And I really believe there’s a portion of luck involved – being at the

What’s on the horizon for the Cotton Candy Machine? We have a featured artist every month. We have an amazing artist from Sacramento who’s in town right now, Skinner. Then next month we have Scott C who does really cool, cute water colors. He’s a New York artist, and he works a little bit in comics too. Then after that we have Alex Pardee doing his Zero Friends show. Then after that we have our big annual group

DASH Featured Artist right place at the right time. The luck of the draw really has a factor in things. For me, those really make it all happen. Talent, hard work, and luck. Thank you, Tara. Final question: DASH Literary Journal aims to publish instantly impactful works that when lingered upon seem to evolve into something more profound. What do you think it is about your art that gives it this effect? Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a very good question. I definitely put a lot of thought into my work and into the message that I want to send with my work â&#x20AC;&#x201C; with some paintings more than others, of course. Some have a deeper, stronger meaning. A lot of my work deals with relationships and emotions that transcend language and culture and I think speak to a really wide audience and a wide variety of people that can empathize and relate to the imagery. Some of my newer work deals with a lot of different mythologies and some different cultures, and you can still delve really deep into that, as far as these stories and creating these narratives that function really well.

DASH Featured Artist

DASH Hybrid

The Practice of Female Dispersal Kelly Nelson Abstract Two million years ago, males stayed close to home, the females radiated. Methodology Find nineteen skulls in a cave in South Africa, relatives we barely know. Test their fossil teeth, still carrying traces of minerals from the soil where their food, their water came from when they were young. Test if those minerals match the ones in the soil where their bones, unburied, were found. Findings The males died close to where they had grown up while most of the females had dispersed from their natal groups. Discussion When I die my teeth will tell of Hostess Cupcakes, fish sticks carried by freezer trucks from a bay Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d never seen, traces of Fruit Loops, chicken pot pies, Butterball turkeys in my enamel. I will appear to have come from a cornfield. No trace will tell I moved six hundred miles before I had any teeth, or that I moved five hundred miles more before my permanent teeth pushed through. I was set in motion, like my mother and her mother and hers again: we left home.

DASH Hybrid

Victory Defeats Victory I live a good thirty miles from MacDill Air Force Base, where Central Command plots the war on terror. Yet when I sit in bumper-tobumper traffic, I still find myself surrounded by bumper stickers that read SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. VICTORY IN IRAQ. FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION. VICTORY is the word that slays me. It’s always been part of the vocabulary of war (example: Winston Churchill’s famous quote, “Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be.”) Supposedly victory means the “defeat of an enemy or opponent, the state of having triumphed.” Yet think of how often the word has been appropriated to serve other purposes. We Americans like Victory as a place name. At least three towns in our country--two in New York and one in Vermont--sport this triumphant label. (We can only hope the two Victories in New York don’t pit their high school football teams against one another, lest the headlines read VICTORY DEFEATS VICTORY!). The minor-league baseball team The Indianapolis Indians plays at Victory Field. Chronically or terminally ill children and their families gather together at The Victory Junction Gang Camp. Victory is used to sell products. Victory Refrigeration has been one of our country’s most successful manufacturers of commercialgrade refrigeration equipment. Victory motorcycle riders are quick to point out the many ways their bikes triumph over the big leading

Rita Ciresi

competitor, Harley-Davidson. In New England, you will find Victory Supermarkets. At flea markets you will find old copies of Victory Records. But you will have to travel to Papua New Guinea to find a Victory Volcano. Victory is the name of a novel by famous seafaring author Joseph Conrad. It also is the title of many Hollywood movies, the most recent starring the unlikely duo of action-hero-actor Sylvester Stallone and former Brazilian soccer great Pele (who once said “It seems that God brought me to Earth with a mission to play soccer”). Most of us have our own personal definition of victory. I myself once named a doll Victoria. I thought the name sounded aristocratic. Haughty. Worthy of a woman who had servants. The problem: Vicki (as she eventually came to be known) was not made of fine china or even sturdy plastic. My mother had sewn her out of leftover fabric and stuffed her full of torn pantyhose. My empress--who in my imagination could command the world--in truth was just a pile of smelly rags.

Copy Edit

Brianna Whitehall

DASH Hybrid

Death Certificate

Dani Flint

DASH Hybrid

Six Words to say (ALMOST) Everything Contributor/Editor Bios CONTRIBUTORS: S.M. Abeles writes while walking his dog. Charles Ardinger loves his wife and his work. *Joseph Blair: using words to make sentences, daily! Matty Byloos: Byloos just sounds better said twice. Rita Ciresi usually is a novelist. Brendan Constantine is a poet based in Hollywood. Terence Crump: 62-year old budding poet. Eric L Cummings: he’s one lost mutt, an Ameropean. *Hannah Diaz: never part of a balanced breakfast. Lynn Elwell is a retired research scientist. *Dani Flint is hyggeliging-out. Kit Frick radiates pergolas and coordinating conjunctions. Howie Good is cultivating his garden. Deborah Hauser: a head of curly flames. Michael Kearns: teach write love. Ben Loory enjoys drinking tea. Marsha Mathews’ first book is Northbound Single-Lane. Lincoln McElwee: Barges wounds. His sea: skin, emotion. John McKernan is now a retired comma herder. Tara McPherson is a lover not a fighter. *Ammanda Moore: Eat. Pray. Love to write. Diane Vanaskie Mulligan writes to make peace with uncertainty. Anthony Nannetti lives in South Philadelphia. Kelly Nelson: I biked to work today. You? Shawnte Orion: influenced by night, tea, and chocolate. Charlotte Pence sits more than she stands. Jackie Ryan designs Burger Force comics. Carrie Seitzinger’s a snowflake you’ve already. Hilary Sideris lives in Kensington, Brooklyn. *Denotes contributing editor

Paul Sohar is a prisoner of words. Matthew J. Spireng is widely published. Monica Storss escaped from Fellini film, glamour bitch. *Brianna Whitehall: dancing is poetry in motion. Adam Wilson is a full-time earthling.

EDITORS: Nicole Bailey: not polite to talk about yourself. Matthew Berger: write, until we all find our Randy Bravo: (6) words are two much. Matthew Corcoran ...believes in ghosts, Scientology, and love. Kendra Dixon: unsure of next path . . . but ready! Stephanne Duran: I’ll publish when I’m ready, mom! G. Ehring eats cookies before they’ve cooled. Kimberly Farley: wandering worlds, seeking a susurrus. Stephanie Flint is very passionate about exact change. Maureen Fox wishes you a very merry unbirthday! Brian Fulsom: hopeful, despite the ties that bind. Mariam Galarrita wants Beckett on her zombie-apocalypse team. Michelle Greer was once a traveling magician. Christopher Hamilton: I learned how to count today. Charity Hammond does not write witty under pressure. Alex Hamo: somebody you never knew. Dan Hogan believes Bigfoot is out there, waiting. Raina Karim: saving the world from unpalatable food. Lindsay Kerstetter: limited by words all too often. Nadia Kijanka: write for the beloved, future reader. Emily King has a farm in West Texas. Josh Korn promises to do better, next time. Tara Leederman: eating Tapatio keeps her hair red. Judith Levy: lightly laughing away life’s ludicrous laments. Jenni Marchisotto: windr wondr wildr weltr wirbl warbl. Allison McKnight: she came, she mocked, she left. Dora Mora: fluctuating personality = multitudes. B. Neis: now legal in forty-two states. Christine Nguyen currently lives in a yellow submarine.

Alexa Oliphant: she keeps bees and Soviet literature. Matt Pelle: forcing pop culture into your academia. Katlin Ritchey: I sing the body electric. Daniel Sadnik: Dodger bro, scholar bro, bro bro. Skyler Schulze: searching for meaning in lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inconsistencies. Katrina Schwerdt: radiating awesomeness since 1987! Shannon Takeuchi: husband, dog, dog beach, coffee, happy! Amber Tavasolian: she wrote on tumblr--- a lot. Phillip Trad: the deus in deus ex machina. Daniel Turrubiartes: it sounded funnier in my mind. Patrick Vallee: from Bad to Dad...Loving It! Charmaine Vannimwegen: she saved the world a lot. Emily Wagner wishes she had a red panda. Anne Marie Walker believes in non sequiturs. Cheese! Gubernatorial! Calli Welsch is worrying the spaces inbetween. Steve Westbrook lives east of Santa Ana River. Duke Yang: make money and travel the world. Cameron Young: write whatever means something to you.