FIRST CORPSE

F I R S T C O R P S E featuring art and letters by SAMANTHA ANNESLEY LIZ AXELROD JACK COOPER ZOE GREENBAUM PRUDENCE GROUBE ASHLEY INGUANTA AMY KURZWEIL REBECCA NISON KATIE PEYTON JOSEPH A. W. QUINTELA BARBARA ROSENTHAL NATHANIEL ROSENTHALIS KIELY SWEATT BETTY TOMPKINS ALISON WILLLIAMS

Compiled by KATIE PEYTON & JOSEPH A. W. QUINTELA

Fall 2013 | FIRST CORPSE Copyright Š 2013 by Individual Authors | All Rights Reserved Photo Attributions | Page 90 Deadly Chaps Press | New York ISBN | 978-1-937739-31-7 DCdf&c2013| 1 Samantha Annesley | Letters Liz Axelrod | Letters Jack Cooper | Art & Letters Zoe Greenbaum | Art Prudence Groube | Letters Ashley Inguanta | Letters Amy Kurzweil | Letters Rebecca Nison | Letters Katie Peyton | Letters Joseph A. W. Quintela | Letters Barbara Rosenthal | Art Nathaniel Rosenthalis | Letters Kiely Sweatt | Letters Betty Tompkins | Art & Letters Alison Williams | Art & Letters

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Doctor’s Note | Katie Peyton & Joseph A. W. Quintela

First Corpse was created on 14 October, 2013 at Bar 6 in the West Village. The contributors were each asked for 3 lines of poetry or 3 works of art to be randomly added at regular intervals. As we took turns writing between them, all but the immediately adjacent lines were hidden from us in a variation of the classic exquisite corpse, a technique invented by the Surrealists, whose principal founder was AndrĂŠ Breton. We present it un-edited and exactly as it came into form.

October 2013 New York

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The bond that bonds best bonds between porous bodies.

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If somebody’s prose is somebody’s rose

what

are these sounds?

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The second body was discovered in the same condition as the first,

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and an empty chair is a way to say, go there

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to push my buttons.

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I’m the big button around here. Self-pushing, like a robot vacuum cleaner,

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Softly, silently, the wind took her with a sigh,

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the lamb had resigned itself to die,

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we plunged into the salty lips of morning.

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The ships, still darkened in the harbor, their masts naked, a velvet pincushion:

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you say, “For the perverts who look in your windows.”

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You say, “For anyone, that is to say.”

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Quickly, to the peach stand on the highway, where the journey began. The dig begins immediately.

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She bent over the sink, slowly, back curving like a snake,

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and I became the sink.

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We search for diamond rain where air refuses currency,

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only sometimes words storm like a March flood hurls a kayak down the Allagash.

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Here, only color matters,

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she would let her eye entangle itself with my drain, but

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she wouldn’t let me wash her feet,

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so I applied my recipe to yours and

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you awoke to shrunken feet,

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insect-thin spindles, quivering like

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what hope might skip out on as coin over lake,

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coined in the new language of water:

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the word a spell, the spell a sail that makes

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yesterday dissolve in a blur of heat, all that remains is a shimmering mirage of memory.

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The new world will be constructed of neon.

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The MTA worker makes the elevator wait for me every morning,

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the stop of the elevator a cold, blue kiss.

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My name was called & I rose to speak, still picking the glitter from my teeth,

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and then I wait for him,

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we are all waiting as we

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let fire’s dazzle consume the others.

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Why did they name me Tomato?

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Please make the music stop.

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Please stretch the silence until it is

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You called time out.

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If you listen at the edge of ill and sky,

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you might go on what you hear when the coast is clear,

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and from here, all sensations have been cleared to the coast.

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All places are real, regardless of imagination,

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though imagination may be the tendency to believe any this is actually in some place,

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and I dream in cows, in pixel pastures and the spicy digital bloom of manure.

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Get this truth in your head: every person around desires you.

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the odor of their desire hangs around you, a scent of scent that is the scent of

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chopping meat and singing lustily,

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our cares guttered and our spirits high our pens poised--

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has never seemed like a word for cradling delicate things, but language is full of miracles, and now it seems

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the lead-up was legendary.

She slowly opened her palm.

The phone rang.

Hello?

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The canary didn’t do anything,

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but still, with the light cracking through a single partition of its orange beak,

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somebody stole my laughter, somebody snapped out the sun,

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a moment undocumented, developed later in the lab.

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The water turns to stone in my throat, but I keep swallowing until the glass is empty.

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I wish to hold your velvet in my teeth,

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I wish to worship the body even when it seems

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my body is a job.

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I iron my hands for the photograph.

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In the desert, I imagine the woman I’ve loved together, in one roofless room, maybe growing roses or hanging photographs; they are unaware of each other—I have one chance to make the stars fall,

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but the darkness seems better at making stars fall than I am, and I wonder why darkness

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gets special treatment.

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She fills her house with empty chairs.

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It always seems like a lonely tree in a field is a question:

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can you comprehend the ratio of rose petal to sand?

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Of read to thorn?

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My father is still alive!

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And the photographs are multiplying exponentially.

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I have no mouth, but I must scream.,

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starting is the hardest part.

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Appendix | Photo Attributions

Jack Cooper | 71 Zoe Greenbaum | 25, 39, 69 (Found & Modified Photos) Barbara Rosenthal | 8 (Location China), 49 (Landscape China), 80 (Tree China) Betty Tompkins | 33, 47, 61 Alison Williams | 18, 55, 63

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