*Aw/Al*Vol.II/Issue02*Jan2012* In This Issue... Editor’s Note Issue Artist Words
Lauren Tamraz Samantha Valentine Howie Good, Kendra Grant Malone Matthew Savoca, Sean H. Doyle Jeremiah Akin, Matthew Cronin Matthew Gasda, Dana C. Carrico
Contributors Acknowledgements
Editor’s Note...
Lauren Tamraz
Lately I’ve been feeling like less is more. Maybe it’s a New Year’s, January, clean slate sort of thing. But I suspect it has also been inspired by a Christmas gift from my husband. I can be something of a loud dresser, with bold accessories, pink sneakers and a love for all things vintage and/or rhinestoned/sequined. When I opened a tiny box a few weeks ago, I did not expect the petite and sparkling earrings inside. They were beautiful—no doubt about that—but they were a quiet kind of pretty that I usually avoid. I thought they were *safe pretty*, but did my best to smile about them. My husband could tell though, and he convinced me that they were “me”, and that I looked great in them, even without anything the size of a key fob dangling from my ears. I eyed the box for a few days. I decided to wear them around the house one day. I found myself watching them sparkle in the mirror when I went to the bathroom. I wore them again the next day. In that vein, for this issue I decided to pare down the usual outline. The page count has not really decreased, but the number of contributors has. This month we’re featuring more work from fewer writers. Also, there is only one artist for the entire issue; but from cover to cover, Samantha Valentine’s BFA thesis project, Natural Elegance, does not disappoint. Follow the journey from creating hundreds of tiny ceramic barnacles to the finished gown they adorn. I had the great pleasure of seeing this thesis exhibit, but the horror of hearing a gallery-goer crush a few barnacles underfoot. It was like a bottle popping under tires. The Dorsky Museum fell quiet. Samantha handled what must have been devastating with true grace, just like her finished product. Or, maybe she just took a deep breath and channeled this month’s mantra.
Thanks again for being here, dear readers. Enjoy the deep winter (that has not always been feeling that way) and we’ll see you in mid-March as the light begins to grow brighter.
XO
*L
Issue Artist: Samantha Valentine Samantha Valentine grew up in Massapequa, Long Island. While attending Massapequa High School she spent weekends in the city attending Saturday Live, classes offered to high school students through a program at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It was at FIT that Samantha became adept at using different kinds of sewing machines and learning how to create patterns for clothing. When she graduated, Samantha was awarded the Leadership in Art Award. The artist chose to attend SUNY New Paltz for its rising reputation and extensive art department. While attending college she was able to explore a variety of media and learn valuable skills, such as welding and soldering. She also learned proper techniques for band saws for wood and metal, as well as table saws and jig saws. During her sophomore year, after taking her first ceramics class, it was then she realized her desire to create three-dimensional work. After taking two more upper division classes in ceramics, she applied for the BFA program. There was so much to explore and experiment with; she gained vast knowledge on clay formulations, but especially focused on testing and creating glazes. Samantha found an important part of creating glazes was firing them and, in turn, learned how to fire all the kilns the studio had to offer. Samantha’s interest went beyond just firing the kilns, but to physically building them through Kiln Building, a class offered in the summer of 2009. Samantha’s thesis show was this past December at the Dorsky Museum on the SUNY New Paltz campus. Her thesis work consisted of hand built ceramic multiples referred to as ‘barnacles’ which were attached to a gown. Joining these two craft materials created a gown that was both desirable, but grotesque and challenged the accessibility of the work to the viewer. Find more of Samantha’s work at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/samlval
All images throughout from Natural Elegance and courtesy of the artist
My Life & Hard Times
1 He comes toward me, jingling a paper cup. The kind of books I write aren’t the kind that sell. 2 I stand knee-deep in the noise of spiders. Old cuts begin to bleed. If they won’t love me, an angel is thinking, they can still fear me. 3 An ungovernable city of chill and gloom. Every street ends in an ellipsis. . . Only a stranger, or madman, would stop here. I step down off the bus.
Vivace
O the merry-go-round music of married sex! Familiar and tinny, but jaunty, too, passing through the skin with leaps and spins and diabolical little curlicues.
-Howie Good
Tiny Little Good for Nothing Tiny Man
we’ve caught ourselves in this silly little circle where my current life goal is to become you and it seems to me your current life goal is to become me but i could be reading into this, as i tend to do when you are so quiet it’s convenient that we wear the same size jeans though and similar t-shirt and dress sizes of course underwear too, i like how yours cling to my thighs which are just the littlest bit bigger than yours did you know in france it is considered a bit stylish for a woman to be slightly taller than her male lover? but we won’t move to france for a few reasons and don't worry no one will ever notice because you hair makes up for 3 inches of your height which officially makes you taller depending on how arbitrary you measure and i'm sorry that when i wear my heels i like to pull you close and stare down your forehead making growling dog noises in my bedroom and ya ya,
i'm still sorry i bit you last night so do you think people are buying into our inside joke? the one about how cruel i am to you? i think sometimes people forget that persona ends sometimes at night and sometimes in the morning and i think we forget that persona is always a little bit there toothat's what i was thinking last night when i was looking out the window and then asked you what you were thinking about only because i wanted to be asked in return i still can't decide how badly i want people to notice how tall i am compared to you me, being slightly tall for a woman you, being slightly short for a man and both of us being thin for the time being thank god i own six inch heels for work in case my decision slants that way -Kendra Grant Malone
poem at the beginning of summer
on the roof i stare at trees and wonder what i should do in general i'm afraid to call you because we spoke an hour ago oh wait you're calling me right now you're saying “guess what i just did i did the dishes. and then i saw that the sink drain was really dirty so i bleached it and then i saw that the pan below the dry rack was really dirty so i put all the dishes in the tub and then i bleached it and then i saw that the toaster oven was dirty so i took all the components out as many components as i could and then....... i bleached it”
i laughed each time you said bleached it and then you sent me a picture of yourself wearing baby blue lingerie that your friend gave you and you laughed and said “i look like a figure skater i don't know why i'm still wearing it why am i still wearing it? matthew, i'm still wearing it!” i laughed each time you said wearing it and then half-sung “what would brian boitano do?” “he's canadian, right?” you said and i agreed but then found out later that he's american, born in california eventually we hung up the phone “i'm not going to call you again tonight” you said “ok” i said but then you called me back and told me all about your bank account
-Matthew Savoca
poem at the end of summer
it's 11:09 pm on my bed today and you are in another state texting me dollar signs in reference to why you aren't wearing panties “i was naughty” you said “i bought a red bra and panties AND that coat” smiley face a while later you asked my permission to drink a beer i said two would be okay but check back in with me before the third i watch half an episode of saved by the bell on the computer and come to the realization that some of the people i talk to on weekends are far too young to even know what saved by the bell is i'm waiting for you to call me when you do, it's with another man's mouth enclosed on your foot his name is georgio and he's giving you a pedicure, apparently, with his teeth or something i think he's laughing, you said, because my other foot is on his stomach and i just felt it move later i'm eating a snack and get a text saying 'asshole' which is quickly blamed on your roommate and it occurs to me that i might be the first person to ever give you a chance
-Matthew Savoca
M is for Martha Back in the mid-‘90s, when I was still living in Phoenix, I met this girl -- Martha --through the singer of the band I was in. Actually, I didn’t really meet as her as much as I heard about her. Supposedly, she used to come to all of our shows and just stand off to the side of the stage and watch me play. She and the singer had met through some weird circumstances - I think when he was still in the straight edge band he used to front they played a benefit for some riot grrl zine she and her friends were trying to keep alive -but had stayed in touch. She was a senior in high school, and was deeply involved in everything I was not -veganism, straight edge, feminism, the riot grrl scene, political activism. Me? I was sort of teetering on the edge of hedonism, I suppose. I smoked a lot of pot and was not shy about being someone who was willing to lay down with almost any woman who was willing. I drank a lot. I dabbled with a lot of other drugs as well. Cocaine. Meth on the few rare occasions when cocaine could not be procured. Because my father was the manager for the apartment complex where I lived, I would use master keys and go into the apartments of some of the elderly when they were in and out of the hospital and steal their morphine pills and their valium. Basically, everything I was -- a not-very-nice, drug-taking-type-ofperson – was diametrically opposed to everything Martha stood for. Martha used to write me letters even though we lived only three or four miles apart. I’m not sure who gave her my mailing address, but this is how we began to
communicate. She would send me these handwritten letters -- long-form missives and volleys, really -- that would only have the letter “M” and a PO Box for a return address. At first, because I was such a stoner, I wasn’t able to put two and two together and realize this was the infamous Martha I had been hearing so much about. She never signed a letter as Martha, she always signed them with “Respectfully, M.” For a while, I kept on going through my mental Rolodex trying to figure out if during my travels I had met a woman with impeccable handwriting and communication skills who had an M name. I was quite sure that when I was in the military I did not meet such a woman. The M who was writing me these letters was trying to relay something bigger, something much more important than some past lover or confidant who was trying to reconnect -- these letters were full of her thoughts on feminist theory and how it related to her sending letters to a guy in a band that nobody knew about who embodied nothing more than “pure testosterone with a guitar strapped on for the ride,” her thoughts about animals and why I should consider no longer eating them, sexual abuse, punk rock and the power within it to heal all wounds for all freethinking people. One afternoon when we were rehearsing for an upcoming show, I made a joke about getting bizarre letters from fans. The singer was standing there and then suddenly a beer bottle came flying toward my head.
“You really are an asshole, Sean. The least you can do is answer her letters
after she pours her heart out to you.” “Jesus. Fuck -- you know her? Did you give her my address?” “It’s my friend Martha -- the one I’ve been telling you about. Why are you such a fucking moron?” “Oh. Shit. Okay, I’ll write her back. Sorry, man.” The drummer and bass player looked a little confused, but the singer gave them the quick version of events -- she had come to one of our shows because he had invited her, witnessed the hurricane I turn into as soon as there was volume, and subsequently felt the need to start writing me letters. They rather enjoyed this, and started to rib me about it quite a bit.
I felt like a total asshole for not realizing or responding. ****** In one of my response letters to Martha, I included my phone number. I told her that as much as I enjoyed her letters, she was more than likely going to get slow responses from me. If she wanted to talk, my phone rang twenty-four hours a day. ****** “Have you ever been with another man?” “You mean sexually?”
“Yes. Have you ever been with another man -- sexually?”
something greater than myself in this oddball situation.
“When I was younger I was confused and I experimented a bit. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t gay. If that’s what you’re asking, then yes -- I have been with another man sexually, even though we were boys.” “Most guys won’t admit that, you know.”
Martha was the one who tipped me off on the phone that the band had been auditioning other guitar players behind my back. She told me that the singer had had more than enough of my inebriated antics, and she told me that most of the guitar players they were auditioning could not figure out how I was able to play so many moving parts as if there were more than one guitar player.
“I’m not ashamed of anything I have ever done in my life.” “I’ve noticed.” ****** Martha would usually call me at roughly the same time every night -- just around midnight. By then I was half in the bag, so she didn’t have to dance around all the usual conversational trappings people have to dance around, and could ask me about anything she wanted and I would almost always answer as straight as I possibly could. She liked to ask me about my sex life a lot -- she seemed to be fascinated with my middling promiscuity. I tried very hard to be a gentleman and not flirt with her, but it was very hard to deny that animal part of me that flirts with anyone up to and including the sixty year old bank teller who I would see once a week when I cashed my paycheck. Martha and I had still not met in the flesh, or at least I was full of the belief that we had not. Every time my band played a show I would scan the crowd for a girl/woman who fit the physical description she had given me over the phone. The singer of my band was of no help to me, because for some reason he felt it important -- at times it came across like it was his sole mission in life, really -- for me to be learning about
When I quit the band the next day, the singer angrily told me -- “You might as well go out and buy a drum machine and a four-track and just do everything yourself, since you seem to think you’re a musical genius.” When I told Martha that night on the phone that I had quit the band I could hear her crying softly on the other end of the line. ****** I didn’t hear from Martha for a couple of weeks after I had quit the band. I would sit at my kitchen table with the phone next to me, waiting. It never rang at all. When the mail was delivered, I would check it to see if there was anything from her, but there wasn’t. I called her number one night to see if she would pick up, but it rang and rang so I set the receiver down and went back to drinking and smoking. ****** I saw a flyer in a record store for my old band. They had a show coming up at a new warehouse-type venue. I knew I would not be welcome at the show, but my mind immediately thought of Martha -- maybe if I went she would show
herself to me. Maybe if I went she would speak to me and tell me why she had disappeared. When I got home, I picked up the phone to see if there were any messages. There were three. The first message was from the bass player in my old band, telling me he was sorry that I had quit, but he understood why I had to -- he and I had played in many bands together, and I almost always quit each band. Throughout my teens and my early twenties he was probably my only real friend. He also mentioned in the message who they had replaced me with -- a peripheral acquaintance named Kyle, who was very close with the singer -- and about how hard it had been for him to teach him all of my guitar parts. He also mentioned they were playing a show, and it would probably be best for everyone if I did not show up. I deleted this message.
tried to make out with her at a party once and his face smelled like eggs being cooked. Again she apologized for not calling or writing. She also told me that she would try and call me back again later on that evening. I saved this message. I waited. ****** The next time I heard from Martha, she told me the band had broken up for good. This was another week or so after their attempt at playing one show with Kyle as my replacement. Obviously, it went horribly. Martha then told me that Kyle was moving to San Francisco to go to some recording school, and had convinced her that she should come out and see him when he got settled out there. “Are you and Kyle a ‘thing,’ Martha?” “I don’t think so. Why, are you jealous?”
The second message was from Kyle, the new guitar player. He apologized to my voicemail for the awkwardness of the call, but he had some questions for me about some of the guitar parts, and felt like I was the best person for him to ask. He said he was willing to come over to my place and have me show the parts to him, since nobody else in the band was happy with his attempts at figuring stuff out. He said he knew everything was really weird and that we didn’t know each other very well. He also said the singer urged him to call me and ask me for help. I deleted this message. The third message was from Martha. She apologized for not being around, and she also mentioned how she felt it was weird that the band had replaced me with Kyle. She called him a “hippie weirdo,” and she mumbled something about how he had
“A little. I’m more jealous that I have no idea who you really are, and all of these people I know are aware of who you are.” “It’s probably better that way, Sean.” ****** Martha decided to hitch her way from Phoenix to San Francisco. I advised her that she would probably end up dealing with a lot of creeps and freaks on the road, and that it might be best for her to invest in some pepper spray or even allow me to teach her how to use a knife to defend herself. She laughed at me and told me she would be fine. I made her promise me that she would call me collect every night so I could know she was okay. She agreed.
****** For the next five nights, I would receive a collect call from Martha. Each time, I would ask her immediately if she was okay. She would usually then begin to ramble like someone jacked-up on truck stop coffee about the events of her day. How she was able to grab a ride out of Phoenix that took her all the way to Yuma, and that the kid who gave her a ride was a really nice kid who was going to medical school in Tucson and he had semi-decent taste in music and never once tried to hit on her or treat her like a piece of meat. She told me about the Mexican family she met at a gas station and gave her a ride from Yuma to Indio, and about how amazing it was to see the Salton Sea and the badlands of that part of California while sandwiched in the back seat of a car between two beautiful children. She told me about the old woman who took her from Palm Desert - where she had taken a bus to from Indio -- all the way into Pasadena, and about how she kept on telling her over and over again how she should be in movies because she was so smart and pretty, and how the woman also gave her sixty dollars to take the bus out of the Los Angeles area because she felt Martha was “too precious to hitchhike without being raped.” Martha then told me about how the bus from Los Angeles to Fresno was terrible -- full of screaming children and meth-addled faces. A man got on the bus in Bakersfield who decided he was going to make Martha his “old lady,” and he kept on offering her pulls off of his bottle of Old Granddad. She finally got him to relent by telling him she was on her way to see her father who she told him was in prison -Pelican Bay -- and that got him to leave her alone. She told me that when she arrived in Fresno at dawn it was like a George Romero movie, and she had never felt superior to other people
before in her life and felt really guilty about feeling that way. She said the bus depot there was like a tomb for the homeless and the drug-addicted. Martha then told me about the girl she met in a Denny’s in Fresno who was going to San Jose who gave her a ride. The girl was a student who was the first member of her family to go to college, and they talked the entire time about things that Martha loved -- feminism, being vegetarian, being sexually confused. Martha told me that when they got to the girl’s neighborhood, she parked the car and asked Martha if she could kiss her. Martha said it was the best kiss she had ever known, and she kept on thinking about it after she got out of the car and walked toward the bus station to make the rest of her way to Kyle in San Francisco. Each one of these collect calls felt like a postcard. ******
On the sixth night, the phone rang differently. ****** “You have a collect call from ‘Martha,’ will you accept the charges?” “Yes.” “Sean? Sean. Oh, God. Sean.” “What’s wrong, Martha? What happened? Are you in San Francisco now?” “Sean -- Kyle is dead. Kyle is fucking dead.” “Wait -- what? What are you saying, Martha? Slow down and talk to me, okay?” “Fuck. FUCK. I got here this morning. I tracked Kyle down at his school because he doesn’t have a fucking phone. I found the address of the school in the phone book and I went down there to find him. I found him and he was so happy to see me. He decided he needed to ‘celebrate,’ so we went into some really gross area of town – I have no idea what it was called -- and he bought some heroin for himself.” “Oh God, Martha. What the fuck happened? Are you alone?” “I am at one of his classmate’s apartment building. Sean -- we went back to Kyle’s shitty apartment and we were making out. I have no idea why I came on this trip. We were making out and he decided he wanted to shoot a little dope and then go show me the city. He went into the bathroom to do it because I told him I couldn’t watch him do it. FUCK.” “I’m so sorry, Martha. I am so sorry.”
“He was in the bathroom for a long time and I didn’t know what to do, so I went and knocked on the door. I couldn’t hear anything other than the water in the sink running. I opened the door and he was on the floor and his face was purple, Sean.” “Martha? Can you stay with his classmate for the night? I do not think you should be alone there.” “Sean, I had to call his parents and tell them. They didn’t even know who I was -they thought I was some friend of his playing a joke on them. I feel so fucking terrible and sick. I don’t know what to do. Sean, what do I do? Why did this have to happen right now?” “I don’t know, Martha. I’m sorry this happened to you, and I am sorry that Kyle is gone.” “Kyle was an asshole, Sean. I’m freaking out because I came almost one thousand miles to see someone I just kissed, dead on his bathroom floor. For what? I can never come home again. Ever.” “Martha, slow down -- okay? What do you mean you can never come home again?” The next sound I heard was the dial tone. I never heard from Martha again, and to the best of my knowledge -- nobody else did, either.
--Sean Doyle
Strip Gold Rush City 2010. I am enveloped by airbrushed bosoms and buttocks. Gauntlets of card clickers thrust escort tracts at passersby, and I picture the apocalypse or a nuclear blast turning towers of slot machines to mountains of dust. Strip lights up at dusk while the Bellagio fountains twirl and dance like Rockettes to “The Star Spangled Banner.” A neon Moloch casts a red glare on my glasses, and I wonder if this is what America means —a thousand blind pedestrians gawking by the waters of Babel. Strip smells like a Malibu-marinated sorority girl in a candy store. I get a coffee at the Hard Rock and wish I had a Camel cut to salt the air. Newlyweds at the next table take out menthols and a light. A wedding dress bought at ten is on the floor by midnight
-Jeremiah Akin
On Losing a Spring Baby during the vernal stretch you grew like an arctic bulb an any-daisy or an amaryllis— vibrant carmine perennially lit by a sun-tint embedded deep like its tiny vessel-roots late April sweetpea, my early June hyacinth— (planted like a school of dead starfish longing for the royal thistle shade) calling Girl, Girl, Girl forgetting about you & i
-Matthew Cronin The Loft Apartment Empty the rain of thunderstorms. Or Just kiss me now, finally. The nights Here have always been strange. Full of A longing that wakes you up terrified. Mandrakes crying for blood. Birds that Suddenly stop singing. Memories are rooted in the deep of you, Like butterflies that will not Dust off their wings. How could so much life go out of us? You set the alarm for later in the morning. All these days are like falling out of love.
-Matthew Gasda
How It Was
The sky was never dark and it was always early. The road to my house was empty and Leadbelly’s words in my voice bounced around the valley and back to our feet where they lay, bruised and bloodied, like our soft soles from the shards of glass all mixed in with gravel on the shoulder. Your clothes were dirty – wet – sweat soaked and steeping in pheromones. I had blood twining down my left leg from a cut on my knee. It left little spots of red behind where my heel was.
I smoked too many cigarettes and you could hear it in my laugh. I laughed a lot. Loud. Booming. Happy. I was happy. Your breath was trapped, stale, but like candy in a jar on a hot day. Sweet. I liked how you shot it down my throat when we went to kiss, kissed my open mouth, all of my teeth, my smile. You didn’t have smokes so we shared mine. Passed every couple hits. I liked it better that way. Not because we were partners in some physical crime but because we were enjoying the same thing, at the same time, in the same
place. I like novelty, liked it then, am a sucker for it still. The grass under our feet was dying in September’s heavy air. Your spackled boots looked silly next to my bare feet and I rested my toes on your steel tips. You giggled. You have a great giggle. I loved you and you were indifferent. But I don’t trust linear conceptions of time, so every moment is both the first and the last, always. That’s how I loved you. Like every moment was both the start and end of something beyond fallible language. But you were indifferent and when we were still, motionless, and kissed, nothing lined up, nothing was perfect, no synapses fired. I was selfconscious about that. It didn’t seem right, was not fitting, because when our chests pressed together, all sticky with the day, everything was beautiful – seemed to promise to always stay beautiful – and the taunting forever forever taunting was not overwhelming, but infinite and huge – lovely, exciting, wonderful. It was this fracture that brought my attention to the indifference. It gnawed at first. Then it became choking. It’s still choking. When I looked in your eyes, my face twitched. It twitches now, thinking of the endlessly passing past. You didn’t look in my eyes. Didn’t look at me at all. Not since the night we flooded our bodies with chemicals and twined together in my bed. Not since you looked at me, on top of you with our necklaces all tangled and knotted, and whispered, “you’re so beautiful” – as though in awe. As though your eyes were actually open. As though you actually meant it. But you are indifferent, so I now know better. You were very unlike any other. They had sharpened edges – synthetic,
trained, polished - but you, you were rusty - different, naturally dangerous and it made me think of scrapping in the woods to pay off the debt from living in a society that requires greenbacks for entry. Made me think of running madly through poisons and prickers but being immune to their sting. Made me think of all the other items that could hurt me, because of their very make, but wouldn’t if I was delicate and smart in my movement. If I just kept my head spinning, remembering always that it turns, I would be fine. I told you I’d be fine. I’m fine. Yes, it was your rust all along. I could smell the iron on your skin when you sweat. But this is really how it was – this is what all of the other excellent lovely sunflower moments prove to be – We were at a picnic bench by the river. It wasn’t late. It was always early. We rode bikes there and where we sat, we were hidden from the road 100 meters away. It was the road I lived on. You had walked it with me before. I was making love songs out of cigarette smoke and you were lying back on the table; our heads together, bodies pointing in opposite directions. I asked you to kiss my face and you said you couldn’t that night. I said, “you cant right now?” It just didn’t make any sense to me. When we left that night, I went right and you went left. You told me to be careful and I couldn’t make sense of that either - it’s a clumsy imperative - sometimes it means avoid danger, sometimes it means keep your head, sometimes it means nothing at all, particularly if you’re indifferent and I think that you are.
It occurs to me now that it’s just the human necessity to make special that has caused all of my problems. I’m lighter with the realization that you owe me nothing at all. Unbearably lighter. But the sun is rising higher and higher and the plants need watering. It’s still early, never late, and I have things to do. Things that make me happy, make me sweat, sometimes smile. I have cold beer in the fridge and warm whiskey by my bed. After I made you so big that you
blocked the sun, I came to understand that it’s the little tiny wisps of light that make it all worthwhile anyhow. It’s the flowers. The dirt all around my toes, in my toenails. Those scrapes and bruises that were all over the body that you called beautiful. The moon. Sound, no matter its tone – touch, no matter its texture. Pheromones. The little things. I told you that I’m fine. I’m fine.
-Dana C. Carrico
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the 2011 poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a charity, which you can read about here: https://sites.google.com/site/rhplanding/ howie-good-dreaming-in-red Kendra Grant Malone's first book of poetry Everything Is Quiet is available from Scrambler Books (http://thescrambler.com/eng/books/kg m-ms/) and her second collection of poetry, Morocco, co-written with Matthew Savoca is available from Dark Sky Books. (Ed. note: Morocco was on Awosting Alchemy’s year-end book list.)
Matthew Savoca was born in Pennsylvania in 1982. He is the author of the poetry books long love poem with descriptive title (2010, scrambler books) and Morocco with Kendra Grant Malone (2011, Dark Sky Books). He lives in New York and Philadelphia, building and fixing things for money. (Ed. note: Morocco was on Awosting Alchemy’s year-end book list.)
Sean H. Doyle lives in Brooklyn, NY. He works hard every day to be a better person. Find more of his work here: www.seanhdoyle.com Jeremiah Akin is an undergrad at the University of Idaho majoring in English with an emphasis on creative writing and poetry. He is a music minor, and released his first full-length album last year. Matthew Cronin is a student at SUNY New Paltz, majoring in Philosophy and English. Matthew Gasda lives in Brooklyn, NY. His first book of poetry, The Humanist, is available now on Amazon, from Literary Laundry Press. Dana C. Carrico is a graduate of SUNY New Paltz. She utilizes her degrees in English and Philosophy to perform as your typical genius waitress at a small Mediterranean restaurant. To flex her intellectual muscles, she also works as a research assistant for a local flustered graduate student.
Acknowledgements There are so many individuals and businesses without whom Awosting Alchemy could not exist in this form. Thank you to David Friedman & Barner Books of New Paltz who have supported the project from Day 01. Special thanks to The Yoga House of Kingston, NY who hosted our Paper Anniversary celebration this month. Thank you, talented & diverse band of contributors, for doing your art & word thing so well here in the Valley and around the globe. Aw/Al exists because you exist! And thank you again, dear reader, not only for beginning at page 01, but for reading through to the end. We hope you enjoyed your journey and will be back for the next issue in March 2012. * * * Submission Guidelines * * * Thanks for choosing to send your work to Awosting Alchemy. We’re writers and artists too, dutifully sending our work out
into the atmosphere with our fingers crossed. We truly appreciate what you do and your decision to include us in your efforts. Always check our website for updated submission guidelines & contests. Submit through Submishmash, our wonderfully easy and helpful submission manager. You may also feel free to contact us with any questions you have at AwostingAlchemy@hotmail.com. Our response time is fairly swift. Expect to hear back from us within about a month. Thanks again. We look forward to your submissions. Send us things you had to write or create because they were nowhere else in the world, sharp and new and not yet worn out by others. Strive for a new set of fingerprints. ******* Read: AwostingAlchemy.com Submit: AwostingAlchemy.submishmash.com /Submit Contact: AwostingAlchemy@hotmail.com Facebook: artist.to/awostingalchemy/