Sprung Formal
the twelfth issue 2017
2017 Staff M anaging Editor Austin Lionberger
Staff Madison Crabtree, Ashley Cusick, Emma Daffin, Claire Dain, Debbie Dixon, Caylie Hausman, Benjamin Johnson, Maddie Murphy, Mikayla Overton, Y Pham, Dana Sanginari, Emily Souers, Sebastian Thomas
Faculty Editor Jordan Stempleman
Front Cover “Translucent Fracture� by Paige Edson
Sprung Formal would like to thank: KCAI Crossroads Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice Malynda Eshleman Spangler Graphics Phyllis Moore Tony Brock
Sprung Formal is a literary arts journal published annually in association with the Liberal Arts Department at the Kansas City Art Institute. Established in 2005, Sprung Formal is a literary magazine edited and produced by students who pride themselves on combining professional content with professional-grade student work. To view past issues please visit: www.sprungformal.wordpress.com
Table of Contents 1 2 4 5 6 10 11 12 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 29 31 33 34 36 41 42 47 48 55 56 57 58 59
Thing Cento..............................................................Marcus Myers Venus...................................................................Claudia Sudekum Untitled I.............................................................Madison Murphy Untitled II............................................................Madison Murphy How to Revive a Guinea Pig..........................................Brian Clifton Yolk....................................................................Benjamin Johnson Open Up...................................................................Rosemary Hall .............................................................................Jason Morris Sea Worthy...............................................................Samuel Rowe History of a Dying Father..........................................Jordan Hooper The Real Romantic History........................................Jordan Hooper Rug/ Plant...............................................................Bobby Haulotte Prime Race...............................................................Ségolène Pihut The Conversation...................................................Willow Hardman Lachrymal..............................................................Dana Sanginari Mythos..................................................................Dana Sanginari if you’ve ever picked logic / over love raise your hand..........Dara Cerv I’m working on your wildest dream.....................................Dara Cerv from Welcome to the Last Earth Show.............................Mike Sikkema Sons of the San Joaquin.............................................Kyle Souryasack Cry unto Country.......................................................Dora Malech Chicago 2016.............................................................Emma Daffin Echo................................................................Chel Wright-Navarro Our Secret, 8...................................................Jay Aquinas Thompson Powerline.................................................................Chris Crabtree from Grackles Explain Things to Me....................................Jen Tynes Double Exposure 01......................................................Esther Leech Trip to Death........................................................Troy James Weaver Lotus Root..................................................Hannah Lynn Calvert Fine The Excursionist..................................................Sierra Brown-Faust Watershed..........................................................Sierra Brown-Faust For the Federally Endangered Roan Mountain Bluet....Sierra Brown-Faust ...........................................................Contributor Biographies
T hing Cento M arcus Myers
“We speak about our things, their thatness and whatness,” a dead mouth sings under an old tree. In the museum print room today we looked at their Blake engravings between the sights of the sun. He gave me secret, signifying winks: “And yet we seldom hear our things speak about us.” The meaning welled, perhaps, from nothing other than phalanges, from ceaseless hands at work until the textures gave rise to surfaces. Beneath glass the soft whiteness, the gaping blackness, which reminded us how little was alive and how much space the living occupies only inside of us. Outside, the ear almost hears the river slide out of grass, and the eye in the I, mirrored in her thumb-smudged phone, holds our deaths as something only possible and never a thing at hand. Let’s think, instead, of being with things as action, as angels or cows with whom we relate. Let the object we suffer to make be no more than a broken gate.
Sources: Max Webber, Martin Heidegger, Linda Gregg, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Robert Hass, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke, John Donne
1
Venus
Claudia Sudekum a rotting cabbage the size of venus would have maggots the size of dragons would explode in a swarm of horrifying life and i would vomit along with everyone else on earth watching the live broadcast getting excellent ratings before the smell wafted over killing billions four weeks later. enormous beet hanging from the chandelier dripping its beet juice like a fat sleepy vampire i don’t even want to deal with it i’m just going to walk right past it into the kitchen alien beets always ruin my day. a freshly cut zucchini emits defensive slime it is like a soggy scab when you peel the bandage off. i bet if i pieced it back together it would stay that way and walk around fine. 2
leeks in the basement getting out of hand now the size of palm trees their pale silence haunts me their spindly roots portend a creeping doom. i don’t go down there anymore my dirty laundry will have to wait i am in favor of entombing them down there forever. tsunami of green peas overtakes me as i flee down the middle of the street. the rumbling flood cool and sweet smelling knocks the breath right out. it is too much to bear these myriad vegetables inheriting the earth there is nowhere left to go my knees are planted in the dirt.
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Untitled I Madison Murphy 4
Untitled II Madison Murphy 5
How To R evive A Guinea Pig Brian Clifton
I. Dodi Smuckles had taken to walking around graveyards. Not because she was dying. That’s bullshit. Dodi wanted loneliness, and graveyards were full of it. She had once read, far before she was diagnosed, that most comedians were lonely (“I mean look at Owen Wilson,” she argued with herself in the mirror one night), and since she only had a few months to live, she figured that she needed to up her game a bit in this department especially if her timeline to success had to be accelerated. “Yeah, it’s a little macabre,” she told Ray, her brother. “But this is the industry I want to be in, so I have to do some unsavory things.” Dodi had to admit that Ray looked pretty bored as they strolled through a row of limestone grave markers, but Ray was four so everything bored him. Most of the words had worn from the gravestones, but that’s what happens with soft rock, after 10 years it looks ancient. Dodi thought this was a good metaphor for herself.
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II. “Fucking lighten up,” Dodi yelled at Charlie. “It was just a joke.” Charlie wouldn’t fucking lighten up. It was bad enough that her best friend was going to die. She couldn’t deal with Dodi making a big joke out of everything. Though years later, Charlie would eventually see the humor of Dodi playing Death in the school’s theatrical rendition of The Seventh Seal. The two of them spent the rest of their lunch period fishing around the empty chip bags as if there were something more to munch on.
III. One night over dinner, Dodi’s mother gave her a book called Surviving. The book was full of very hopeful messages like, “The anguish you face now won’t be a permanent state, most likely it will fade and will leave an open space for happiness” and “Life equals strength plus difficulty.” She said the doctor recommended it, and she read it and thought it was wonderful. After skimming a few pages, Dodi began working on a bit about how if life equals strength plus difficulty then death must equal something else. It was a hard bit to finish because she wouldn’t be alive to take Geometry and her Basic Algebra scores were mediocre at best. But still, she knew something was there and she had six months to figure it out.
IV. A few weeks later, the two girls were on Charlie’s roof. Dodi had stolen a pack of cigarettes from one of their teachers and was sucking them down and hacking them up. What did she care? Charlie held Sharon, her guinea pig. When Dodi’s hacking became too much, Charlie said, “Quit it. You sound like my aunt.” Dodi lit another cigarette and another until every gap between her fingers had been filled. She took a drag from each and blew it in Charlie’s direction. When Dodi reached the pinkie cigarette, Charlie couldn’t stand it anymore. She stood up. Her sudden movement awakened Sharon, who squirmed and fell from Charlie’s arms. The two girls watched
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the guinea pig roll down the roof like a brown and white cylinder until she hit the gutter then the concrete below. They inched their way to the edge and looked down. Sharon lay motionless on the patio. They rushed to the body. Charlie held the guinea pig and screamed, “Look at what you did! Look!” Dodi wished she hadn’t. This was why they went to a graveyard. Dodi said, “Since I’ve been in graveyards a lot, I’ve sort of learned witchcraft, and because I’m going to die, I can revive Sharon. It’ll be okay. I can fix this.” Charlie was skeptical that she had lost Sharon and would lose Dodi, so there was not much she could do except allow her friend to make a salt circle, recite an incantation, and wait for the guinea pig to twitch back to life.
V. Dodi’s mother had meant well, but forcing the teen to attend the school assembly held to raise awareness of her illness was cruel at best. At this point, Dodi was visibly frail and fighting with her mother was not something she wanted or could do. In the gym, from Dodi’s vantage point, the assembly began with teachers coming up to her mother and touching her shoulder before finding a seat in the first row. It ended with the principal reminding everyone that grief counselors were there for anyone who needed them. Dodi looked around. She tried to catch people’s gaze. Some looked away; others gave her a sad nod. Charlie crossed her arms over her chest, stuck her tongue out, and closed her eyes. Dodi looked away and left without talking to anyone.
VI. After Sharon’s untimely death, Dodi sat on her bed and looked at all the posters that covered her walls. She imagined the skeletons that hung out inside each celebrity that graced her walls. Each imaginary skeleton looked similar in their dispassion. Dodi saw their eye holes stare blankly at a corner while their spines relaxed into perfect S-shapes.
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“If life equals strength plus difficulty, then death equals weakness plus,” Dodi said aloud. “No. If life equals strength plus difficulty, then death equals listening to Nick Jonas play guitar. No. If life equals strength plus difficulty, then death equals,” Dodi tried and tried but nothing came. She was the worst comedian ever. She snuck through the window to the graveyard.
VII. The two girls sat in the dark and waited for Sharon to flip over and either cuddle with Charlie or eat both of their brains. Nothing. Dodi stammered, “This will work. It has to.” She shined her flashlight on the hand-written incantation. “Aglaa, Aglaa, Agladai, Azazel algia…” Dodi trailed off. Charlie was right. Sharon was dead and, no matter what Dodi wanted her to believe, she couldn’t revive the guinea pig. “Come on, Dodi, it’s getting cold,” Charlie said.
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Yolk Benjamin Johnson 10
Open Up  Rosemary Hall 11
Jason Morris North a drum heaved salt beneath heaven, cave set (as diamond) in depth of forest. Fury of dogs and horses breaking branches, little jade light thrown down through pentacle, a nurse’s touch. Cool dry timber line, perimeter drawn down into tight knot bound by weight of coal— compressed vegetation turned firedamp black, magnetized. That specific old lightness, a sheaf of wheat ore cut to alternate—once in the ground to rot back on, forgive and moss. All low things touch. With mole knowledge, in worm length below wild green the cows ruminate and muddy in brown streams. A hold in berm, series of sets. Steaming, its surface at spring dawn. Banked in brambles out which branch a flowering wand. Cups of dark wine, small bright copse of verdant bed envined. Where couples couple. A graphite sulfur and gold meridian slag of horizon in serpentine and talc, Diodorus’ extreme azimuths first root organ from quartz, in vetiver rhizome is henge calligraphy. Fossilized radicle set forth in petrified form, whose iron’s reflected in red Mars. From oceanic garnet out via time to blown dune spores still lean in on the wind, grow ghostly under moonlit hardened burgundy pitch. An elementary music with four quarters of frigidity slowly composes itself. Out striation of jet flock cornflower & vetiver, rock formation in time is firmament process. It grounds living in the negative charge of oxidation, reduction, trash / health, all matter marsh to single leaf rotting into mud, each mote of dust as Mater. The negative charge, chthonic, a stable cold dryness ancient people perceived. In the electrical current of myth an ion is grounded, reversed; embodied in Demeter, the work (myth, poem) is then in it. Neither is without the other. Serpentine formed at great depth then occurs millennia later, glittering jade on forest floor. What shelters rootstock, in carbon and silica, giving way to systems completely alien to the crystal’s, expressed instead in stamen and leaf. A sheltering giving forth what is wholly its other. Molten fragments cooled and scattered, stack and slag, little hills
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of coarse grain. Batholith to country rock to palmful of dirt, hyle whose rocklike systems are bent folded entrenched into our oldest stories. Hecate Swamp Thing and Geb. Salt circle dissolved into ammonite and moss in reverse. Spiral jetty resurfaces in autumn sun a pomegranate tree, sea of sap and salt. Doorways to the glittering, dripping world—at lava river, or Carlsbad, in the iron that reddens one’s gums. Cobalt copper and phosphorous of gut and eye in open mine, or in calcium carbonate dripping over millions of nights to form columnar limestone jewels in caves. The thingly character our words are in: what changes, layers, ignites them. That out of it they might form something soluble, change into a green chute that lived and died. The bed stays, shelter and grave. Dreaming nurse howling packs of wolves run across, the warm rock face snakes sun themselves upon, what swallows all rain in field, in block and plate. Slow moving solution or slag which dandelions pure arrest of time, yellow to gray out of tourmaline, and crumble, drift. So on having crossed it, the lintel’s always strangely beneath one’s head, or is their future bed. Under mountain great pile of rocks shift in sleep. The dogs move in restless pack length of valley floor horses’ bones become. Leaves what mud the horses’ hooves have and will beat into shape. Horizon of are, at all times in slow cataract under. The health of the heap, dark warm heart in low beats, what sends forth chutes that breathe thin air above. All light leaves hidden. Cool wet hugely slabbed and veined mass, a meld of the vertical held slowly in place, the unseen work a complete mixture cooling. A weather record faded into mellow bloom, lichen kaleidoscope eating granite folded out of sediment, red green meteorite seer. Loam of tertiary to sequence and range. Sheared serpentine juniper holds and feeds from, bent out of green billion old heart. Slow half-silent burrowing music, a form of black below pendant moss, in hollow carved out beneath limestone overhang, water first issues—spring out of shale silt and alluvial debris. As climb to wood out of steeping tea, smoke stained and begun. The high dry entisols, gold sand hills. A chart plain visible of accreted millenia, in iron vine moss and root. What steadies the rhizome lightless and heavy, situating everything green. The held firmament blends a series— immovable immovably springs forth all that leaps and uncurls toward air and the sun. An iris opens above. Dogs in Pleistocene packs on over through dim blue space worn stone. An extension through humus and lichen beneath decomposing leaves deepening into striations of jade. Dripped into dug and carved out of invisible rivers into cathedral, backward spire, initially maze—what 13
ancient poets said water changes into before finally taking form. What unthought tons of dark displaced for an ounce of gold they later carried, held. Cinnamon-colored beetles, death’s heads, worms moles centipedes home in blocks and slabs, ice’s thawing forms in pulp of swamp that push out cattails, marsh, reeds and fern as marble snakes through clay. Mounded around canals at rills rings and hollows, pumice sulfur salt and coal. Down among the possibility, in the seeds of things, in spores of fungi hardness and glint soften and dim into the every that, having grown out of it die back in. Under deep frost or trackless sand blown into hot razors lie sleepless tint of bursting green, a chartreuse the beloved’s eye was born to see. Burbling in gorges or traced out in hazy ridgelines— Hidden rhizome rootbender old quartz in mud, dustless gleaming mirror in ground: strength of granite in its mammoth seams, the history of all interglacial weather, heat and wet rendered cool, hard, drying to dust. The softening slowness of time rendered graywacke and diamond, a pile of shifting sands under sun. Dirt soil aggregate wormshit compost decomposes nouns into verbs— and back again, sends forth a daisy to slurp down rain into itself and turn to face the blazing sun. All that roots big rumbling quiet slabs and blocks, that dreams mountains into place. What ferns and nasturtiums fan, grace—dripping green jewels, moss hung off a stone, rich black antonym of abstraction. Spoke a word of origin, its initial dark cool substance always different, and to manifest something wholly other. Never for it, but (indirectly) by virtue of each. This palmful black and granular, that dry full yellowy dust all common to the living become visible. Left at a loss with matter, in repose it sets grass into growth and slowly forests itself, holding quiet dark against endless surge of sea and lightening world, lambent air. Holy unholy core coal black skin a glacis of leaves unfolding into stem and vein. Teeth a stone, a series of peaks, a rock ranging its spine south into ocean. Rock dust piled into crystal heaps a system as of living eyes, particle hidden eyes alive to amethyst gleaming in dark chambers. Clouds expanding out into fissures and tunnels, an array. Condensed dependent metals, thickly ranged in low sets, mineral subject of heart and rock’s cold substrates, where thought slowed to bare incidence allows only hints of far-off weather. Other under every out forth, what the if must split or situate its notion in the dark density, the composite of. The of in of all as wholly mixed—wolframite, iron, lazurite and zinc. In an uneven slab, running through coarse grain north to cold dirt interval, only then opening out into sluice or fan—mud miasma substrate mixture mess. 14
What any all must first give forth from out: cold low northern issuant, that he’d fein be a tracklayer somewhere in the orbit of. What priests sprang forth from, the dream layer. A bed of iron, salt and quartz, belted—hung in golden leaves and led out through in clear spigots. Fold after mineral fold, held. A form light over time might take at depth. Gesture’s opposite. Weathered pedalfer drummer silt in dream of glacial drift. A series occuring under tall fibrous grasses, beneath Venus and the Moon. Endeavor’s basis. The lag or plinth at which all marvel, infant, takes hold and nurses. Thinking’s catch, unhurried to near-complete stasis. In channers and cobble of sand, silt and clay, any composite in which root might take hold—from hardpan below hummock out to glacial till over granite and schist. Dry turning cold. Amid the bright hard weather record break down forms that also breathed. Leaves, radiolaria, rats’ skulls, the nearly translucent shells of snails—what held light or worked it, at pains and with bliss through cells. Tanbark twigs, purple clover, the seeds of figs rot amid agate obsidian and pitch. The shells tissues and nails of things bloom into morel, into bear’s head tooth and white chantrelles before decaying back into dirt. Heavy slow lucid opener changes millenial registers. A crush—tectonic, glacial—of names toward lucent green chute the thread: a verb. Devotion devotion devotion. Core hid, skin held dry to cool off a history of the rates of change. Since it is fall one lets oneself be led. To think of it as a store is the grave misperception: look, it holds. Permanent movement of the almost-stasis.
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Sea Worthy Samuel Rowe
This evening turns to me. A canal – sluiced in sunset, opaque green. Terriers, geese. A boat emptied of stuff, full now with water. Ecstatic autumn: leaves alight and slow about the sinking barge. A tired scene: geese and terriers turning from evening. The lock is shut, hissing in places.
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from The History Of
History of a Dying Father Jordan Hooper
I was raised to be uncomfortable. Like passing a street someone you know lives on, but don’t talk to anymore, then speeding up at the change to a yellow circle. A stranger across the street. I could feel that when she looked at me she saw me mean. Even through the windshield. It’s that time of year when it’s warmer behind the wheel. We now get warmth through street lamps and lit up clocks in the square, no longer from the general air. Light shifts into warm, not just color. When the slivered lit sky follows the set sun, we get chilled. I only cry about my father when I am driving home after the obligation of the day, at dusk. But a father is not God.
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from The History Of
T he R eal Romantic History Jordan Hooper
I have sent many things to lovers—letters, postcards, notes written on trash, pictures of me dining with other people, pictures of how perfect my lips are, one of my less liked tank tops (I wore it for a week straight so it would really soak up the smell. Don’t worry, they were into it), a single piece of chocolate with a thin slice of mint down the middle, the type you get when leaving a restaurant (they kept it in the pocket of their flannel for a few months, and I believe I was the one who ended up eating it)—and of course, a scrap of toilet paper (one of my prime moments that made them fall for me instantly, believe me). But whenever one of the relationships ended, I would have them visit one last time, bringing over the sent thing(s), not to keep, but to archive them. I don’t let them know about this part though, until they watch me open the scanner bed. One time was a little awkward—because one of the given items, a note written over a discarded plane ticket receipt, wasn’t given directly, and was instead hidden inside the Patti Smith book, Just Kids, to be discovered later. I know, very romantic (maybe this would have been my prime moment if it had played out correctly). This was the only time I tried to take back one of the given things, because they didn’t deserve it anymore. Once they figured out my true agenda of having them bring the book, the one that I read in their bed for two consecutive days, they tried to see why I was shuffling through the unevenly cut pages. For a moment I thought the note had fallen out on the way over, but once the debris found me and I went to place it in the scanner, they asked what it was. Nothing nothing nothing, the pinnacle of our relationship. I didn’t get to keep the note, and they still got to read it. But reading it again myself after scanning, I realized the note was more for me anyway. Hopefully they kept it between pages.
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Rug/Plant  Bobby Haulotte 19
Prime R ace Ségolène Pihut
Weakness. Fragrance. Stuck in the pile, stuck in the mess in the room. Makes bearer look good, brings in blonde hair. Most is turned up to the elbow; elbow bent down. Made one jealous. One red hair, a different body—short. Anatomical short abdominal pain. Two blue seen-through glasses, glasses without frames, makes one want to stick their finger in the change, in the pick face, the truth that absurdities address. Adverse cotton white. The different colors in the other layer. No singularity, when only. That is how participation in the free world works. That’s the Gemini process. “My special court, my coat, my good good good good, it makes me look hot.” Spices I know because of your sweat. The hotness. Have a glass eye for a long time stretched to touch your face, unnatural at 90 degrees, because that’s when you see the eyes and nose in place. The female symmetry of the need is not to me, a cause of birth, a single-celled one row of prostitutes reproach. Small circle of font boldness, strength, and contribute to, and as Sinai of the beam.
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The Conversation Willow Hardman 21
L achrymal Dana Sanginari
Wedged in the shallow grave of my backpack, a neon green pencil had a sermon for me. Ditches are deadly, stay away! We were warned every year when the rains came in, from parents and policemen and cartoon rain clouds: the arroyos are not a realm that is yours. Yet in droves we still flocked to them under October moons, following the trail left by our lost mother. ¡Ay, mis hijos! We were taught better than to ignore someone’s sorrow, after all. And then later, maybe by the next morning’s news, they’d find a few of us left, those of us from our adventures who weren’t taken by the currents or embraced by a set of grasping, ethereal fingers. We’d be soaked to the bone, but more alive than ever. Last night by the river I met a stranger, the kind you think you might have once known. We spoke for a while as the water lapped at our feet. She told me she was looking for someone important. I told her she looked like she had been crying.
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Mythos
Dana Sanginari
The secret game. The hidden boss. A looming ancient legend of wood paneling and wires. Retro, vintage, throwback favorite: searching synonyms for ancient. My uncle builds consoles, he says he saw it, he can’t be wrong. These mythologies of the modern era. Watch the pixels. Forget it happened. Play again. Someone died, you know. The nightmares ate ‘em alive. Consumed by the cyan glow, we play for hours. There were men in the arcade. Who brings clipboards and suits to the arcade? Here for a year. No, a month. Then gone forever. Real? As if that mattered. The tempest never stopped. Polybius’ ghost still lingers on the power button. Ready player one.
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if you’ve ever picked logic / over love raise your hand Dara Cerv 24
I’m working on your wildest dream Dara Cerv 25
from Welcome to the L ast Earth Show Mike Sikkema
Don’t get it twisted, there are no orgasm trees in the playoffs. Since you take most of your naps at red lights, we’ve grown weary of death in your family and my timber was fine until the flood ⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄ isn’t the primary target isn’t anything a bullet can’t cure isn’t deep into the woods isn’t all that midwestern isn’t going to thank you later isn’t the asshole of a hypnotized rooster isn’t keeping up isn’t keeping a file on you isn’t sturdy for rugged play isn’t able 26
to translate without the earpiece isn’t equipped isn’t going to be isn’t a souring agent ⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄ It’s a long time since I’ve had a breakaway kick return resulting in the full music of the spheres while shitting in the tiny church ⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄ isn’t an army isn’t afraid of guns isn’t impressed by how hard you hate isn’t hanging by his ankles in a tank of water isn’t a seed made private property isn’t off the rails hoping for cartoon physics ⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄ I’ve been growing a few neurons in a dish and sure, we’ll feed 27
you while you bleed out into the reflecting pool if you have the proper documents ⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄ isn’t flagged and gun racked isn’t afraid of mud isn’t the red star isn’t the reanimated corpse of Woody Guthrie isn’t subtitled isn’t much more than a problem isn’t the middle ranks that is, isn’t a pillar isn’t quite sober isn’t open til 4 ⋄⋄⋄⋄⋄ Drinking champagne out of your own asshole is the day’s best afterthought but your vertabrae holds otherwise Houdini, Houdini come through
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Sons of the San Joaquin Kyle Souryasack
I run this ragtimey whistle waiting for your sail, floated through the smog of a White truthiness against the Mariposan backdrop. I trample the same meadows the Yokuts found asylum in during flooded San Joaquin summers, I trample corpses through a sfumato smog of citrus air. In the cabin a thorn-stemmed wine bottle confounds Nathaniel Vise, wise wittol, toward a chiliad Vise City of 1852. An axe ridden fort not to empathize with the foothill people, not for diatribe of sub-tribes but for corporate rebranding of the continental aviary. To carpet bomb a cuddlepuddle manifested a must-win Monday to write home to Mona about. The sun snarled white at me but upon second viewing my momma’s voice echoed through it, pouring me pump-action Vaseline, rubbing me a bolt-action handful of morning leaves. A nuisance to the white neighbors my clicky joints reverberate a hummingbird’s cry. My garden of lemongrass steeps in black strap molasses. I am a rake-eyed naughty boy in a daze encrusting your effigy with solid oak eyes, a callipygian square-jawed hunk of frozen horsemeat melting hot in Central Valley’s abomasum, greasicle tarred and your protrusion is carved as an amphisbaena. A legend is born; in California, a legend is a blatherskite thunderstorm off the coast of Catalina Island. A pregnant siren shudders under the acid rain static across the electric blanket of the Pacific, caustic black juice steams asunder the curtains. The widow had an unflinching foresight. Screenager perspiration makes my spine visible through my t-shirt. In a bobsy-die stumble I bury you in my bicep as I pincer your head in my arm, an inexplicable feeling of a clenched square jaw biting through your tongue, hanging like a toenail it was plucked and dropped in amber held in a shot glass that I bought off Valencia Street where you drove your smegma whiplash through
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me. I ruffle the ticks off my neck and under my bare heel pops the blood of my Mekong ancestors, the blood of Peter Cottontail, the blood diffused with Mona Lisa’s forehead sweat when I pulled her off the corner of Houston and Church akimbo in a force-ripe tenderness and fetched her a bundle of switches splay across the thin rug to choose from as I shave my chest in the rocking chair in the single oil lamp light of the cabin. Any apple-knocker can be hanged against the Sequoia sunset under a foxtail pine. From start to finish I convert 3 billion calories into fossil fuels for my father but my children are left burning Tule leaves, refracting light through a splintered bottle of CK Obsession. You are hard sweating for my children’s future and I drive an unopened Heineken into your forehead, and you haven’t known pain since your mom scorned exasperated why the fuck are you crying now and you point to the TV where Beetlejuice is playing again but she keeps washing the dishes. You find comfort in the memory of when tenderoni Mona Lisa floated the side of her head into your chest and brushed her stubbled eyebrows across the wool of your double-breasted Hugo Boss and tilted her veiled face toward your ear after the slow dance and asked you for pain. Mona is my child the white sun of the Versace fire is my child I plant my knee into your broken chest and I hold my pestle in two ƒƒƒ fists I tunnel apart the teeth in your clenched puckered grin I leave your limbs for the fertile cathedral of Yosemite to feed its bony congregation but your body stays with me. I stare down your fevering flesh as it cankers under a pulsing moon you are covered in orchid ticks I store you in honey and blood my dimpled children grow old on this elixir but my fortune dies with me your shrunken eyes stay open after your brain ferments into a shivering satchel under the cowshit morning fogs of the valley.
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Cry unto Country Dora M alech
Mind as conflagration, mind as a canting floor— not as in nation’s raw red reward— rather some other mare’s lore—plays up a role. Apply us a poultice of pulped bills (cut, I bleed). Poll’s pupil, of this sea be fealty’s fashion. I obey, finish a last shift, see a say-sickness, to swab abscess, ways to skin late cataplasm, a meat past call.
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Spend us sends up baubles, sad baud, bless a bit per second, bent crop dies, honored horde. On a bruising in us I brag as big ruin— In America I can re-aim.
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Chicago 2016  Emma Daffin 33
Echo Chell Wright-Navarro girl of one spoken word girl of another’s word girl of the river canyon Echo dwells in a shadow of cliffs artful in taking the last few words only the last few words as 34
her own echo listen her mouth is yours a cave full of reverb claim the final word her own she opens up merely sound opens up her voice your voice skips over a veil of water Echo returns a song she sings your song sings Ghost sings the canyon 35
Our Secret, 8 Jay Aquinas Thompson many come to me
bearing armfuls
or dragging their finery cloudy lawn /
like
of rain’s loose lace /
May’s queen across
silly park koi circling
like airplanes /
a wave like that of heat or rumor in the apples’ glummest prologues master I have yet can’t get enough of all peace to you little galloping need
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yet some days
people are symptoms
my lover or father
waiting for me
on the farther shore: no /
of our free
in renewed bloom
a world where
souls take root: no /
of iron rack
not angels /
the flowers
liberty to captives
SSRI & fluorescent light: no / another summer just like
this one: no /
world in balance of my
to save it: no /
knowing that every night
I’ll fall asleep
my head in your lap
my good figure persisting: no /
that we be free: no /
body
forgiving me: no /
alleviated
since it is your will sometimes hell
foremost for safety / sometimes
by some
O Lord
is wishing
the recognition is
locked brakes colorless radiation bacilli resting corpse /
like tonight
as you read: no /
red-lining piss tests & police bullets revolutionary miracle
sheer will
grass matted up
a world of mushy apples
bears & my own un-
beneath the fence 37
where it
can’t be mown / moon rays falling
city stuck in-
side the whale
audibly /
that swallows me
stuck inside this
wedding-strawberry
horizon /
but you O Lord
my mummified child
& willow stretching
into astonished perpetuity /
from the mirror
& fir tree’s sleepless odalisque
sustaining force is diluted
you look on always
& minor power
flaming up like ice / infinitely
of the ram’s horn
in a world all yours /
your spirit’s
spreading bloodstain
in the gamma ray & ungathered lilac
of life / in the named dead
crowding the rainline:
could you spare me? /
still I kneel
& stars’ soft chirping
& in the burning charity
all in a row /
in a treefrog’s gown &
in the moths’ organza rinsing clouds
curious:
adoring you in the briar’s monstrance of every lover
the lips at my throat
& congealing wombs
from the sky
what “love”
of amethyst / child
with the park water fountain /
38
wiped out
you persist
to life again
forsaking yourself you flare
like sparks through
strings thrumming
in a piano /
the vacancy my heart contains
but isn’t
huge enough
hearing you in
first rain’s
concealment of
bread & wine? /
to do as those
parking-lot stubble
leaping paperwork & the just once allow me
mercury choristers
my terror & my longing / cobwebs from the
& sing to you my gratitude
O close & suffocated soul /
moon’s far corners /
& flourish of outskirt conscience / now reader
in front of you?
I’ll say how
the greedy & dis-
hates knowing others are contented /
O wounded healer beating
O trailing glow
but how much
do I want to die
so much figured ape in me
have found themselves
hates suffering
scared I am to suffer /
without
are at home
& hates how
hates losing
& hates the certainty
39
that I’ll lose but please I should
everything / plummeting help me learn
name
which name would make like
which listing iris
your body after /
which flower in throat
away
toward the heights /
which river-glowing you answer
stone /
instead of darting
rain / it’s easy to get married /
40
Powerline Chris Crabtree 41
from Grackles Explain Things To Me Jen Tynes I record better data on days I have pockets. The look-alike is vetch, the man at the visitor’s information kiosk flowers just once a century. Cub scouts wiggle their pleated mortgages from the top of the dune. Is it too late this year to see a harbinger? In the paper its feathers could only be possessed by cyber bullies with clean driving records. Near the eagle’s nest every body has a climbing rope, a beautiful toddler produces a musk that demotes us. Does it make the hairs on the back of your neck catch fire? Roughed up kids going fishing 42
with some nice pieces of equipment. We reach the river just in time to witness student loan flower, court appointed flower, the diurnal blossoming of one person’s story.
Benadryl—this is where the deer bed down. I keep an oral history of female names for the animal trap. Loosening the skin that every egg has around it. You can’t tell budget adults how you want them to end their day. It used to just be butter melted on it. The oil pump, garbage dump, frogs released like murky graduate students. Now there’s a really big bird and unripe berries on the calendar. We power wash spider mites and get talked to 43
by the police. Happy longest day is one way of thinking about it. The gun still inside its holster, the wide variety of pills for sleeping, the brush accumulating at the live fire training facility just down the road.
Where is the Family Dollar located in my practice? I wish a complicated marriage of trust and wilderness to sleep on the spot nearest a water source. I never lacked protein or an instinctual mouth, but we’ve all seen its x-rays, when it tries to relax. Mosses send up red flags and decide gender later. Mostly it’s about how much company 44
you’re willing to explore. I was embarrassed we stood in line so long to acknowledge the honeycomb’s existence. The loons were dead silent. You couldn’t cuddle the workers. It wasn’t so much curation as a quick way to take the gizzards out. There’s so much planning everything we want to talk about. Modern females cannot cross construction sites without bursting through some scrim. I was embarrassed I wanted all my steps to count as creativity. It’s almost exactly one mile to gather in your arms the erotic gap, the deep purchase.
Bird expression, birds’ lungs expelled—this brown almost-reptile is hovering near some chicory. The activists of morning have two legs, open up 45
the grasses. This beach towel and this bird blog and the perimeter of this snow tire. Our night-time visitors don’t eat fruit, wrap up like burritos in our thrift heat. Watch bands in full sunlight. All particles are waterproof and the alley blooms inward, ancestor roses. A mattress that crystallized. Birds bursting in pea gravel. This is where the gentleman begins thinking about his family.
46
Double Exposure 01  Esther Leech 47
T rip To Death Troy James Weaver
Joe showed up late and said, “Hurry up, we don’t have all day.” I hopped into the car, slid back in the seat, and slugged his shoulder. He was sipping iced-tea, had the radio too loud, and was wiping away at smears of lipstick on his cheek. We were road-tripping from Kansas to our mother’s funeral in New Mexico. She’d died the previous week, from pneumonia, and the news had come like a bolt of lightning, as my sister play-by-played her final moments to us over the speaker phone, how she’d asked for beef jerky and Coca-Cola and a crossword puzzle, how an hour before she slipped away into the black nothing she felt like she was on the up-and-up, like she could run a marathon or two, which we’ve since concluded was a result of the steroids they were feeding her. It was a real shock to the system, this news, considering mom had always been pretty healthy. She had only been in the hospital for two days, so there was no way to brace ourselves for it. We were told that it was acute pneumonia, nothing too serious, and she’d be out and off to a quick recovery the very day she died. We spent the first couple hundred miles talking about the summer that everything changed, how we’ve both been haunted by those events since they happened, nearly twenty years earlier, and how our lives have seemingly been shaped by them in one way or the other, however slight, ever since then. Joe laughed. “I remember losing a lot. My tooth, my friend, my virginity, my innocence—that big fat fish that one time, remember that? Must’ve weighed fifteen to twenty pounds.” “Oh yeah, I remember that,” I said, laughing. “He was a monster.” Last day of seventh grade Joe got his tooth knocked out. The mean Hurley kid had chucked a rock at him for some slight transgression we never spoke of, and the next day, his best friend, Tom, moved across town because his parent’s divorce ended messier than expected and apparently included a relocation clause. It was the summer the dry creek flooded and burned away the first week of June. It was also the summer something awful happened in the woods. Confusion 48
reigned through those months, until, slowly, we got a handle on our own thoughts and fears. It was as if those few hot months outside institutions of learning had incubated us. Everything stayed the same, yet everything changed. “Man,” he said. “That was a weird fucking summer.” “We sure as shit fished a lot,” I said. “Of course, then things got weird, you know—I only now feel like I fully have you back.” Joe and I spent most our days collecting dirt and clay in mason jars, searching for bones along the sun-sucked banks, and in the afternoons, as the sun started down and the air cooled, we fished. At night, we’d catch crickets and stuff them in Ziplock bags, dreaming our dreams, filling ourselves up on visions of the perfect catch, and once home, bellyful, we’d scratch at our meager bodies in our bedroom, our faces all washed up in TV light. Mom and dad were working like mad all through the summer, the sun bleaching the carpet through the slots in the blinds, while our sister, Jules, the oldest, was busy, on multiple occasions, breaking Joe’s nose for dissing the food she’d made him for lunch. I laughed over Mark Knopfler singing his songs, and said, “How many times has Jules broken your nose?” “That summer alone, three times,” he said. “Altogether five I think. Look at me. I’ve got an Owen Wilson nose, for god’s sake.” He looked in the rearview mirror and smiled. “Who would’ve thought I’d need a nose job at thirty-four because my sister used to use me as a punching bag,” he said, laughing. “Could be worse,” I said. “She used to twist my balls when she got mad at me.”
49
There were the upset phone calls to our folks while they were working, the savory tears and blood of boredom, the sadness and joy of long days passing—the embarrassing hairs that had begun sprouting here and there over our bodies like ruinous mold. That was around the time, that summer, Joe started sneaking out at night after spending hours trying to make out boobs on a fuzzy TV screen. Jules would rat him out every chance she got, though. Not out of concern. She just did it to cover her own tracks, mostly. Let me look at your eyes. All four of their eyes, hers and his, were just blood pools most nights, but his were the ones our folks focused on, she made sure of that. After the shit-storm cleared she’d scurry off with an older boy to fool around in his car down the block at the park—the age-old canon of carnality fulfilled, an exercise that would swell her belly to near-exploding by the time she’d barely reached seventeen. Joe, he stuck to his hand until the beginning of August, when he lost his virginity to Samantha, who was five years older than him. “Pretty sure it was illegal,” he said. “I mean, I was twelve going on thirteen. She was eighteen. I barely even had pubes yet.” “Really?! I mean I knew that but kind of thought you were okay with it.” “Oh, I was more than okay with it, but I was drunk as shit. Boone’s Farm. I had a nasty hangover, too. I was so drunk, when I got home, I was looking all over the place for Wheezie so we could watch TV together.” “Mom was pissed when she found you in the morning.” I laughed. “Remember that, you’d pissed yourself—and she made you scrub the carpet for like a half-hour? Then she made you mow the lawn so you could sweat it out, whatever that means.” Our dog Wheezie got into a fight with a razor that summer. It was a disposable lady Bic with a pink handle and flowers along its edges, daisies I think. He had gotten into the bathroom trash while we were gone.
50
Joe and I came home to old Wheezie lying at the base of the television stand, head all gloppedup and sticky with blood, steady streams from his nose and mouth filling out the furry edges around him. Not really breathing, just kind of shivering, tongue pushed out to the left and crushed between his teeth. Poor thing was laying there dying to an episode of Jerry Springer. I looked at Wheezie, tears streaming down my face, and said, “You know, it’s weird. Nobody ever did find your tooth.” Joe didn’t say anything, just stared at Wheezie. But he always cried best inside his heart, all alone, so I let him. First we called dad, who was too busy to take the call, or he was at lunch and out of the building, I can’t remember which, and then we called mom at the department store she worked at, told whoever it was that answered that it was an “emergency.” “Hello,” Joe said, voice folding, turning into defeat. “Wheezie’s dead we think.” I could make out the sounds of our mother crying and instructing Joe through the silence of his hiccupped Okays. Finally, he hung up the phone. “Mom can’t come. Forgot—her stupid car’s still at the shop.” “Well…” I began. “She said we need to go over and ask Willie if he can come over and help us with this mess.” His lips quivered a bit, a single tear marking his cheek, but now I’m not sure if it was ever really there, if I’m just filling in the gaps. “Where’s Jules?” I said. “Probably out with that Mexican dude, what’s-his-name.” he said.
51
“Ricardo?” “More like Retardo,” he said. We walked across the street and rang the bell, which did some kind of Yankee Doodle jig of a muffle through the bricks. The door announced Willie’s gross beard with a sharp slap against the wall and fumes like a dead rat soaked in bourbon hit us like a car crash.
“What’s up, Jimmy Dean?” He called everybody that, even multiples.
“Wheezie. You know, our dog, Wheezie? We think he’s dead,” said Joe. “Mom told us to come over and see if you could help us out.” “Well shit, of course I can,” he said. He fired up a Marlboro and led the way over and into our house, just reached down, picked Wheezie’s body up, and started back off across the street. Just kind of turned his chin over his shoulder and said, “I got it from here. You two just go back in and clean the blood and shit off the floor before your folks get home.” I went to work scrubbing the floor, but Joe was looking really weird and watched Willie through the blinds. He watched a good ten minutes then came over and helped me clean the rest of what was left of Wheezie from the carpet. We didn’t talk much, but I could tell he’d been crying. I didn’t ask him what he’d seen through the blinds, but he’d come to tell me some years later, while I watched him plunge meth into his arm, what it was. What he told me was, Willie went across the street into his garage, threw Wheezie down beside his Chevelle, opened up the garbage can and hoisted him in by his tail. Said it made him want to puke, even thinking about it. Joe was speeding, observing the nothing of the landscape, just yellow fields for miles and miles and occasional clusters of trees. “I remember you being really upset about how Willie handled Wheezie.” I started to choke up. 52
“But fuck that—god-damn-it—I’m really glad you’re finally happy and sober, man,” I said. “Thanks, but, uh, yeah, I was upset. That fucking asshole just threw him in the trash.” “Well,” I said. “What’d you expect him to do? Full burial rites with a homemade coffin, some kind of wake?” I laughed. “Shut up, man,” Joe said. “Seriously, though, he could have had a little more respect for ole Wheeze, you know.” We pulled off the highway to get some beef jerky and Coke, the very contents of our mother’s final meal on this earth. Joe got a bunch of instant coffee, too, so he wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel. Every thirty minutes or so he’d just open it up, take in a mouthful of crystals, and chase it down with the Coke. It must’ve been the recovering addict in him, like it made his heart do something beyond just pumping blood. I gnawed quietly on a Slim Jim, while Joe spewed on about the time he and Jules got fucked-up from huffing gasoline. He laughed and went silent. I thought it was funny, too, this getting high on dinosaur bones, and I thought about a lot in the span of those few seconds. Crimson drinks made with bottles of gin. The way I used to look at the sun, hoping to go blind and feel my way through life. The piles and piles of bones in the earth and how I wished they’d never died. Wished they could pop up from the dirt and dance around in the same clothes they wore to the funeral. Mom and dad, too—I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Neither one of them could dance. But they could sing. “Listen,” I said. “You hear that?” Joe looked at me askew from the road. “Hear what?” I cracked the window, sank down into the seat, and polished off the Slim Jim. “Come on, Joe. 53
Don’t you hear that?” “I don’t hear shit.” “Listen. Just listen. Hear it?” Joe listened for a few seconds, trying to please me, and finally shrugged and shook his head. “Come on. Listen, man. You can hear them howling.”
54
Lotus Root Hannah Lynn Calvert Fine
55
T he Excursionist Sierra Brown-Faust
I am your national correspondent, your unholy airplane returning from Holland with tulips on my back: fire engine red, dogwood pink, yellow, off white. We made a child like everyone does and then another, and these children together made their own wild kingdom in the brush, in the bluegrass, in the top of a tree. It was like this in the beginning and you may or may not see because I myself can only know what’s been rendered to me as instruction. I lay face down in a field of violets. I stood with one foot on each side of the equator where the water doesn’t know which direction it should go about swirling down the neck of a funnel. I sat with the window to reflect on the weather and the radio wavered out of the pipes, broadcasting something that sounded like news. I expect the moon to be beautiful but am nevertheless surprised.
56
Watershed
Sierra Brown-Faust
Everything since the flood passed by like television. A man’s body had dissolved in a pool of acid between hemlocks and pine. The red boat, weak in its course, set its trajectory toward the deep blue center, the pummeling heart of the dark pool. Some of it was like fear and some of it was like history. It was a little like most other things. The blue of the canvas sail dampened black, folding in on itself like two split halves of a lung. The water turned in on its ovoid path. The mast dipped and pulled its counterparts under water, the hull coming to rest at the drain. I would have liked to forget the metronome which was pushing each word into the next. And if this lyric is impossible to maintain for any length, perhaps the failure belongs to the form. Because a particular habit was not relegated to any isolated period of time, the taste of it, to me, could not recall any memories. When a bomb detonates in a car, the engine will remain intact. It forms a metonymic relationship to the violence inflicted on the passengers. This is important in retrospect due to the photographer’s temporal limitations in relation to trauma. I crushed my teeth down into the sink taking air only to see that the mirror was no longer serving us with its only purpose. It’s not a pleasure to land on solid ground.
57
For the Federally Endangered Roan Mountain Bluet Sierra Brown-Faust
When we learned that the white of the page was also not blank, we found it too could be erased. To define what was only not, one had to stake out posts at regular intervals, measuring elevation in glass pipettes like the depth of snow. We spent some time being angry about issues beyond our control. I called my dad who said that he wondered what thoughts he would have in the morning now that he was turning off the news for good. He said, “the quiet morning. the blue kingfisher. the pale quartz.� Time had articulated the evidence to suggest that our error must be stronger than our truth. So sure as the difference between a good thing and a bad one. From the lookout on top of the mountain we saw all nature in a long cry of resplendent error and the lingering archway of stars.
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Biographies
Paige Edson is from Lee’s Summit, Missouri and is a current sophomore double majoring in Painting and Creative Writing. She is particularly interested in exploring the appearance and concept of afterimages and peripheral vision. Dara Cerv is the author of Bath Poems, a chapbook published by Sixth Finch in 2015. Her visual art has appeared in collaboration with the poetry of Christine Shan Shan Hou in Parallax, Emily Skillings in Hyperallergic, Ali Power in Poor Claudia, and on a broadside in celebration of a performance of John Ashbery’s “Litany” at the Poetry Project. Dara works in New York and lives in Brooklyn. 24, 25 Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City where he’s one of the founding co-editors of Bear Review. His work has appeared in Arkana, H_ngm_n, Hunger Mountain, Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, The Rumpus, Tar River Poetry and elsewhere. 1 Claudia Sudekum has lived in Kansas City for twenty five years. Four years ago she began writing poetry. Her favorite pen is a pilot v7. 2 Maddie Murphy is a fiber artist, writer, and fashion designer double majoring in Fiber and Creative Writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. In her artwork and church leadership, Murphy fights for greater inclusivity in the Christian church, while critiquing oppressive systems at work within it. Murphy primarily creates wearable art, drawing inspiration from high-fashion and liturgical vestments. She is currently interning at Informality Blog, focusing on interviews and show reviews about artists whose work contains spiritual themes. 4,5
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Brian Clifton co-edits Bear Review. This is the first piece of prose he has published. 6 Benjamin Johnson was born and raised in North Carolina and moved out to the midwest for school when he was 19. This is his first published work but he’s been writing for about three years now. He’s a practicing artist and is currently attending KCAI and seeking a BFA in painting. He sometimes misses living on the East Coast. 10 Rosemary Hall is a current BFA candidate at the Kansas City Art Institute in the Fiber department. She takes influence from sequential narrative, color meaning and her own personal life. 11 Jason Morris was born in Vermont. His chapbooks include Takes (Bootstrap, 2016), Local News (Bird & Beckett, 2013), and Spirits & Anchors (Auguste Press, 2010). He lives in San Francisco CA. 12 Samuel Rowe is an English poet and postgraduate law student. He co-edits Killer Whale Journal. He is grateful for the number of magpies in his garden. 16 Jordan Hooper is originally from Portland, OR and is currently studying Painting and Creative Writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. She is interested in histories and how it can act as a framing device for her work and as mindset for both the reader and herself, as she collects these different histories through materials from her life, such as fragments of phrases, passing thoughts, memories, dreams, conversations, and trash. This is the first instance of Jordan having her writing published and she thanks the Sprung Formal Editors for featuring her work. 17, 18 Bobby Haulotte is currently working towards his BFA in painting at the Kansas City Art Institute. 19 Ségolène Pihut is a current freshman at KCAI. She will be double majoring in Painting and Creative Writing the upcoming year. She is primarily interested in sound art and interactive poetry. 20
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Willow Hardman is currently pursuing her BFA in illustration at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her creative practices range from the use of painting and drawing in mixed media to assemblage and the fiber arts. At present she is exploring methods of documenting and expressing the passage of time in daily life through the lens of what is left behind. 21 Dana Sanginari is a writer and illustrator currently living in Kansas City, MO. She is an active affiliate of demons, dragons, cryptids, and all other monstrous ilk. This is her first published set of poems, and she is currently working on her first full-length novel. 22, 23 Michael Sikkema has absolutely no ties to the Russian mob. His fourth full length book, Die Die Dinosaur, was recently released from Blazevox Books. He enjoys correspondence at michael.sikkema@gmail.com. 25 Kyle Souryasack was born to Lao immigrants in a small California farm town. He is a sentimental boy who doesn’t like eye contact. 28 Dora Malech is the author of Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press, 2009), Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and Flourish (forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press). She is an assistant professor of poetry in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. 30 Emma Daffin, 333. 32 Chell Wright-Navarro. Poet. Waitress. Advocate. Teaches a creative writing workshop “Expressions in Recovery” for women in recovery. She is founder of White Rabbit Poetry Circle. 33 Jay Aquinas Thompson lives with his family in Seattle, where he teaches creative writing to incarcerated women. He has recent poems in Denver Quarterly and The Stockholm Review of Literature, and essays in Poetry Northwest, Berfrois, Kenyon Review Online, and The Inbreaking, a Catholic Worker publication. 35
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Chris Crabtree is a singer/songwriter/musician/photographer who provided the soundtrack music for Corporate FM, a film that won the award for best documentary at the Kansas City Film Festival. His novel, Zen and the Art of Killing Your Self, is best enjoyed while listening to its companion soundtrack, Counterfeit Heart, which he also wrote, produced, and recorded. His work has appeared in Children’s Hope International Quarterly, Licking River Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Forge, Soundings East, and Helix. 40 Jen Tynes is the founding editor of Horse Less Press and the author or co-author of several books and chapbooks, most recently Hunter Monies (Black Radish Books). She teaches in Michigan. 41 Esther Leech is an artist primarily working with photography and writing. She has spent a long time experimenting with these two mediums and how they intertwine with publications and design work. Leech is currently living and working in Kansas City, Missouri where she spent most of her life. 46 Troy James Weaver is the author of Witchita Stories, Visions, and most recently Marigold, which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorite books of 2016. His work has appeared in Hobart, The Literary Hub, FANZINE, Everyday Genius, Funhouse Magazine, Swimmers Club, Atticus Review, and many others. He has a book of short stories (as yet untitled) forthcoming from Disorder Press. He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and dogs. 47 Hannah Lynn Calvert Fine is an artist based out of Kansas City, MO with an emphasis in sculpture. She focuses on systems in regards to digital fabrication and social practice using light, color, shadow, time, and space. She has a passion for food, spends her free obsessing over Anthony Bourdain and loves eating tacos, pineapples, and crab rangoon. 54 Sierra Brown-Faust lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri where she attends the Kansas City Art Institute as a Sculpture major who doesn’t make sculpture. Her work is forthcoming in the April edition of Killjoy Literary Magazine. 55, 56, 57
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