THIS ZINE IS A SPACESHIP issue two: The Void Writing by Jim Bowler James Bryson James Drew Andrew Kirby Jason Purcell Visual Art by Stephanie Frame Staff John Mortara Anna Reser Sebastian Lubbers Kervin Bolts
John Mortara Writing Editor This being only our 2nd issue in TZIAS history, I’ve gotta say that I am so proud of what we have accomplished here. All four of us are busy people, and so are our writers and artists, but somehow we can all still manage to make time for something we deeply care about. I could not be more excited to release this episode into the universe for all of you to enjoy. Please, spread the word. Contact us, become a distributor, send us some poetry! Please do anything to help us keep this independent publication going. Live long and prosper.
Anna Reser Art Editor As I had hoped at its inception, This Zine is a Spaceship is fast becoming an important vehicle for collaboration and community. Through the submission, publishing a distribution of this zine, my cohorts and I have met many amazing people, both in our own communities and through the larger community that we are trying to embrace and foster. Special thanks are due to Stephanie Frame, our first artist collaborator, to our exccellent writing contributors, to the dedicated and infinitely imaginative and enthusiastic staff of TZIAS, and most especially to the volunteer distributors and community members surrounding this project.
Sebastian Lubbers Assistant to the Writing Editor It’s been a weird summer for me and a lot of people this year, and that can be taken in either a positive or negative way, but working on this zine has been one of the best experiences I have had this summer. Looking at other peoples’ work and all the drive and emotion that is put into a creative object has brought a lot of perspective to my life. While I was working with John and Anna on the zine, I was also doing layout work for my school’s magazine, and I have grown to appreciate all the hard, thankless work those two do. I’d like to thank Kevin as well for helping ease the workload and, as always, thank everyone who submitted and encourage those reading to submit in the future.
Kervin Bolts Assistant to the Art Editor As a new staff member, I’m proud to be involved with This Zine is a Spaceship. From genesis to inception, and all the other fictions inbetween and thereafter, I’ve got to say that this abstract thing we call a collaborative zine took off smashingly. Hm, what else to say? Hello to the other folks coordinating, editing, submitting, arting and all else. I hope to meet you all some day. Oh, and many apologies for the haphazard typesetting and page layout.
“The Void� We are going to keep this short because to delay this excellent issue even longer for a stupid theme blurb would be absolutely reprehensible. This issue is about The Void. Emptiness. Negative space. Things that are missing. Things that never were. It is an important theme to us because as human beings, for some reason, we are always concerned about what things ARE, rather than what they are NOT. Our writers took this challenge, and have helped us make sense of this limitless Void in all its nothing.
Victory Sometimes at night before it rains, I look out towards the barn and see your shadow grazing. I remember I never saw you enter through the barn’s front door. You hated small doorways and you hated the rain. The family brought you home and I renamed you Victory because you trampled dirt under your hooves, crushed tall grass like a falling stone. I never rode you, stallion, white appaloosa, but you kicked me in my gut after cornering me by the chicken coop when I was three, and I never forgot it. I forgot your age as the wind erased wrinkles from your dirt covered skin, so the bugs wouldn’t eat you. I never brushed your hair. It grew long and tied around the fence posts as you scratched your back on rough pine. I never saw you walk straight. You limped with a busted leg, stumbling, like the night you were nauseated. Dad gave you Jack Daniel’s and baking soda, and I smelled horse breath mixed with alcohol.
I never heard the gun shot, never saw blood water the grass in our pasture. The bullet arrived as I left for work that Friday afternoon. The family planted you beside the roses you ate that summer. We hade no ambrosia to lay by you, no gifts, except for smells of dung and honeysuckle. You are mortified by heaps of worms, there’s no head stone at your grave, and you weren’t buried you with your reins. I just wanted to let you know I still see your shadow, even now as in begins to rain.
James Bryson is a senior at the UNC Wilmington. He is
a double major in creative writing and English. He lived on a farm in Swansboro, North Carolina until he transfered to UNC Wilmington, and it remains a great inspiration to his writing.
A Drift We stomp through the snow, squinting against the ice in the air, brushing the crystals from the corners of our eyes, our lashes. My boots are wet and cold and my lungs are biting with each step. How did the snow get so deep? Sometimes you look back at me, your sleeve over your cheeks but saying something with your eyes. I follow you. The storm hit suddenly, throwing its sharp voice against the windows and I thought the whole house would blow away. I was grateful to be indoors. Then the phone rang. Lawrence still hadn’t come home, Theresa told me on the cracking line. But she saw flickering lights from her window, down the far end of Highway 16. She begged you to drive down, just to check it out, see if Lawrence had gone into the ditch and needed a hand. She had to stay with the kids and you said you would go right away. But the truck wouldn’t start, wouldn’t move. You said you could walk it; it would only take you half an hour, you thought. And I said I would go too, in case there was something wrong and you needed help. So we bundled up, you packed a small pack with emergency supplies and we left. I’ve never followed you through the field at night before, in a storm like this. But if it is Lawrence in that ditch and he’s in trouble, you’ll need me. Won’t you need me? You’re ahead of me now, by about twenty feet, trying to slow down for me but I know how urgent it is. My eyes are freezing shut and I’m trying to keep my eyes ahead. God, isn’t it supposed to be white? Everything is completely black and heavy, except the heavy orbs of snow and ice that fall in the beam of the flashlight like tiny planets. You shine your light at me, wanting to speak but neither of us can. It’s too loud, too cold, there’s no point. I wave an arm at you, as if to say, Go on without me. I’ll catch up. I think you understand, because you turn around and go. My throat feels choked by this emptiness, this wailing silence between us, this chasm of dead space. I slow my pace. *
I remember the nights in summer when we’d lay in the wheat. “Tell me again,” I’d whisper. “Well, if you get past The Big Dipper, past Orion’s Belt, past every constellation and single star, there’s nothing. The planets matter less and less. The moons become like a single grain.” You pluck the straw from your mouth and run it lightly behind my ear. “Is that how farm boys get girls?” “Yup,” you chuckle. “Keep going.” “Well,” you whisper, “beyond all of that, there is nothing. All of the nothing that you can imagine is kept there behind the stars. And the neat thing is it keeps expanding and one day it’s going to stop and start coming back this way and we’ll get swallowed up.” “That’s a big change.” “Not really. Still nothing. Swallowed up and becoming nothing. That nothing is everywhere.” * The flashlight battery has gone out and you’re carrying the pack that has the replacements. I’ve been walking for almost an hour and I can tell I’m not even halfway there. By now, you’re too far ahead of me. I’ve stopped walking. My eyes have adjusted to the dark by now, and even though I’m laying on my back in the snow I fool myself into believing that I’m floating. The snow to my sides is a brilliant charcoal grey against the black sky. The clouds part sometimes, the blowing snow has been calm for a few minutes, and I can glimpse the stars. The wind has hushed itself. My teeth have stopped chattering, my skin has stopped screaming and the snow is falling in fat globs towards my face and I tell myself that I am floating through all of space, that each tiny ball of snow is a planet or a star, and I’m walking past them towards the great black nothing. My body has stopped rejecting the cold. I’m starting to feel tired. I think I’m being swallowed up.
Jason Purcell is a writer, musician and student. He lives in Alberta, Canada, and has a new blog at jvpurcell.tumblr.com.
full woman, 2/5ths, added to the half-man I used to be. Luggage filled with letters like a W for Why? & an O for Orgasm, now a three-hour once past ignis fatuus of hands on one another’s phantom kick wheel in respect to gender. Grouper’s unchained melodies play her ghost blowjobs down those fading tights groped in. We warp the window sill into disparity, auto-sodomized by our feelings, these lobby phantom limbs. Fuck. You almost destroyed me, & anyone in earshot of this would call me a Pig. We were supposed to be transparent. Yet you’ve grown full of the best hiding places. I didn’t think that in a hamper I would meet a tall dark stranger. Horny thighs. The light toasted shine cut into a gradient stake. The arch of your feet tipping from exalted flats. We’d say “Hi” to whomever passed
“I’m so fucked. She’s festering in the vestibule, fugued out the chaste porticoes of placid robin’s egg blue, it’s vertical fall finer & accurate than Wilhelmina Told, William Tell’s Tongue-tied cousin to a tacit fellation of the expecting, tsundere & indifferent horizon. I am her face. I can tell you a certain voyeur can’t find my docile, stagnant ambivalence sexy. Feel like Demi Moore,
[His basement bedroom gilded by maize rain orbs rebelled against the blinds in retroreflection: He the camera, painting the frame, & She the canvas.]
FALLUJAH / THIERRY’S LONELY TELEPATHY: MUSING DALI’S “YOUNG VIRGIN”
University of West Georgia. His writing blog can be found at esquemasjuveniles.tumblr.com
Andrew Kirby is a twenty year old English major attending the
-erefore, I am stupid. There went the vitals of her title. Showed her hand for him to grasp, and he went all in with his cordial, soothing peck. Coquetry. Where do I fit in? Have I come, have I came between you two? Never fathomed that being the thin space between person and picture could be so excruciating. Excommunicated, but can’t ignore this. Your thighs might as well be as tree shade paprika as mine.
-der if somewhere in Young Virgin’s room exists that desk of many drawers (maybe she could find hers) beholding secret superpowers. Maybe she could find her face. I want to see if she was dovetail and fig-leafing her moans like I was. My problem with Great House is my problem with this, perhaps with everything. I never thought any would ever fin -d me in that hamper one year back. I did lose myself though, I think th
“Then we said see you later. I’m so fucked, I thought. I think. I innnnughhh’-fffffffffffuuuuccck. Between the entrance to a bright outside of being pals and the hall to deep stories of rela -tions, there lies the laps of shorts, the shadows of white tee-shirts like cumulus, boners in closing spaces from nowhere. Earlier I read Great House, finished, felt more than nothing, but hated how out of place I was between the parts. Won
[Her: the feminine care aisle at the local Pathmark. She’s not on the rag, mind you. She’s just looking for a suitable product to allay this seemingly biological absence.]
Leonard’s Abyss The new coffee girl wears her hair short, flicked over to the left so it nearly blinds her in that eye when she laughs just a little too much at my bad jokes. I’m not delusional. I’m an old man, she’s a brunette with a summer job and a bird tattoo she showed to me on a slow day. The nametag says her name is SUZANNE. I catch her staring at me from behind the counter while I’m on the phone with my daughter trying to stop her eloping with this new guy. Suzanne expertly beats out the rhythm to some inaudible melody with her whole hand and while I tell my daughter how she wants to be careful because I met her mother at that age I’m trying not to think about Suzanne and all her hands could do to me with that youth and fluidity in her system. When it’s time to pay the bill she hesitates with my change in her hand. ‘Leonard,’ she says to me, ‘I don’t mean to be weird or forward or anything, but you’re pretty well turned-out…’ I try to stay cool but all I can say is thank you. ‘…and you’re not married, right?’ Laying bare my ring finger I tell her the short version. I was, I tell her, but it didn’t take. Without a word she scribbles something on her order pad, folds the top sheet and hands it to me. It’s a phone number. ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I want you to call this number – my mom’s in town for the weekend. I think she’d really like it if you gave her a call.’
James Drew hopes you enjoyed his abyss-mal story. He let his girlfriend supply his bio. He has a blog: jamiedrew.co.uk.
Trajectories You leave trails of photographs as you fly traces and impressions, pausing now and again to feed from my open palm I’ve never had an interest in bird-watching and suppose I still don’t, but to sit very still and blindly trace the loop-de-loops of birdsong (or imagine them, anyhow--like the tail of a rogue spark spiraling madly away from a popping fire) venturing guesses at direction, position, momentum though never all at once; always that Uncertainty: unintended ambiguities, unforeseen connections occurring like particles suddenly existing at two points in space, simultaneously) without even closing my eyes, I can see us clearly two figures fluttering around between space bound in eternal otherness, yet zipping back and forth plucking fireflies from the same swarm. I send cryptic messages like echolocation to prevent collision, primarily but also to let you know that I know you’re there even if I can’t pin you down
After graduating from Riverton Highschool in 2005, Jim Bowler set about jobhopping between Utah and Texas. Currently residing near Dallas, he attends Coffee and Cigarettes University between graveyard shifts, occasionally (obsessively) writing things down.
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