Archive
Batman’s Address, or the Theory of Fort Knox
“It will never be safe, Superfriends.
The Legion of Doom is always already
escaping in their skull-shaped rocket ship,
always just fast enough to out-run the Invisible Jet
and even Superman and the Flash.
The loot is heavy in the hold.
And still they zoom into their swamp.
“We are not who we think we are.
Look in their eyes, Lex’s deep, seductive
onyx, the ragged black holes of the Scarecrow,
the zombie gaze of Solomon Grundy, can’t you see it!
Can’t you see it in the way they lick their lips, Grod
the Gorilla, the uber-genius, eating bananas with his feet.
“Watch them as they crowd into their skull,
their foreheads nearly touching as they plan
their next heist, seated, suddenly like presidents,
at their Roundtable of Doom.
“We are the soft, hidden and heavy gold bars
the enemy desires, we are the ray guns
they steal every other week, the very theory
of might-makes-right Lex bangs out, his manly
fist never once splintering his tiny little podium.
“Admit your face, too, etched angular
where it should be soft, blunted chin
where it should be jutted in heroism.
“Save the kitten from the tree
and make love to your doppelgänger
and give up the tights, for god’s sake,
give up the tights and peace will reign.”
Christopher Hennessy (blog) is the author of Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets (University of Michigan Press). He is studying in the PhD program in English Literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His poetry was selected for the special “Emerging Writers” issue of Ploughshares. His poetry, interviews, essays, and book reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Verse, Cimarron Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, Wisconsin Review, Bloom, Knockout, Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere.
Call for Submissions: The Crowd
The crowd, the flock, the herd, the mob, the swarm, the tribe: we are simultaneously fascinated and repelled by this super-organism, capable at times of great beauty and even wisdom (cf. The Wisdom of Crowds) and at other times of appalling ugliness and violence. Aristotle defined humanity as an animal whose nature it is to live in a polis, but in all ages we seem incapable of deciding whether this is a good or bad thing; one commentator’s inspiring revolutionary struggle is another’s mob rule. For the next issue of qarrtsiluni, we are open to all perspectives, positive and negative, historical and biological, on crowds and other aggregations of social animals. Inspiration can be sought in the ecstasy and fervor of the stadium, the battalion, the game, the march, the final episode, the fad, the stampede — or the collective consciousness in general. With the planet’s burgeoning human population threatening to exceed our ecological carrying capacity, and so many crises now requiring urgent collective action, it seems imperative for artists and writers, so often antisocial ourselves and preoccupied with the struggles of individuals, to turn our attention to sociality in its most vital and basic form.
We welcome submissions from all genres that we regularly consider: poems (no more than five per submission, please), prose (no more than 1000 words per story or essay), photos, videos, or other digitized artwork. For this issue, we will also entertain suggestions for crowd-sourced compositions. Email us with a proposal, and you might find yourself in charge of a wiki or survey set up for the nonce.
As always, please refer to the general guidelines for complete details on how and what to submit. One big change: we have taken down our online contact form. Too many submissions have been lost that way in recent months.
There are no guest editors this time; we are editing this issue ourselves. (See the About page for our bios, if you’re interested in knowing just who you’re dealing with.) The deadline for submissions is June 30, and we expect to begin serializing the issue in August.
We hope to hear from you soon!
—Beth Adams and Dave Bonta
qarrtsiluni 