Archive
View through police lines, anti-Iraq war demonstration
New York City, February 2003 (click image for a larger version)
Jonathan Sa’adah’s photographs often deal with people and political/social topics. His favorite places to photograph are streets and within shared lives.
Mass
by John Vick
Both. And perhaps the others too, but more expert at ringing chimes and obtaining useless property than the ululation, the way one screams Eureka! at each new spring’s discovery of us, the interfering ones who claim transubstantiation. Where all olfactory and otherwise remain centered on texture and bouquet, the smaller people in the chapel remain suspect and therefore more intelligent than a full rack of lamb with rosemary and apple chutney on wedding day.
Either. Because nothing else matters than the idea of it, the kitsch you saw at Goodwill, brought home, cleaned with merriment. Or the handheld device, a setback to the ham radio presented at Christmas (c. 1971). Overhead a toy airplane buzzes and cuts through a common blue sky. It clips the wings of an irate crow and the crow is not a nice bird, no. As though one is chintzy with haircuts, yet expects everyone to look exquisite; a string of salons turning out bowl cuts to anxious teens who all want to look precisely insane.
Neither. Without knowledge of the poodle-skirt, the standard poodle, the poodle parlor, and the poodle princess — the way a leash can mean so much more than simple Pooper-Scooper activity — or casual sleeping felines en masse. There are too many smells of humanness on the public transport. Acceptance of same comes as folly, wherein you find yourself skank-stinky and need to get home cheap, folly where you are put in another’s position — only focused on talking the situation to death. Saying everything three times, over and over like Mother did, again and again. There. There is a flock of poodles with proud poodle owners marching down the street in poodle parade formation, as though a battle is to begin. A battle of froufrou against the odds. A turning point. An amassing.
John Vick was born in Mississippi. His family moved across the continent to Canada in the mid-60s, and when he was 11, he moved to Oklahoma with his parents and finished high school. Since then, Vick has lived in Texas, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He served in the military for two years in the mid-80s. He’s placed poems in a variety of journals, including in the upcoming issue of phati’tude, and his chapbook Chaperons of a Lost Poet appeared from BlazeVOX in 2009.
The Incredible Corpse Dormitory
bodies together, bodies to gather
in bags and boxes, in black zippers,
ice boxes and black bags, gathered
rows of bodies, rose bodies scatter
on sheets and pillows, on cases,
pillowcases and petals, scattered
bodies in beds, bodies that confuse
limbs and forgetting, in whispers,
forgetten limbs whisper, confused
halls of bodies, hauled bodies rest
in corners and crannies, in heaps,
crammed corners, hauled, rested
bodies left behind, bodies that lift
into mist and midnight, into moon,
misty midnight bodies, now lifted.
Donna Vorreyer hates crowds, unless she’s at a music festival. (Music soothes… well, you know.) She lives in a house with a spacious yard and plenty of breathing space for her husband, her son, and her dog. Visit her and view her work at her website or her blog.
A bird makes a crowd flaccid
by June Nandy
The streets are deserted. A bird comes
to collect our quills; it carries wrecked
houses, ransacked school-rooms,
burnt out sanctum, smashed shops in its
beak and flies to a figment-
island with our micro-characters.
Days later, others—like me—go and
spend some sweat to bring home a
new federal policy, fresh job-hunt
papers and a leader from the mart.
The crowd is brave not to wince
when the bird scoops out topical arts
hidden in their skulls; when blood
leans on their temples.
June Nandy’s recent works have appeared in The Beat, Aphelion, Muse India, Kritya, Up The Staircase Literary Review, and elsewhere. She has won the third place in the open poetry contest, 2009 with Prakriti Foundation, Chennai. Her debut novel Ideospheres of Pain is available on Amazon. Her poems can be accessed through her blog.
House Jumping Place
by Brian Pike
Click on image to see a larger version
Brian Pike is a mixed-media artist who lives and works in rural North Yorkshire. A selection of his recent paintings can be seen on his website. He also writes haiku-influenced short poems at Paiku.
Simulation of Bacteria on the Floor After Mopping
Distraught about the simulation of bacteria on the floor after mopping, we leave for our respective superstores in such a hurry that we forget to shut off our TVs. We can see them, the TVs, from the road as we pass, in our neighbors’ windows, or in the apartments across the alley from ours as we peek out a staircase window or up at the tired brick facades from the sidewalks below. While we’re gone, the latest mop-replacement advertisement airs a dozen more times during commercial breaks from afternoon soaps and talk shows, informing our kitchen appliances and living room sofas of the unwanted microorganisms dirty mops leave behind.
Yet at all our Walmarts and Targets and Krogers and K-Marts and BJ’s Wholesale Clubs, traditional mops are still a purchasing option. Why?
A stray ant or two carting bread crumbs across a marble countertop we can handle. But when we’re using a broom to scoot dust bunnies from behind the washer and we discover a colony forming around the base of a ripped dog food bag, no damp paper towel is quilted enough for us to attempt a raid.
This simulation, it is the maggots in the wet cat food dish we forgot to clean out last week.
What we mean is traditional options aren’t working.
The steam vac infomercial devouring the late-Sunday-morning-to-early-Sunday-afternoon programming block on the local cable station argues against the use of the latest mop replacement, whose disposable sheet can scratch dirt and grit like sandpaper across hardwood floors. We don’t trust infomercials, but when the same product is demonstrated with only minor errors live on QVC and HSN, the phone lines are flooded with orders. A sweet-voiced woman with a southern accent tells us she is buying a second steam vac for the studio apartment her lover rents downtown for their clandestine rendezvous.
“Those floors can get so filthy,” she says to the doe-eyed saleswoman.
Meanwhile, Larry Whitmore, an Iraq War veteran from Syracuse, NY, spots Lexi, the chipper SU senior from across the hall, lugging cleaning supplies into her apartment, including the latest mop replacement with a Wegman’s bag full of disposable sheets. She’s cleaning up after a small Super Bowl Commercial party she held the night before. He offers his assistance and his mother’s steam vac, on loan to him. While he’s steaming sticky alcohol and nacho cheese remnants from the floors he overhears her apologizing to another neighbor about the previous night’s noise, reciting a line from Williams about the crowd at the ballgame moving uniformly, without thought.
“I do that to disarm people,” she confesses. “Reciting poetry usually calms people down. Or at least makes them see you in a different light.”
He tells her later, over lunch, that he only remembers Williams’ red wheelbarrow.
“I can’t imagine anything nowadays holding such weight,” he says. “Can you?” And recites for her:
so much depends
upon
a green Swiffer
mop
covered with old
dust
beside the trash
can and recyclables
They discuss the cultural, community importance of the red wheelbarrow to the implied farming family, like the bicycle in De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, so much unlike Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, which means nothing to the men who toss it into the furnace. They discuss how Kane’s wealth made all but sentimental objects meaningless to him. How this was the movement of the country Welles was perhaps trying to convey — from humble, impoverished pioneers to pretentious, community-impoverished capitalists.
Oh, we listen to them from the adjacent booths at Applebee’s, grumbling to ourselves. Who do they think they are? Who even watches Citizen Kane anymore? What kind of cultural importance does it have to anyone besides English majors and film school dropouts? Isn’t that the purpose of art? To be culturally important? To be important to a wide audience? To be important to a community as a whole?
What about our art? we want to argue. What about cavemen commercials and annoying ringtones that get stuck in your head? What about the one-liners from The Hangover or the lyrics sung on American Idol? These are the things we discuss around office water coolers. Why aren’t they important? So much does depend upon TV ratings: jobs, incomes, careers, stocks. Entire families and suburban developments. School districts supported by the sales of General Mills cereals.
Our art is a nation-wide means for sustenance.
Larry and Lexi don’t see that the steam vac brought them together. Not Orson Welles or William Carlos Williams. Not a mutual cultural background. Not love. But a steam vac. A steam vac, on loan from his mother, that Larry uses to break the ice, to impress a young woman he’d been eyeing for months. He’d come home from a day at Pep Boy’s and close his door to the empty hallway, only exchanging brief greetings with any neighbor that might happen to pass by. What kind of community is that?
We, on the other hand, gather in crowded living rooms for the series finale of Lost. We form Paris Hilton fan clubs online. Years from now, we’ll still be writing X-Files fan fic. We do things together. We make decisions about our culture, including traditional cleaning options, by fidgeting en masse on Black Fridays for doors to open. Early bird shoppers may form a semblance of a line, but by the time store managers are sweating with keys in hand we are like the simulation of bacteria on the floor after mopping: all movement, no order. Kill enough of us and things will start to sour. Shit will fester on the store shelves, unbought. Stagnant stocks will rot undigested in your portfolios.
We build cul-de-sacs and church steeples. We rent hourly motel rooms and spend fortunes on birth control and anti-abortion legislation. We donate to charities then die slowly together in nursing homes after states have absorbed our estates, our children bringing us reaching claws and sleeved blankets they ordered from a toll-free number, as seen on TV.
Danny Pelletier’s short fiction has appeared in Pear Noir!, Quarterly West, Monkeybicycle, and Night Train. One of his poems appears in the latest issue of Contemporary Haibun Online, and he has an essay at BookLifeNow.com. He lives with his wife and one and a half children in central New York, where he teaches writing.
Left Behind
We gathered twelve baskets of leftovers,
and then we confronted a new crisis:
what do with all the food left behind?
We slapped together fish sandwiches for all the weary
travelers. We made to-go bags
for everyone with hungry
families at home. We made sure the boy
got his investment back and then some.
We still had several baskets.
We made a picnic for ourselves.
And then Martha stepped forward.
With her old family recipe, she baked
pan after pan of bread pudding.
Some people gathered to talk mystical
theology. The rest of us helped
Martha clean up the kitchen. We wallowed
in dessert and fellowship. We celebrated
sweetness, the important life lesson.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. She has published in many journals, and Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard, in 2004. She currently serves as Chair of the General Education department at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. Her website, which has connections to the blogs that she keeps, is kristinberkey-abbott.com.
The King’s Shilling
by Clive Birnie
They cut his hair short like a peasant,
and he trembled like a maid
on her wedding night.
Fright? I dare say I should feel the same
if it was for my neck they were
sharpening the blade.
Regicide they call it.
I say killing is killing.
A King is just a man
like any other:
thin and scared and pale.
All I know is, when they lopped off his head
he bled red as the rest of us.
My Bess she got a rag.
Soaked it in his blood.
She loves a relic.
Prays, she does.
Some people got a lock of hair.
Some they got some whiskers.
I know one got some nose hair.
Another his left eyebrow.
I met this woman once,
claimed she had old Charlie’s penis.
Shrivelled and dried.
Touch it first, she said,
and it protects you from the pox.
Me, I bought an earlobe
off this fella in the King’s Head.
A good bit of business.
Only cost a shilling.
I took it home.
Cured it like a rasher.
I put it in my mouth once.
It tasted like a scratching.
That was three hundred
and sixty one years ago.
So I suppose it had some power.
Note: There was an exhibition in London in May 2010 of relics of King Charles I, who was executed in January 1639. Many of the relics were reputedly sold to the crowd at the execution. Legend has it that many exhibited magical powers.
Clive Birnie lives in Portishead in SW England with his wife, daughter and a French dog. He has recently had poems published in Popshot and Snakeskin magazines, with further work forthcoming in Message In A Bottle.
Hundspiele
by Alan Hayes
Click on photo to see a larger version
Alan Hayes was raised on a defunct goldfish farm in Western New York. In 2000, after a lifetime wasted on trivial matters, he began making pictures. He also operates, with his wife, Rosemary Starace, the newly formed chapbook press, Elephant Tree House. For more of his photography, see his retrospective installation catalogue from a show in Buffalo, New York last year, or his Portraits of the American Dead gallery.
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 