Showing posts with label 1/25 6. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1/25 6. Show all posts

26 March 2014

RAINY DAY COLLAGE by Ira Joel Haber


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Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer, and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one-man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 140 online and print magazines including Rock Heals, Otoliths, Winamop, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, Barfing Frog, The Raving Dove, DeComp, Foliate Oak, Siren, Prose Toad, Triplopia, Thieves Jargon, Opium, Dirt, The Centrifugal Eye, The DMQ Review, Broadsided, Hotmetalpress, Double Dare Press, Events Quarterly, Unlikely Stories, Coupremine, Cerebration,Chick Flicks, Softblow, Eclectica Magazine, Backwards City Review, Right Hand Pointing, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Brew City Magazine, Superstition Review, Fiction Attic, Mastodon Dentist, Blue Print Review, Ellipsis, The Indelible Kitchen, Cricket, Entelechy, So To Speak, Taj Mahal Review, The Fifteen Project, The Externalist, Why Vandalism, Mungbeing Magazine, Lamination Colony, Paradigm, Lily, Literary Fever, Glassfire Magaine, The Houston Literary Review, Lilies and Cannonballs, Wheelhouse Magazine, Terra Incognita, Qarrtsiluni, The Tusculum Review, Multidementional, 34th Parallel, Wood Coin, Sacramento Poetry, Art & Music, Anti-Poetry, Divine Dirt Quarterly, The Mom Egg, Disenthralled, Etcetera,Sea Stories , Bicycle Review, , Down In The Dirt, Psychic Meatloaf, Diverse Voices, Blue Lotus, Forge, The Front Porch Review,The Blotter, Breadcrumb Scabs, Guerilla Pamphlets, Imitation Fruit, Front Range, Convergence, Meat For Tea, Grey Sparrow Press, A Handful Of Dust, Ink Filled Page,The Journal Of Unlikely Entomology, Frequencies, Orion headless, Missive, Lit n Image, Media Virus, Spudgun, Bare Hands, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Maintenant 6, Glass Coin, Off The Rocks, Sliver of Stone , Blue Five Notebook, Map Literary, Literary Ophans, Pinyon Review, Decades Review, Monongahela Review,Amethyst Arsenic, Blue Five Notebook,Tenement Block Review, Cleaver Magazine,The McNeese Review,Storm Cellar,The Original Van Gogh's Ear Anthology, Red Fez, New York Dreaming, Slippage Literary Magazine,Madhat Lit, Olentangy Review,The Writing Disorder, Symmetry Pebbles, Petrichor Review, Cigale Literary Magazine, Episodic Magazine, The Writing Disorder, Four Ties Lit Review, Decades Review, Crack The Spine, Elohi Gadugi Journal, American Athenaeum,Fiction Fix,The Squalor Review, The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review,The Open Road Review,he Meadowland Review,Thrice Fiction, Banango,Sassafras,The Germ, Synaesthesia Magazine,Santa Clara Review, inkblot,Vagabond City, Compose Journal,The Indian River Review, Ricohet, Oddball Magazine,Verse Junkies, Superstition Review, The Black Light Engine Room,Watershed Review & The NewerYork. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists' Fellowship Inc. He currently teaches art to retired public school teachers at The United Federation of Teachers program in Brooklyn.

25 March 2014

ABSURDITY BECOMES HER TASTE CURVE by Mark Sebastian Jordan

It wasn’t the army helmet bra
nor the hat with hummingbird feeders.

It wasn’t the clear bubble-wrap dress
nor the organic eggplant shoes.

It wasn’t even the smartphone earrings
nor the corrugated cardboard corduroys.

It was the elusive slip made of Higgs bosons
that made us all sit up and take notice.

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Mark Sebastian Jordan has been an active presence on the Ohio arts scene for thirty years as an actor, director, playwright, and improv comedian. His Mansfield Trilogy of historical dramas was featured in sell-out performances for a decade at Malabar Farm State Park. As a living history performer, Jordan has portrayed Orson Welles, George Frideric Handel, Dan De Quille, and Clement Vallandigham. He has also been featured in television programs such as Ghost Hunters, Mysteries at the Museum, My Ghost Story, and House of the Unknown, and appeared as an extra in the classic film The Shawshank Redemption.

Jordan is also a poet with numerous publication credits. He was awarded 2nd place in the 2013 Jesse Stuart Memorial Award by the National Association of State Poetry Societies, and has also received awards from the Ohio Poetry Association, the Ohio Arts Council, The Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, The Associated Press, The Rupp Foundation, The Ohio Theater Alliance, the Ohio Community Theatre Association, the Ohio Eta Chapter of the Theta Alpha Phi drama honor fraternity, and the Mansfield/Richland County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Jordan has worked as a freelance journalist for publications all over Ohio as well as ones based in New York City and London, England. He currently reviews concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra for Seen & Heard International. His humorous satire 1776 & All That is available from XOXOX Press. Jordan's poetry chapbook The Book of Jobs was published by Pudding House Press, and his next chapbook, Murder Ballads, will be published by Poets Haven Press in 2014.

Mark lives at Malabar Farm State Park in Lucas, where he runs the Hostelling International hostel, which provides affordable accommodations to travelers of all ages, promoting the idea of world peace through culturally diverse travel.

12 March 2014

NOTHING IS KNOWN OF HIS PERSONALITY, OR HIS THOUGHTS, OR THE MEANING OF HIS ART by John Sweet

let the dead be the dead and let the
living feast on their bones

let money be the law of the land

sons & daughters of the poor good for
fucking good for sending off to war and
there is humor to be found in religion if
you can kill before being killed

there is the ghost of bosch in
every prayer you choke on

there is the sound of his laughter as
the bullet finds your skull

compassion is too precious to
be wasted on just anyone

09 March 2014

LOVE HURTS by Michael Grover

Love can hurt sometimes
Not necessarily
Even romantic love
Love hurts
Friends grow apart
          die
          fuck each other over
Being human is hard work
Love hurts
Everybody dies alone
Yet we die together
Love hurts
Most people are
Just in it for themselves
Love hurts
When you're trying to be
Something bigger than self
Love hurts

08 March 2014

WHAT HAPPENS by David McLean

sex is what happens on piles of naked skeletons
stripped of the senseless insensible
flesh,

it is all the terrible under every memory,
the proximate painless
and never parties yet,

like William Burroughs climbing out of a car
so old it is permanently history
and has always been rusty freedom

to dream in, empty boys, suicide
the cruel exigencies of non-being;
what happens is flesh and skeletons,

the banality of good and evil

06 March 2014

HOW I TRIED TO BE KIND by Michael Hemmingson

a.
I wanted to be kind but all I could achieve was cruelty. I wanted to be kind to the friend who had been dumped by a guy she thought she would marry and grow old with, only to realize all he wanted from her was sex; I acted concerned and hugged my friend and we got drunk and then I fucked her; she called me this other guy’s name the whole time and when she left, she never talked to me again because a month later she committed suicide, leaving a letter blaming that guy for destroying her soul. I couldn’t go to the funeral and mutual friends left me nasty text messages and emails. I sent flowers to the funeral parlor because that seemed like the kind thing to do.

b.
Her sister smeared dog shit on the windshield of my car. That was not a kind thing to do but I understood.

c.
I tried to be kind to a young woman who was jogging with her dog and the dog was hit by a car that sped off. I told her I could drive her and the dog to the vet and she yelled at me: “My dog is already dead, you goddamn jerk!”

I did not understand this; I was trying to be a good person and she acted like it was my fault. I told her to fuck off. That was a kind thing to do because she would later meditate on why I said it and realize what she did wrong. She will never treat a stranger offering kindness like that again, should another dog of hers ever get killed by a car.

d.
A guy at work was in a jam. He was short on his rent by $210. His landlord was not happy that he always paid the rent late and told him he would be evicted if it happened again. I loaned him the $210. He promised to pay it back. A week later, he stopped coming to work and people said he had moved to a different state where rent was cheaper.

e.
There was a small island that was hit by both a hurricane and an earthquake the same week. Two-thirds of the 23,000 people who lived on the island had their homes destroyed and were living in Red Cross tents. I sent the Red Cross $100 through its website.

The next morning I sent another $100 because I didn’t think the first was enough.

f.
There was a snail on the sidewalk. Someone had stepped on it: its shell crushed, green fluid oozing out like sap from a tree, eyestalks looking frantically about for safety. I stepped on it and killed it.

That was the kind thing to do, like shooting, in the head, a horse with a broken leg.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hemmingson

05 March 2014

WHY AM I RED? by mpcAstro

Because your peek
a-boo
elicits crime
and punishment.

And I am ashamed of
my platitudes
because

that’s all that
I have.

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mpcAstro is the "user name" for Mike Castro, publisher of OpPRESS. His poem, "Why Am I red?," was written in his head to keep himself awake while driving home alone 3 AM from the downtown Tampa Hilton's opening night of FetishCon, which coincided with the hotel's separate event opening, Art of Kink, where he was showing his art prints with catalog, Spider's Nest, promoted by Oneiros Books with iambic footnotes, Nidus Plexus. Both sections are scheduled for reprint as two books by Spring 2014 under the Oneiros imprint.

The poem is a red-faced cocktail of grief from love of the poet's life lost (only weeks prior), mixed with a pinch of shame and a dash of frustrated excitement for concocting all night into the wee hours (undelivered) lines to a bevy of fetishettes. The heart is a deep well.

https://www.facebook.com/OpPLEXUS
http://www.paraphiliamagazine.com/oneirosbooks/spiders-nest/
http://issuu.com/oppoet/docs/nidus_plexus_with_iambus_10-23-13

As a first amends, the above issuu link's 20-page (107 thru 127) finalé dives into the ART Of KINK show while at the same time saving his love from drowning.

04 March 2014

WILLIE JOE FROM COCOMO by Catfish McDaris

While washing windows with
a rag on an old rake handle &
a long wide squeegee, I could
not help but think of wild Willie

The cat that taught me plenty,
the correct mixture of vinegar
& ammonia to add to the water

Which rags were best, how to
choose & slice the right rubber
for a worn out squeegee edge

How to do the maximum amount
of work in the minimum of time,
how & where to hide from the boss

Willie always had a pint of rotgut
& a dime bag of good weed, he
never learned to roll a joint, so I
put together our cowboy cigarettes

After a doobie & half a pint, out
would come the Polaroids of his
new chick, all naked spread out
on a bed, smiling like B.B. King

Shots of him grinning, holding
what looked like a huge black
banana with lips all puckered up

I’d make an ugly face & pretend to
gag, he’d crack up laughing hard &
we’d smoke again & finish the booze

Then climb the ladders three stories
up & make the windows so clean, the
birds would commit suicide like in
an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

03 March 2014

DROWN by Melanie Whithaus

Only a baby
when birthed from an egg
in a nest perked over salty water.

She came from deep inside—
vomit.
I pushed her out of my throat,
unhatched and stillborn.

Come now, my child;
Let the blood soak
through her
shell.

Wake up—
suffocate—

die again.

02 March 2014

BURST by Zarina Zabrisky

my breasts burst backwards:
armored artichoke bullets from the inside,
jigsaw puzzle petals from the outside.

they strip
blue lingerie lace—
its sick transparency—
layer by layer

they rip my skin
viscera
the silky insides of blood vessels
the gentle velvet of capillaries

they split my ribs
bone splinters sticking out
marrow blows up
into inky splatters of
Japanese scrolls

and my shoulder blades
morph into blazing birds behind me

tails of dark liquid fire,
wings alarming and striking,

and naked
clad in flight

i am free of the chains of the skyway

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Zarina Zabrisky is the author of short story collections Iron and A Cute Tombstone (Epic Rites Press), and a novel We, Monsters (Numina Press). Zabrisky's work appeared in over thirty literary magazines and anthologies in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong, and Nepal. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a recipient of 2013 Acker Award. Visit Zabrisky at www.zarinazabrisky.com.

28 February 2014

INDEFINITE ARTICLE by Parker Tettleton

I’m to throw, be thrown up in the air. The window sentence is fourth floored, on a balcony in August, area code prime meridian. There are stir-fried cigarettes accumulating in a vegan soup’s can circa ninety degrees. You feel like you. We’re suits & suites in front of a screen: the service elevator religion of relationship wind.

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Parker Tettleton's work is featured in &/or forthcoming from Gargoyle, Word Riot, Deluge, Camroc Press Review & ILK, among others. His grocery shopping collection GREENS is available via Thunderclap! Press. Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014. More or less is here.