August 2nd, 2020
Delicate
Some porcelain is missing from my cheek,
a hole you study while you think I sleep.
In light of day it bothers you I’m weak.
In darkness you find penetrable deep.
July 26th, 2020
Why Charlie Can’t Leave The Factory
After a reveal of cotton candy sheep being
shorn for confectionery purposes in the
Burton Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film:
Willy Wonka – “I’d rather not talk about this one.”
You peer a possible pasture in a
pink corridor. Perhaps peeking proves it?
Perchance a perpendicular door plays
with peripheral vision, pomegranate
sheep producing shorn candy floss piles pruned
to palatable heaps? Panicked to peep
Continue reading “Womannotated – Why Charlie Can’t Leave The Factory”
Two Golden Tickets sonnets (my Charlie and The Chocolate Factory homage book of poems) from the Hot Chocolate section which involves chocolatier love triangles, femme fatale industrial spies, strip clubs and licorice .
Sugar Daddy’s
A strip club in which Arthur Slugworth, chocolatier competitor of Willy Wonka, meets the woman who will become his secretary and industrial spy and future lover of Willy Wonka.
American Candy Expo meets in
Chicago each year. Arthur Slugworth’s jet
consistently appears before show begins
day early to play. Bittersweet secrets
over his butterscotch schnapps confessed
to the ponytailed stripper; her peach ring
pop, bubblegum thong, sweet visage suggests
she is a shell you could tell anything Continue reading “Womannotated – Hot Chocolate!”
Two Golden Ticket Dark Chocolate Sonnets:
illustration by Amy Suzanne
Pipe Dream
“He’s changed!” said Grandpa Joe, peering down through the glass wall of the elevator. “He used to be fat! Now he’s thin as straw.” Grandpa Joe on Augustus after the pipe, Roald Dahl Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
All they saw, “thin as straw” Augustus who
once was not. Boy almost boiled inside
a chocolate pot, consumed post fudge room
before the change. Chocolate liquefied
The following is a brand new poem written for The Meadow, my bdsm themed poetry collection about my time in the world of bdsm as a young woman. I wrote this piece as well as the Reader’s Guide I published below to enhance your pleasure and understanding of the text. Order your own Meadow at apeppublications.com.
Underneath
Before you call yourself a womanchild,
you fly to New York City, college girl
costumed to be defiled, pigtailed, beguiled
before a bedtime story, too. A whirl-
wind trip in which he will present to you
Red, topsy-turvy, Riding Hood one night, Continue reading “Womannotated – Underneath”
A sample page from Crow Carriage, an annotated poetic horror novel set in a Victorian English seaside village. This is the format of the Crow Carriage book, a sonnet with an expansive annotation that tells a story in prose below (the same format as my book Flutter available at my website and Twist In Time).
The Night The Crow Must Go Away
You lie beneath a dozen nightmares. Screams
careening down a crow-covered stair wake
you in the last second before the dream.
Continue reading “Womannotated – The Night A Crow Must Go Away”
A Crow Carriage
Sonnet Double Feature:
Mistress of Malice
Ten miles upon a tufted seat, elm trees
to village path, discreet, a beast will ride
to seaside town. One hooded straggler by
him found, too young this hour to be outside
indecent bodice, brown eyes wide. Fingers Continue reading “Womannotated, Crow Carriage”
I Was Blythe
I would do anything to not be cute,
fifteen, though it’s, without dispute, what I am,
Blythe doll eyes, wide face, small limbs a brute
could hold in place with fingertips. Brown eyes Continue reading “Womannotated – I Was Blythe”
Calpurnia
After Morticia Addams describing Wednesday’s
role model (“Wednesday’s great-aunt Calpurnia.
She was burned as a witch in 1706. They said she danced
naked in the town square and enslaved a minster ..
but don’t worry. We’ve told Wednesday: college first.”)
Young girls require a patron saint — aunt’s
abysmal ashes antiquate entwined,
Massachusetts grave, with God’s servant
whom she enslaved. Impious mind
in clerical cravat a town square dance
(performed in only raven plaits) bewitched Continue reading “Womannotated – Calpurnia”
An Ancestral Love of Boyish Bees
He recognizes painted eyes like green
irises mythologized over a decade and
a half ago — the speckled girl, sixteen,
he used to know — acquainted, where you stand
in her place, in your hand replica, bisque,
familiar face, unblemished cheeks, unbloomed
by his demonic lips. Lunar eclipse Continue reading “Womannotated – An Ancestral Love of Boyish Bees (Flutter: Southern Gothic Fever Dream)”
August 30th, 2019
No More Names
If you would follow, after dark, him and
his friends into the park — a boy who likes
to call you names, then make lewd demands,
midnight games. Mother said, “He’s so polite,”
his slick blonde hair, and Dad’s old spice, shirt tucked Continue reading “Womannotated – No More Names”
sudden the homecoming
coyotes have learned to build traps
made of endings from the center of the earth
dressed as wolves they give them
to their loves who live in houses
with pink curtains and weather
warped floorboards
dictionaries and streaming services
1. Decode
Decode:
Men awe, at that heathen spindle,
to see any machine’s ode.
Cater, Enigma:
I generate codes,
inch —
many ease, to lend pins heat;
heat that we name, decode….
Ash and Stardust was a monthly column by energy worker and artist/writer DHIYANAH HASSAN exploring the intersections of tarot with healing and creativity. You can read the full series here.
When I started this column in January 2018, I was still calling myself a tarot noob. I confess I didn’t thoroughly believed it but lacked the confidence to openly claim myself as a card reader without having gone through some kind of an initiation period.
Who I am now is so far traveled from the person I was at the beginning of 2018. This was my Saturn Return year and it was so full of magic – this was my first happy year, ever! Connecting to the healing tools that I accepted as available to me really went a long way in teaching me what my happiness could look like. And I took it, ran with it, and trusted in everything I am that is strong and soft and beautiful.
During the span of this year, I received confirmation after confirmation at each level of release and growth I experienced once I committed – not just mentally but also physically, emotionally, and spiritually – to my chosen intentions to heal, to love, to have fun. I know now that writing Ash and Stardust as a monthly column was a sort of initiation I designed for myself to activate within me what I thought I was running low on – the ability to trust myself.
I’m writing this now, already at home in my new wilderness, on the eve of the new year cycle. I’m writing this as the last post of Ash and Stardust on Burning House Press.
Ash and Stardust, a monthly column by energy worker and artist/writer DHIYANAH HASSAN explores the intersections of tarot with healing and creativity. You can read the rest of the series here.
When you look at a card like The Tower, where do you see yourself in it? Pull it out now and observe the illustration of the card in front of you, do you recognize yourself in the tower falling apart, the figures raining down towards the ground, the air ignited by lightning, or anything else that’s happening in there?
Tarot encourages us to consider situating ourselves in scenarios we may not be able to acknowledge or recognize without some support. In this way, the cards open us to investigation, exploration, and possibility. With cards like The Fool, The Lovers, or Six of Wands, they encourage us to see ourselves as deserving more goodness from ourselves or from the world around us. And cards like The Tower, Five of Cups, and Ten of Wands – these difficult cards? They’re just as much avenues for liberation as the more obviously affirming, softer cards.
Our imagination, under social conditionings that are oppressive and oppressing, limits us. Our imagination, integrated with our soul’s truth, frees us.
‘Página 28 de la Gramática General Española’, found file, 2018
Bruno Neiva is a text artist. This is a found, unaltered piece, a page Bruno took from a Spanish book on linguistics. It’s a piece on the (supposed) European solidarity towards refugees. Curiously, the original book was published a long time before the crisis. The author used the theme by accident just to illustrate an example of a basic syntactic structure. Website. Twitter: @umaestrutura
As guest-editor this month, I was fortunate to have published a small selection of stunning, future-facing poems from Astropolis (Haverthorn Press, 2018) by Astra Papachristodoulou earlier this month. I also asked Astra if she would write a small piece on Astropolis, which she has kindly done.
The methodology of Astropolis Continue reading “Astra Papachristodoulou: The methodology of Astropolis”
Giant Tube Worms
When the saidnow news of smothering ecological
apocalypse had been assimilated into the culture,
we all could relax once more. It hadn’t been the heat –
‘Martin, order more refrigerators’ – that was stressful,
it was the exhaust headache of dystopian art everywhere,
frankly we could do with some love songs again.
And just in time, away from the fattening of the water,
a group of young thems started being fucking vital
in plume-like vascularised clothes. Undersea
rift worms vampiring on the energy of a volcanic vent.
We’d not realised, living far too close to ourselves,
that evolution had always been a hot and sexy circle.
Tom Sharp is a vanity poet with five self-published pamphlets released over the last year. He tweets here @ThomasSharp_
Continue reading “Tom Sharp: Giant Tube Worms”
Ash and Stardust, a monthly column by energy worker and artist/writer DHIYANAH HASSAN explores the intersections of tarot with healing and creativity. You can read the rest of the series here.
For October, I came up with a personalized tarot-inspired inktober challenge that I named after this column, #ashytober. I drew a card for each day and then illustrated my response to that card. The result is a series of digital art illustrations that gave life and ambience to the vibrant things that pulsate vividly beyond the surface of my days. Save for a couple of lags, I spent my October making art that I had no chance to plan for since each day’s prompt only happened when I pulled a card from the deck. I documented the work and shared some insight about the process for each piece on my Instagram (they’ll also be up on my website once that’s back out of its hiatus).
The ways in which I work has changed. Instead of squeezing effort to make things, I’m more focused on allowing things to happen. There’s so much that wants to come through me, so much that’s getting ready that wants me to be gentle with it.
Working on #ashytober after months of light sketchbook work allowed me the space to let the different parts of my work – my art, my training as a healer, my words, my aspirations – find their own ways to integrate and merge. I also found out that working intuitively was a great way to allow old strategies of art-making to adapt to where I’m at now.
Like how with each piece of #ashytober, I was building – finding – a fantastical world that housed its own cosmic cartography with strange landscapes, multiple suns and moons in the sky, and characters living diverse lifestyles.
Building up a cosmology for magical worlds – like building up the narrative behind the theory behind the symbology of a series – is something I’ve grown so accustomed to in my work as an artist. Except that I used to pressure myself to the point of paralysis that not much of this work gets to see the light of day. And so it was really delightful – like unwrapping candy to find a surprise toy packed inside with it – to see an entire universe of characters and narratives being spun out so spontaneously with each piece.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 