Liminal Spaces – June 2018 Guest Editor James Pate – here is the final edition of all selections curated by James Pate during the month of June 2018 for his theme of Liminal Spaces – thank you so much to James for all his hard work during the month and for the impeccable way he managed and curated his month’s editorship. To have been avid readers and fans of James’ writing – especially his essays during the days of the incredible and much-missed Montevidayo site – to have James collaborate on BHP for a month has been such a dream experience. Thanks, James! – and Thank You So Much to all who contributed such magic work to the theme – Here it is, June 2018 guest editor James Pate’s Liminal Spaces edition – enjoy! Continue reading “Liminal Spaces – June 2018 Guest Editor James Pate”
By Fredric Nord
Zero is the only numeral with the ability to remain itself in solitude. Zero is defined by the ability to not change. All other numerals are relative to each other and depend on each other for existence. They always change and change together. Without each other, stripped of cohabitation, they have no meaning or personality. That’s why all numerals in solitude equals zero. The total amount of numerals aren’t gazillions but one and a half, generously measured. Continue reading “Footnote to silence”
My Gender is the Fledgling Solo Career of Annie Lennox in the 90’s
Maybe Mom playing “Here Comes the Rain Again” on her tape deck in the shower as one of my earliest memories is why I have such a proclivity to wordplay. Mom blasted music in the shower on her tape deck, even when we lived with my conservative paternal grandparents in the late 80’s. My dad’s mom who made me play her my music in the late 90’s to tell me how “Hit Me Baby One More Time” had dirty messages in it, how a milquetoast hit like “Roll to Me” by the squishy-soft rock group Del Amitri seemed to forebode “roll over me” subliminally, and do I “know what these songs mean?” Continue reading “An Essay by M. Perle”
Factory Work
A remote-imaging satellite glides soundlessly over a distant planet’s moon, collecting terrain correction data. The raw information of the lunar landscape is then relayed to a network of unmanned computers in an otherwise empty building located somewhere in the frozen expanse of the Arctic. The surface of the moon is like skinned fruit, rolling out of reach. Many years later, the vessel sends back evidence of absence, countless and identical images of an unending void. Sometime later still the feed stops—the arrival of data ceases. Continue reading “2 Poems by David Peak”
Burning House Press are excited to welcome JAMES PATE as our fifth guest editor! James will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the full month of June – when he will then hand over the reins to our sixth guest editor for the month of July.
Submissions for James are open from today – 1st June and will remain open until 23rd June.
James’ Theme/s for the month are as follows
Liminal Spaces
James has introduced his theme for your guidance:
I’m fascinated by those spaces that are on the threshold between the interior and exterior, the conversational and the unnamable, the recognizable present and the intangible future. Please send work you feel might be too eccentric for other venues—writing with twilight-lit edges, photography that blends the particular with the anonymous, art that is charged with the radically other.
Are there images and phrase that only grow more cryptic the more we think about them? Are there barely audible voices still waiting to be recorded? Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry, Shirley Jackson’s novels, Sun Ra’s discography, Tarkovsky’s films, Beckett’s plays, Francis Bacon’s humanoid creatures, voices reading the Tarot heard in the static between radio stations, night gardens with metallic-seeming insects…mystic political tracts, literary realism haunted by sci-fi, Gothic verse imagining lunar vistas of paradisiac ruin…Please send work involving liminal spaces that question and invoke.
James Pate is a poet and fiction writer. His books include The Fassbinder Diaries (Civil Coping Mechanisms), Flowers Among the Carrion: Essays on the Gothic in Contemporary Poetry (Action Books Salvo Series), and Speed of Life (Fahrenheit Press). He teaches creative writing at Shepherd University, in Shepherdstown, WV.
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For submissions, James is looking for your poetry, short stories, flash fiction, prose poems, art, collage, painting, photography – as well as non-fiction submissions: essays, reviews, commentary, features, interviews – and all hybrids and cross-forms.
Submission Guidelines
All submissions should be sent as attachments to guesteditorbhp@gmail.com
Please state the theme and form of your submission in the subject of the email. For example: LIMINAL SPACES/POETRY
Poetry and Fiction
For poetry submissions, submit no more than three of your best poems. Short stories should be limited to 1,500 words or (preferably) less. We encourage flash fiction submissions, no more than three at a time. Send these in as a .doc or .docx file, along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.
Art
Submit hi-res images of your works (drawings, paintings, illustrations, collages, photography, etc) with descriptions of the work (Title, Year, Medium, etc) in the body of the email. Files should be in .JPEG unless they are GIFs or videos, and should not exceed 2MB in size for each work. File names should correspond with the work titles. Video submissions can be uploaded onto Youtube or Vimeo for feature on our website. Send these submissions along with a short third-person bio, and (optional) photograph of yourself.
Non-fiction
Non-fiction submissions (essays, reviews, commentary, interviews, etc) should be no more than 1, 500 words and sent as a .doc or .docx file along with your third-person bio/and optional photograph.
Submissions are open from 1st June til 23rd June – and will reopen again on 1st July for our sixth guest editor.
BHP online is now in the capable hands of the amazing JAMES PATE – friends, send him your best!
May’s guest editor has chosen and presented her final selections of work responding to her theme/s of
Identity: Crisis, Creation, Multiplicity, Singularity
BHP would like to thank Karissa for all her hard work over the past month – for the fantastic work she has chosen, and the impeccable way she has dealt with submissions and submitters. Thank you for everything, Karissa – you have been amazing!!!
The Things I Called You Were Never Quite Right
But I was preoccupied with
wonder. A cursory ask: is gay-boy
the same as femme, the same as
gender- queer, the same as sharp, then soft,
then wading destitute through
swamps of molasses? I was so
distracted, drowned in the black rush
of mascara in untouched eyelashes.
Burning House Press are excited to welcome KARISSA LANG as our fourth guest editor! Karissa will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the full month of May – when she will then hand over the reins to our fifth guest editor for the month of June.
Submissions for Karissa are open from today – 1st May and will remain open until 24th May.
Karissa’s Theme/s for the month are as follows
Identity:
Crisis • Creation • Multiplicity • Singularity
Continue reading “MAY’S GUEST EDITOR FOR BHP ONLINE IS KARISSA LANG!!!!”
As April draws to a close – our guest editor for the month, C.C. O’Hanlon, has posted his final selections, and is winding down his tenure.
Burning House Press would like to thank C.C. for everything he has done this month – it has been a colossal few weeks of submissions and engagement – and this successful month has meant an abundance of admin and responsibilities – C.C. has managed every challenge that his editorship has brought him with total aplomb – and we are truly grateful for all his hard work.
We would also like to extend a massive thank you to all who have submitted work to BHP during April – and for the amazing way that your submissions and contributions have engaged with C.C.’s fantastic themes of Place: Movement / Escape / Exploration / Architecture. We have been absolutely blown away by your creations. Thank you so much for continuing to entrust BHP with your precious art.
Be sure to catch all the fantastic, diverse, incredibly wide-ranging and glorious pieces of writing, art, photography and hybrids selected and featured by C.C. as part of his themed editorship HERE.
We appreciate every single submission that we receive – and although not all submissions make it onto the site, every single submission sent is valued and of merit, and we encourage you to continue to submit to future editors and respond to forthcoming themes.
The main idea behind the guest editorships at BHP is so that we can keep the platform fresh, continue widening the scope of the community, the readership and the work and artists featured, to posit new approaches and directions to themes both old and new, to bring new work to new audiences, to stimulate a correspondence of ideas and responses, to offer creatives an inclusive space and platform to take the reins as editors, to instigate and initiate creative cross-pollinations and cultural contaminations – and during his editorship C.C. has ably fulfilled every facet of that remit and then some – THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING C.C.!!! WE TRULY HOPE YOU COME BACK AND EDIT BHP AGAIN!!! Xx
We now prepare to hand over to May’s guest editor – more themes, and more opportunities to submit your genius creations to BHP! Thanks again, C.C.!
This is the end.
I’m going to miss these few weeks I’ve spent as a guest editor for BHP. Thanks to everybody who submitted their works around my loosely framed theme of Place: Movement / Escape / Exploration / Architecture. With few exceptions, they were exactly what I’d hoped for.
Thanks to everybody who read them. My immediate predecessors, Florence Lenaers and Amee Nassrene Broumand, had broadened BHP‘s readership significantly and I’m happy (and relieved) that I managed to add to its growth.
I’m also happy to have maintained a similarly rich diversity of contributors. Old, white males – like me – were few.
Thank you, Miggy Angel, for allowing me to be part of this. I’ve had a blast.
I’ll let myself out.
Fragment I
The story of a screech: it rose as the last bus of the evening crossed the borders of the city to the motorway. All seventeen of us on the top deck turned our heads. Oh yes, it was perfunctory (because on a double-decker you cannot really see what’s going on behind you on the road, even less so in the dark), but the gesture had already captivated me – the meaning, the intention. By the time all heads were turned, it was clear that we had all misjudged the nature of the screech (pitch dropping, frequency decreasing as it unwrapped). This could never come from a human throat, but rather from the strained brakes of a vehicle. Continue reading “Three Fragments On The Portative Organ* by Eva Ferry”
“I seek a place that can never be destroyed, one that is pure, and that fadeth not away, and is laid up in heaven, and safe there, to be given, at the time appointed, to them that seek it with all their heart.”
– John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
Our pilgrimage almost came to an end under the wheels of a 10-ton truck on the D650 from Istanbul to Eskişehir, on a summer night made darker by no highway illumination and no towns for miles around. The four-lane highway was flanked on one side by dry, empty country and on the other by two-hundred-feet-tall black crags, out of which the silhouettes of pine trees leered, high up. Continue reading “Phrygians In The Rigging by Caroline Stockford”
Jo Tinsley is the founder and editor of Ernest Journal – “an independent magazine for the curious and adventurous”. She is also the co-author of two books, The Odditorium: The tricksters, eccentrics, deviants and inventors whose obsessions changed the world and The Mysterium: Unexplained and extraordinary stories for a post-Nessie generation, and editor of Waterfront, a magazine celebrating a connection with water for the Canal & River Trust. Somehow, she also finds time to work as a freelance writer and curator. Continue reading “Jo Tinsley: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon”
If I were an office worker in Japan, I would take a holiday with my Japanese boyfriend to the Hachiman Shrine in Kamakura. We would ride the train together, holding hands. We would always be holding hands. I would know the feel of his grip better than anything. Continue reading “This Would Be The Perfect Day by Cathy Ulrich”
For the end of the plague, for victory the erection of a scutulously ornate votive column in the isolation of the multiaxial crossroads of the citycenter, for here is the palimpsest of vehicular crossroads, for the completion of the navmesh, for the nativity of Salty, for nothing more than the ecstasy of sculpture, for successful dolphin harvesting, here upon this plinth is the destruction of the Parliament Hall, here upon this plinth is the meatjam Continue reading “Smithsonian Destruction Vigil by John Trefry”
It was a bad day:
By the end of it
He had become convinced
That the landscape of the city
Had been usurped Continue reading “In Anticipation Of The Singularity by Mark Beechill”
For months before going to Alaska, I thought about how six hours of daylight would feel. In California, I’d lay in bed and imagine the darkness as a hand closing around my throat. Continue reading “A Believing Place by Nina Foushee”
Fying from New York to Athens,
I am seated next to a man named Frank.
35,000 feet in the air,
high above sea level,
far from swelling waves – Continue reading “Meeting Frank by Loretta Oleck”
Fushimi Inari
We walked into the dark-
-er and darker red gates and long long steps
a key between my teeth
shiny shiny boots plastic
cup of warm white wine Continue reading “Two Poems by John Boursnell”
Crying on the threshold, waiting to step into light, waiting to step into a history of pain. I am at the doorway now. The process of healing hollows me out, a tree preparing to become a waka. Sailing back in time into an ocean of grief and love, back to where I began, back to where we first landed. Continue reading “whatitoka (doorway) by Kathleen McLeod”
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