Into The Beyond, by Ewan Aparicio
Collage on paper, 2019. Continue reading “Into The Beyond, by Ewan Aparicio”
I’m completely over it.
Almost.
This ever present guilt,
an effervescent spirit;
it took death to impress.
Ephemeral pleasures,
hold on, it’s already gone.
All clowns cry,
our clocks wink goodnight.
Won’t buy what you’re selling;
rather rob you blind in broad daylight.
The most beautiful thing in the world
is realizing there is no soul that carries on.
Beyond and after
is just here and now,
an angle unseen
from a self-centered mirage.
Continue reading “Can’t Fake a Fake Life, by Kevin Farrell, Jr”
That copywriter who missed ‘Sex or Death’ – beaten to within an inch of their error. No make-up required in the seduction of myth. Devil’s Advocacy is deviation rather than deviance. Making the world a better place has always been a dream of the few for the many, and where water flows it will eventually meet its own end. In capitalist readings, the Eighth House is for tax dodgers, not sex lodgers. On the fringe. The demise of conversation is irrelevant to the Aquarius phone caller who is happy satisfying themselves. Groping in belief’s light and dark. The mirth of Uranus will never die down, even for a god of gods. When Coleridge chose the pious over the oneness. Good Evil and Heaven’s Hell in a Battle of the Bands, riffing sweet harmonies. Moving beyond Catholicism, this is a different kind of devil to accept/reject.
Human beings have a proclivity for interpreting their experiences through a dualistic lens. Maybe it has something to do with the hemispheric structure of our brains; or perhaps, it’s simply because we’re stimulated by the novelty of contrast. Whatever the reason, we can be certain that since time immemorial we have sought to make sense of the world through binary models of interpretation. Binaries act as information filters by simplifying complexity down to its most essential elements; also, the bridging and combining opposing differentials can potentially stimulate new avenues of creative thought. If they are given over to representation, binaries perform a symbolic function by embodying multiple information sets within a unified aesthetic. Continue reading “Thanatos, My Lover, by Alex Amos”
I remembered the feel of you, how you felt heavy and slightly sweaty.
I remembered how our eyes met, and our spirits seemed connected.
Now I am weightless. Now I am in the dark.
And you’re not there.
It is a funny thing to have once been so connected to the earth, to be rooted there.
The life left my body, that rooted body, so easily, and so gracefully.
I left you and I floated away.
I should feel something I said to myself. ‘I don’t I answered.
As I rose into the air I could see within the depths of a great forest.
Every action in that forest so precise, so vital.
Sex, life, death, rebirth.
I passed over a city.
Every building was as if the roof was removed.
I could see the lives within, patterns repeating.
Sex, life, death, rebirth.
I am pulled upwards suddenly.
Being as, I supposed, the allotted time to look around was over.
Ahead of me is a great cosmic sea.
That’s a tad cliché isn’t it? Yet, there it is.
Expanding in and out, like it breathes. Breathes life and death.
There are naked iridescent beings in the waves, capering about.
Sometimes joining together, then splitting apart again.
Some disappear, and new ones arrive.
But you’re not there.
It’s time to go now, the goddess is here.
My ancestors are here too.
And there are others. Great winged creatures.
They are taking me somewhere, and I am grateful to go.
But I wonder, will you be there? Continue reading “You’re Not There. by Anastasia”
The door closed 3 days ago and it hasn’t opened again. I have had 16 diet cokes and I chew gum like crazy. I have a thermometer and I take my temperature, write it on a bit of paper and push it under the door for them.
I have seen other people doing this and they get hundreds of followers. They post pictures of their food but I don’t have a camera with me. I ate spaghetti bolognese with that pre-powdered parmesan that is sandy and coats your tongue.
There is a man I can see from my window and he tidies outside. He doesn’t look at me ever so I watch him and watch him. He has beautiful shiny black hair and the label sticks out the back of his shirt. Continue reading “Twitter Famous, by Cleo Henry”
P R E F A C E
Some time ago, poet & astrologer Sarah Fox and I – following a reading by poet & astrologer Sun Yung Shin – (gosh, there are a lot of them!) – got into a discussion regarding cusps.
According to Fox, they don’t exist. Born edging the terminus of a sign, one has essentially experienced the full qualities of said sign, travelled deeper into the mysteries of that sign, knowing and intuiting the murkier substrata, the finer attunements, performed excavations unto the core of what it is to have been born within those stars, the lessons learned there taken in as something total and foundational.
This got me thinking. Born at the tail end of Scorpio, what does it mean to be so fucking Scorpio..??
Well, if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you. .. (Just kidding.)
This project is a document of self destruction and rebirth. The death of the self, of fear, of anger, of anxiety, of misery and how the weight of these things pushes one through transformation. Akin to a burning forest. Violent and destructive, consuming all life in its path and tearing down the old world but, in being a harbinger of death, it is also a giver of life. A new world is born from the ashes of the old. Sex is a background figure here but ever present; an undercurrent assuming many masks: a lover, a villain, a dealer, a scapegoat, a gravedigger, a mother, a companion, a friend. The album is intended to be understood in three acts: Act I (“The Itch”, tracks 01-06), Act II (“The Drift”, tracks 07-09), Act III (“The Dance, tracks 10-14). Each of these acts documents the three separate phases of death, transformation, and rebirth. The artwork reflects these themes in the juxtaposition between the eroding of how the death of self has been expressed in mythology and lore (how we wish things to be, how we wish to frame our desperate situation) and the decay of abandoned places (the reality of death; the cold apathy of it).
Continue reading “Item 08: Thresholds in Flux [Vol.02], by A Virtual Memory”
A visual poem: Black (W)Hole Swallow by ReVerse Butcher & Kylie Supski
ReVerse Butcher is a multi-disciplinary artist with focuses in making unique artist’s books, collages, visual art, writing & performance. She will use any medium necessary to engage and subvert reality until it is less dull and oppressive. When she grows up she wants to be a well-read recluse.
Kylie Supski is a Polish-Australian poet, playwright, & spoken word artist. She is greatly concerned with using art as a method of speaking out about social, economic and political inequality. Many of Kylie’s poems discuss her experiences as a transgender woman. In 2016 she was the winner of the Melbourne Spoken Word Prize. Kylie is passionate about personal autonomy and exploring the beauty of being alive.
This exclusive track, DOMINATOR, explores themes of sexual obsession and late capitalist psychology in an age of unreason.
PRIMITIVE KNOT is a Manchester (UK) based artist who explores themes of obsession, transgression and the nature of reality through a diverse selection of musical styles. Recently, he has released acclaimed albums (PURITAN, BRUTALISM) on US label Deathbed Tapes which feature an innovative fusion of industrial, power electronics and metal. Twitter// Bandcamp
Image by Joan Pope
“Hello I’m Anthony, I’m an artist” something broke behind his eyes and several invisible walls swung themselves up between him and everything.
Exhilirating sterility. He stared at her five whole minutes without looking at her chest. At the end of their conversation they both looked at each other in mutual tacit acknowledgment of the fact then in acknowledgment of the acknowledgment broke away. He felt so strong. He considered all the viruses he had and felt they’d raised him more than the TV. His gut was filled with fire and he went to the bathroom and hit himself in the face bleeding and staring numbly at a half angle in the edge of the cubicle considering how his vision hit it so it intersected at 3 angles, really felt all 3 dimensions operating. Numbly he probed at his teeth with a tongue and considered his haircut – it worried him. Sideburns weren’t fleshed out enough – he’d always had weak facial hair, but he wasn’t willing to just shave them off. He kicked at the side of the toilet which caved in and water spilled over his shoes, then he climbed out the window and left. It was 3 AM then and the air was abuzz with primordial loneliness like you might feel outside an industrial freezer or inside the bowels of an airliner: Somewhere manmade where man no longer was meant to be & which as a result became rarefied space, something like a temple – consecrated to what? If Anthony were capable of having God, that would be it: The God of Modernity, God of the object-besotted white man – man overwhelmed by his making which worked itself through him to crushing excess and which process itself was the worship and products the God. Work is worship. A thing became as much a part of you by your making it as vice-versa. Anthony felt looking was a making but he didn’t know where he begun or ended but despite this he felt alone, not lonely, and complete in himself which was several things. He felt an invisible planet or void around which these things orbit and which in turn orbited round each other and from which orbits things left and into which things entered, and the planet-void he only knew was moving by its deformation, by the changing of the orbits, the sensation of a deformation apart from any reference frame. Could not tell whether it caused or was caused by the orbits. Although it was the centre, and these things were not contradictory. Anthony thought dimension only made sense in terms of relation like how could you tell where a thing was except with reference to some other thing and probably that space existed so that things could find ways to relate to each other anew and he split himself into a million pieces so they all could have 999,999 friends. Continue reading “LIFE IS LIKE SOMEBODY HOLDING MY FACE TO AN ANGLE GRINDER, by spigot”
When desire causes a body to erupt, measurements of time and space become impossible.
Continue reading “(dis/remembered) 10 – map of the underworld, by James Knight”
Dirty Dancing Saves Your Life
When you are raised by fundamentalists,
at slumber parties you resist. Approved-
of-girl, goes to your church, sly fantasist
whom no one hurts, her mom insists
you stay the night — both look sufficiently up-
tight, lacy collars, skirts below the knee.
Continue reading “Womannotated, Dirty Dancing Saves Your Life”
Now, let’s unpack what’s going on in your fourth house, which is the place in your chart that has to do with home, ancestry, foundations. Since, as we know, your first house is in Gemini, that means that your fourth house is in Virgo. Common associations for Virgo: hard working, perfectionistic, purifying, introspective, critical.
Some say that people with a Virgo fourth house will have a perpetual feeling of “unsettledness” at home, or a sense that something is “lacking,” or they feel as though they are on an eternal quest to “perfect” their home. But, astrological signatures are complicated. Besides the houses and the signs, there are all the planets and their placements in your birth chart to factor into the equation.
Continue reading “From Jupiter Rising, Stories from the Zodiac, by Christine Simokaitis”
My mom told me to buy vessels for what I already own when the itch for novelty strikes. I did one better. I closed the loop of longing, enshrined the weightless dying!
Continue reading “Extreme Abstractions: Home Edition, by Bree Jo’ann”
At nineteen she decamps to an apartment in the western suburbs with her boyfriend, Tanner Walsh. This is not her first time living outside her parents’ home. There had been that whole year[1] [2] [3] at the university downstate — a semester in a traditional dorm room and then a desperately traumatic semester in a suite situation with three other girls who had all already been living with each other for a whole semester and who had a system and everything that went along with it (“intruder” is barely the word). The point being: she had lived alone[4] before.
Continue reading “Playing House, by Jenn Lee”
There is a ghost for each crack of the child’s heart. Her ghosts are neither good nor bad. They bless, they poison, they offer deliverance through wood and poetry, through empty buckets and walking sticks. The ghosts take the form of wild beasts, of her parents, of a long hallway, a warmth pressing between her legs.
They are all things at once while reflecting her nothingness. They are born from her dreams where the she-monsters cry, where the mermaids drown, where the warm rush of his arms in the river made her see God.
Continue reading “Keeping Apparitions, by Kelly Gray”
saint of homeless shelters
imagine a whole room of us, braiding one another’s hair. imagine our hair, blackthick, imagine how it was braided together, by strand and by time. three girls brushing my hair at a wide dirty window, while six strangers smoke cigarettes in the garden below. at least half of them will not live. imagine us girls in the window looking down. how half of us will become our mothers. we eat a communal dinner, speak a communal prayer, sorrow spilling tang and blood water, catastrophe hands ripping wet bread and steeple prayers. dio, we say, are you here now? a church bell tolls, the summer light burns silent, doors shut, bodies writhe, and we think we are saved. imagine a whole house of women battered and bad, bodies crushed by ill and their children. waiting on god. count until forever and that is the sound I remember.
Continue reading “two poems by Lisa Marie Basile”
1
Sophie Calle exits her studio. Sophie Calle enters short hallway. Sophie Calle opens her neighbor’s door. Sophie Calle opens her neighbor’s pantry. Sophie Calle eats her neighbor’s oatmeal. Sophie Calle drinks her neighbor’s coffee. Sophie Calle does not clean her bowl or mug. Sophie Calle documents each unfamiliar tenant who passes through the apartment. Sophie Calle notes in her head the stains on the furniture and grime in the woodgrain of the walls. Sophie Calle asks someone about rent and does not receive an answer. Sophie Calle cuts her nail on the sharpened grease of the stovetop. Sophie Calle spills coffee on her lap and doesn’t pat it dry.
Continue reading “Sophie Calle Triptych, by Mike Corrao”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 