image by Cas Stockford
Continue reading “STUDIES IN THE HIGH (GAUDY) DOMESTIC // original images & (evolving?) links-library”
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”
dear _____,
i have been awake at all the hours, and asleep. there is not a second that hasn’t played both sides. sometimes i hear the first train emerging from the tunnel in the morning, a song like blown breath over wine glass. i know my time by the sliver of light cutting through the break in the drawn curtains.
the first person has already been caught by facial recognition software.
when people get plastic surgery do they have to update their passports.
i want to be more invisible.
so many electrical appliances make beeping or dinging sounds these days. the microwave, the kettle, the refrigerator, the washing machine, the dryer, the dishwasher. even the lightbulbs buzz. there is no such thing as silence.
the only cure is to make more noise.
_____
Continue reading “five letters by della watson”
– 1 –
I make this approach examining fundamentals. Consider a fundamental an element present in every instance. In the practice of performance, the fact of the floor constitutes a fundamental. By this definition, every instance of performance involves a floor, a ground. Can we imagine a performance without a floor? Even the aerial performers hang on the trapeze bar, a suspended ground that swings in arcs. They may stand on it. The astronaut in zero gravity encounters a floor in the space capsule’s every surface. Out in the void … I will get to that. For now, in this demonstration, I lift the largest airplane, the P-25, to display for the camera. A moment ago it rested on the now-empty space of the blue square: each square a color; each color a floor – foundations becoming grounds of different climates and degrees.
Continue reading “I discover color: 1965, by Matthew Goulish”
Snakes weave in and out of their spaces, they are hardly seen or heard or anticipated. They usually simply appear, without warning.
Usually they scare the fuck out of you, and you jump and try to escape and while you do— while you’re running, the snakes will follow. They’re hungry.
I pull the muted cream light over the cream
bed and the cream curtain
and the cream book. The day diffuses.
I consider some advice to consider my grey
hair when going on the market.
I pull the cream sky over my sternum. The word
Continue reading “WITH LOVE AND CHROMA AND RAGE AND LOVE, by Stephanie Anderson”
Lamp casts ghost shapes on the wall. Snowberry (symphoricarpus hesperius) goes cold, loses leaves, appears as sticks dripping white globes. Snowberry decorates herself by being less.
//
Continue reading “Of Winter Gardens, Confections, and Routine Holiday Stress, by Jessica Johnson”
Tell me, do you enjoy the scent
of vinegar & lemon, the rawness of newsprint
when I polish your surface clean?
You have about eight permanent scars on your body:
do they make you feel ugly?
Do you ever wonder if the stunned smoothness of a country lake
was a distant cousin?
Or the breakability of your bones, a genetic inheritance?
I’d like to know if you spend Sunday afternoons
reminiscing people that passed
through you?
Or speculating why it is you shine
only with what’s shone
at you?
Do you at all feel
my face plunging into your silver landscape?
Or the fact of its absence, when it moves away?
Can you sense joy
when a pair of lips blooms open at you, the ache
of a tear darting across your skin?
Do you ever wish for it to stop:
this perpetual drama—
this holding of things briefly
and then, letting go?
Vismai Rao’s poems appear or are forthcoming in the Indianapolis Review, RHINO, Salamander, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Parentheses Journal, Kissing Dynamite, & The Shore. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She lives in India. // @vismairao
Banner image by Olivia Cronk
No one asked for the tower
the tower was simply there—
Continue reading “from Disassemblage, by Emily Barton Altman”
<fever>
fingertips tracing the hall bumping
captured memories in thrift store frames
fabric walls swirled + stumbled
plastic champagne nightmare
aged by ghastly spirits
curled + feline in voyeuristic rage
i am six + vomiting on the carpet
old enough to knock
wall to wall berber moist
the smell mind meltingly distinct
mid coitus shame anger childpuke
fear my sadness stained
my character nightshirt + baggy socks
while dad covered crotch w/ sheet
yelling squint adjusting to the overhead
light bowing my head to vintage porcelain
running the shower
(mom thought: steam helps sickly babes)
palm to cheek watching
my mother dress
i understood b/w
polyester silk layers
grief was not a gown
to be slid out of
but a skin to be licked
in tight corners
for a better fit
sitting denim cross eyed style
(two minute pee warning) hair matted to face
+ toilet seat my puffy slits tracing
bicycle wallpaper bloomers to aged tile to
original stainless toothbrush holder +
even pre-orgasmic my mother is a stunning
wreck-age her salt-blasted wood
elegant breasted mahogany stern +
oiled to withstand
a fevered mind
<night terrors>
my room overlooks
snowy garbage bins +
family photos stuck to crusted
albums an ancient
flat faced cat presses its nose
beneath the surface
to drink everything is lit red
hole in my palm made of flashlight
(antithetical religious imagery)
i keep sunshine caged + growling
locked
from the outside flicktailed
babies haunt
nightly i scream + sing
never remember the dream just the
melody (forgotten) before it ever left
+ i feel his warmth on my chest
as an unnamed planet dies inside
(the loss of an entire world)
you tell me it’s time from the doorframe
+ you’ve never said anything more
horrific or true
i was given an $800 backgammon set
like a rare origin tale
sprinkled w/ blooms in seasonal varieties
jealousy striped but functional
(mother’s burgundy ceramic glassware)
i am blessed to know different types of
hot pepper burning eyes twinkling
like a beacon knobbled wood to palm
sliding down stairs +
swimming to the fridge
while on fire
<bedroom>
sticky paged corridor
(technicolor ode) to
youthful sanctuary
emblazoned backwards across
wet or bloody mirror (hair dye)
wheat paste tissue muddied
astroturf was cheaper than paint
+ dad had an industrial stapler
safety pins at each corner
to hang posters secrets
leopard print bed bugs eating my sadness
this is how i remember
a red doored cardboard house little
brother chewing on pony hair
chunky baby spit in brushed plastic
helpless rage (he ran into my fist)
sara, how could you do such a thing!
textbook witch
inching the world by word
sleight of hand quarter
of an ear left nibbled +
personified by loss grief
jeans tucked into boots
knotted violence
maintaining structural order
walking on duct tape
to the bus home
Sara Matson’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net 2019 + can be found in The Journal Petra, Bone Bouquet, Pulp Poets Press, and elsewhere. Sara’s chapbook, electric grandma is available from Another New Calligraphy and her chaplet, Forgotten: Women in Science is available from Damaged Goods Press. Sara lives in Chicago + Tweets as @skeletorwrites.
Banner image by Olivia Cronk
Continue reading “three pieces by Sara Matson”
volta OR she says children are born by being shoveled out of wolves’ bodies, but who does the shoveling? are all wolves, therefore, females; are all females, therefore, as vicious as wolves? tell me, my heart, what reality is
—i drain the nightingale
shove you in & through the moan
tendering
interior of poem these trained claws
pulling skin from—how do you say—the way a tongue celebrates its obsession
accomplishing verbbody/ verbbody/ verb
wetverb/ wetverb/ wet i drop
your bones from sky get marrow
starve what desire i have
violence
i have so much violence
another!
another!
bring me another nightingale
Continue reading “two pieces by Leia Penina Wilson”
I’m sorry I am [n]ever seen
Alone
I look for you every day
A deer in two overlaid poses
Continue reading “from The Star Cabins, Sara Wainscott”
Paula told me she was housesitting when a boy appeared. She walked into the house and through a long hallway and at the end stood a child who looked chalky, and then dissolved. This kept happening again and again.
Continue reading “from dream states, by Anne K. Yoder”A friend commented on my Instagram “Dancing in My Dressing Gown to Jacqueline du Pré.” Said it put her in mind of Miranda July. Provocation over lettuce, and late-night texts. Conversations in kitchens with celebrity friends who’d popped around for a cup of Oolong tea to discuss the latest dilemma (Miranda, not me). An aficionado of constant curation. Inviting the viewer in, mid-conversation. Ambiguous narratives. Personal, even intimate. But not quite. A gauzy beauty, manicured locks, quirky, vata. Zipping about like a dragonfly. But there were slower posts. In one she’d put an empty bottle of soda in between her body, and the lens, and proceeded to pull off her jeans. The shape of the bottle accentuated her derriere. The colour camouflaged her. What a trick.
Continue reading “Miranda in Juno, by Samantha Louise Talbot/ Sam Lou Talbot”
“Those who know ghosts tell us that they long to be released from their ghost
life and led to rest as ancestors. As ancestors, they live forth in the present
generation, while as ghosts they are compelled to haunt the present generation
with their shadow life.”[1]
In response to my dreaming that my mother was a ghost, my therapist started talking to me about Sigmund Freud and, by extension, Hans Leowald. My understanding of my therapist’s explanation was that Freud considered parents as other beings, separate from their children, in their children’s minds, until they (their children) begin to take on the ideals of their parents. With the death of the parents, children begin to embody their parents, as if their ghosts are dead.
Continue reading “from How to Be Still, Heather McShane”
With fraying certainty did Linda handle the folds of her origami original. Where before had been pristine squares of folding paper there was now a complete failure on the part of paper. The squares had had a gloss and that gloss had met its foil in Linda’s troubled folds. Linda tut-tutted herself and variously rattled at her desk. First, two hands to one of the four legs. Then, two good grips on either edge of the desktop, widthwise. Lastly, a pair of arms under the center drawer, and a kick at the side-cabinet, for good measure. The latest paper square, set squarely on the rubber mat, could hardly be expected to shrug its shoulders. These glossy paper squares battled a good deal of battle. Proper soldiers.
Continue reading “Diagram 5, by David Alejandro Hernandez”
____________
Danielle Salvadori is a poet, photographer and video artist based in London. She is studying at the Poetry School, London. // @danisalvadori
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 