1
a b c d e f g h i think, therefore i am
a shot of Espresso
2
a shot of Espresso has an i
the cup has an i
the coffee powder an i
so has every coffee granule &
the sugar powder & every sugar crystal &
the water & every covalent bond of water
& every H atom
& every O atom
The one-eyed elephant trainer wept. The girl lay motionless, without will or strength. He offered her tear-stained slices of white bread from a plastic bag. They did not only look stale they were furry with mould, especially at the crust. She refused by jerking her head away. He had replaced the good quality clothes she had worn with a cheap nylon T-shirt and a sarong. He said that he bought these clothes for her from the Thieves’ Market in west Jakarta.
He was a monster. He had kidnapped her from the fairground. Monster.
Continue reading “The One-Eyed Elephant Trainer by Ivy Ngeow”
millennia of shame
bound up in my name
Eve
is tongue-tied
God’s sticky sauce on the spare rib
Adam needn’t wank off every night
not now
not now I’m here named maimed incomplete no cock
Continue reading “My Naming by Eve Black”
In one glance you’re a girl clad in silks,
in another a man in a jumper,
turn my back you’re a farmer,
blink and you’re a hunter,
fetch a pint and you’re a fisherman.
I wake up to a shepherd,
come back from a shift to a carjacker.
There’s no warmth in her smile, nothing friendly.
I’ve seen a smile like this before, but not on a human face. It’s the smile Mum’s sadistic bastard cat used to flash at trapped creatures.
‘Maggot,’ she decrees, her wine glass shaking with nervous rage. ‘Snivelling worm. Deluded, self-important asshole.’
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.
Ash and Stardust, a monthly column by artist and writer DHIYANAH HASSAN, explores the intersections of tarot with healing and creativity. These are personal essays and articles sharing experiences of growth as someone who has recently found a deep connection to tarot. You can read the rest of the pieces here.
“To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one’s own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.” – from Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Last year I designed a spread that was meant, according to my earlier notes, for days when you’re “intellectually and emotionally fucked up.” I named it the Chaos Spread. Here’s how you use it:
A convenient, comprehensive index of the works selected by guest editor C.C. O’Hanlon in April, 2018. Check it out, make sure you didn’t miss anything.
April 3rd
Chainsaw Demolition Waltz, a poem by Tara Lynn Hawk
April 4th
Wonderment, a poem by Tara Lynn Hawk
Waiting For The Ocean, words and photographs by by hiromi suzuki
April 5th
Nothing Dries Sooner Than A Tear, a memoir by Joanna Pickering
April 6th
Tom Jeffreys: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon
April 7th
Badlands, a poem by Betsy Housten
Peach On The Beach, a prose poem by Kate Feld
April 9th
Static In The Bones, a poem by Amy Kinsman
April 10th
In Dudley, two prose poems by R.M. Francis
Writing A Winter Sunset, a diary by Oliver Cable
April 11th
The Catskills Dream, collages and brief memoir by Anna Louise Simpson
April 12th
Under A Wave Off Kanagawa, a poem by William Doreski
Meeting Robert Graves, a memoir by Larry Buttrose
April 13th
Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Four Poems by Sam Lou Talbot
April 14th
Fernando Sdrigotti: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon
April 15th
On Becoming A Storyteller: A Berlin Memoir by Jessica Ciccarelli
April 16th
The Tyranny of the Horizon, words and photos by Laurence Mitchell
April 17th
Arrival As A Form Of Departure: the lamentation of an immigrant, a poem by Bola Opaleke
Dream Vision, a poem by Lucie Richter-Mahr
April 18th
Dreaming St. Conan’s Kirk, a memoir by Ever Dundas
Sahara, a poem by Petero Kalulé
April 19th
Two Poems by Janet Reed
April 20th
This Is Not A Memorial, And Other Stories Of Remembrance, a pilgrimage by Alan Nance
April 21st
Mulure Mike: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon
Creation, a poem by Erynn Pontius
April 22nd
Make A Way If There Isn’t One, a poem by Heather Saunders Estes
Sh-Boom, a poem by Mare Leonard
April 23rd
Skin, flash fiction by Olga Dermott-Bond
In Casablanca, a travel story (sort of), by Ganzeer
April 24th
You’re The Crocodile Now: Journal Fragments by E.F. Fluff
Who’d Pick A Fight With Lee Marvin?, a travel story by David Dragon
April 25th
Walking Westward, Toward Jerusalem, Across The Jordan Valley, a poem by Aiya Sakr
This Place is Ours, a poem by Hazel Warren
Journeys, art by Jodie Day
L.A. Lust, words and images by Yanina Spizzirri
April 26th
whatitoka (doorway), a prose poem by Kathleen McLeod
Two Poems by John Boursnell
Meeting Frank, a poem by Loretta Oleck
April 27th
A Believing Place, a journey by Nina Foushee
In Anticipation Of The Singularity, a poem by Mark Beechill
Smithsonian Destruction Vigil, experimental prose by John Trefry
This Would Be The Perfect Day, flash fiction by Cathy Ulrich
Everything, a poem by Line Toftsø
April 28th
Jo Tinsley: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon
Phrygians In The Rigging, a pilgrimage by Caroline Stockford
April 29th
Three Fragments On The Portative Organ, prose by Eva Ferry
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”
I want to be promised
everything.
My hand I am
so wet
the simultaneous breaths
are soaking
everything Continue reading “Everything by Line Toftsø”
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”
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