like guys with a video game’s dimension. I think about Parasite
Eve this way. Its rich antagonisms are feminine, animal,
familial, bodily, savvy, fractured, abstract. It contains a
squirrel.
You see how rarely I like a guy.
Continue reading “Lacquer Garden by Joseph Spece”
From FIELDS OF VIOLENCE: A TRANSCRIPT OF A DOCUMENTARY ON THE ONGOING FARM CRISIS
FOREWORD
The necrotic underside of the history of the Farm Crisis lives on in the Heartland and in the mind of the landscape, whose pulsating synapses and rhizomes absorb nitrogen nourished by the prairie soil under the watchful eye of high harvest––a time of year of reaping that steals as much as it proffers, withholding the promise of a dream that never existed but did, at one time, grow faith. In another existence. Somewhere between the dream and the dead, blood red tinges the borders of everything. A woman and a man put their hands together like arrows pointed up toward some augury that will never come and when it doesn’t, they forgive the augur. Why? Continue reading “An excerpt from Fields of Violence by Julia Madsen”
‘Cybergothic,’ write the Ccru, in an essay titled ‘Unscreened Matrix’, ‘finds the deep past in the near future’. There is a Crypt, a shadow space that exists beneath the gleam of our cyber reality:
Sprawling beneath public cyberspace lies the labyrinthine underworld of the Datacombs—ghost-stacks of sedimented virtuality, spiralling down abysmally into paleodigital soft-chatter from the punchcard regime, through junk programming, forgotten cryptocultures, fossil-codes and dead systems, regressively decaying into the pseudomechanical clicking relics of technotomb clockwork. Continue reading “Cybergoth Archaeology: The Seductive Datacombs of OPN’s “Age Of” by Maria Sledmere”
Conscious Dark in Vertebrates: Sleep and Sleeplessness
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Av. Paulo Gama, 110 – Farroupilha, Porto Alegre – RS, 90040-060, Brasil
Received Date: June 04, 2018; Accepted Date: June 21, 2018; Published Date: July 2, 2018
Citation: Eduardo CRL, Almeida DA, Da Cruz A, Steiner F, Greenhall L (2017). Conscious Dark in Vertebrates: Sleep and Sleeplessness. International Journal of Science and Arts, 4:2. doi: 11.1266/9945-3210.5499714 Continue reading “Conscious Dark in Vertebrates by Jason Kane”
During the purplest midnight the time comes to repurpose and scavenge the deepest recesses of the pancreas, sugar-processor and liquefier, mushy and shapeless, which is the least necessary of every twinkling lump of flesh under the round belly. This is major surgery.
A procedure is in order, to be followed precisely.
First, wetness settles: stretch in it, breathe it and swell up, an oversalted fish. Water is made up of many parts and layers: the sunlight, the twilight, and the midnight. The operation must be completed in the dim part where dust particles are zooplankton and speak with urgency to each visitor. Dust spins through air, little animals through water. Dust is silent, but the ocean buzzes and they wiggle their weak legs, incapable of standing.
Second, the endemic, veined skin is stickily plastered onto the inner red eyelids. Bodies are simple, paper-maiche collections of wallpaper. Outside, floral patterns. Inside, the abdominal organs all run together—root around until you find the one you’re removing. It’s easiest with closed eyes.
Third, the sea grows weary of pressing and pressure fades but darkness doesn’t.
Fourthly, the patient will grow distressed as you sever their energy-delivery-system. Explain it like this: I had the bends once and an angel appeared. She glowed brightly in the midnight zone. Said, “we’ve carbonated your bloodstream and these are not simple growing pains. There are impassable meters between you and the heavenly sphere spinning.” Around my finger she tied a white ribbon glowing green in her eerie radioactivity—it read, “eat me.”
Finally they will need to be sustained somehow—choke down sugared green Jell-O and butterscotch pudding cups. Only foods that wobble and can only be partially-chewed are acceptable. The fluorescent lights never fully go off in the hall. Force jittery insulin into their veins.
Katherine DeCoste is a writer and undergraduate English student in Edmonton, Alberta. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sybil Journal, Rag Queen Periodical, Structural Damage, and others. She likes to write about anxiety, dissociation, and decay. You can find her @katydecoste on Twitter and Instagram.
About the banner image: The operating room orderly, a 1-W, Voluntary Service worker, wheels a patient from the elevator to the operating room. VS workers in the Mennonite Hospital at La Junta, Colo., contribute much through their sacrificial service.
Farah, welcome! Thanks for speaking to me here on Burning House Press. You’re seventeen and not only an accomplished poet, but also the editor-in-chief of Sugar Rascals, your own literary journal for teens. What is it about poetry that calls to you? What role does it play in your life?
Thanks for having me!
Poetry has always been the perfect outlet for my joy, anger, sorrow, and opinions. It means that I can come home after a long day, usually tired, and turn my emotions into something beautiful, something that other people can enjoy and connect with. A relief from the tedious busyness of life, reading and writing poetry forces me to slow down, spend some time in other people’s brains, and relish in the incredible complexities of language. Though it’s occasionally a little draining, if I don’t write for a week, I start to suffocate with words.
The adventure of poetry really calls to me, too. I love the tough questions, defensive answers, confessions, secrets, glorifications, histories, judgments, and other elements that poems can present in a condensed form. I love how you can control this kind of adventure. I love how you can use language to its limit. I love how this kind of raw, pristine communication is of endless potential. And I love how a poem can truly be anything.
“if I don’t write for a week, I start to suffocate with words”
I find myself thinking about boredom. Boredom, is a feeling that seems to be prevalent amongst the modern world’s most dominant social experiences of fatigue, depression and various neuroses which are effected in today’s society. It is an inevitable consequence of modern technological advancement where the borders between work and life have become blurred, the world made smaller by the internet, and the news broadcast continuously twenty four hours a day, extending even further into our subjective experience.
On the release of her latest poetry collection – blud – Adrianna Robertson interviewed Rachel McKibbens for Burning House Press.
I first contacted Rachel McKibbens because I had been—as I often am—considering what it means to write about mental illness. I wanted to have more conversation about why it matters to write poems about mental health, how it factors into one’s identity as a human and a writer, and what it is to attempt to put the experience of it into words. At the same time, I was reading more and more of Rachel’s work (I picked up Pink Elephant and couldn’t put it down) and I felt like I had to tell someone—or as many people as possible, that these poems were opening a door. The new poems in blud left me with that same breathless feeling. Again, I found myself reading them aloud, handing them to friends and my students. Yet, when I sat down to type my questions for this interview, I knew it was impossible to say all I wanted to say—how to describe all that these poems bring forth in me: sorrow, heartbreak, awe, kinship…and always surprise. Finally, I settled on some questions and what follows are Rachel’s eloquent and evocative answers, though they would have been this regardless of what I had asked. And, perhaps more important than any perfect word I could come up with to describe this collection, is this: we need these poems and I am so grateful to Rachel for writing them.
All we misfits, weirdos, black sheep, outcasts and witches who have managed to crawl out of the mud and hold our faces up to the light are family.
I realize how this obsession has gone too far. I’m on a bus cutting through Stockholm, it’s a smug city but easy on the eyes. I’ve dressed up for this. I’m on my way to see Morandi at Artipelag, beautifully situated in the archipelago. My expectations are high, feeling a bit too happy for paintings, a bit nervous. I’ve seen so few of his works in real life, only once before, and they affected me so profoundly that the big painting next door, some ceiling job by some dude named Michelangelo, left me cold and meh. I seem to have something at stake here.
And for this text, I will be Don Quixote de la Costanza.
You complete me, he says. In the movie. Manufacturing swoon and meme for the masses. Romance aside: I stare at art. I’m stunned by some lines of charcoal on paper. I’m liberated. It completes me. A moment of Eureka soft as morning. An Oh Snap gentle as the night. Our habit is of completeness: each irregularity will eventually be found by a being that seems born to complete it. Our habit is of individuality, and then overcoming it. Continue reading “What trumps love”
Note: Creators, would you like to be interviewed for one of my Burning House Press blog posts? See the details at the end of this post.
The Arsonist Magazine Edition 01 – available to purchase here
Featuring the best poetry, flash fiction, photography, art, interviews and features from around the world, including the UK, Japan, Canada, USA, Malaysia, India, Philippines, Sweden:
stephanie roberts – Saquina Karla C. Guiam – Penny Goring – Adrianna Robertson – Anneghem Wall – Dawn Fredericks – badpoem – Dean Lilleyman – Antony Owen – Aina Izzah – Bruno Neiva – Paul Hawkins – Keith Ford – Joseph Ridgwell – Dhiyanah Hassan – C. R. Resetarits – Rob True – Sophie Pitchford – Jamie Thrasivoulou – Martin Appleby – Liz Zumin – Siddharth Dasgupta – Ben Williams – Caitlin Meredith – Adam Steiner – Jim Gibson – V.M. – Fredric Nord – Mark Goodwin – Hiromi Suzuki – Trevor Wright – Howie Good
The Arsonist Magazine Edition 01 is a 92 page full colour/b&w matt/gloss perfect-bound A5 magazine (this is a limited edition and, being the inaugural print publication from Burning House Press, is sure to be a collectible item)
The Arsonist Magazine Edition 01 – available to purchase here
Between the years 1990 – ’93, the poet Paul Hawkins was squatter/occupier/protestor in one of the most contested of spaces in the U.K.’s recent and past history of place-and-occupancy wars. Claremont Road, in London’s East End, was an occupied site and scene for the protests of the ‘No M11 Link Road Campaign’. Paul Hawkins was there, and has documented what took place in his book, Place Waste Dissent, published by Influx Press.
In the foreword to the book, Alice Nutter refers to Claremont Road as ‘the symbol of resistance to the road-building programme of the early ’90s’ – Place Waste Dissent operates not only as flame held close as intimate torchlight illuminating that symbol, but as intravenous entry point into the sign itself. An immersive invocation of the sign and the times it symbolises, a border-shamanic reanimation act that brings Claremont Road back breathing bleeding spitting and bounding into the now. Into the Now that requires reckoning with what was and is still its Then.
It’s time for a ghost story—now,
while opalescent giants, dark-robed, stride
over us, hair blazing with the night
to come—
they imagine themselves
masked, bejeweled, descending
to the asylum window. The inmate’s lament—
They came in the night and stole my head.
What did they do with it? My old green head. Continue reading “3 Poems & An Interview With Poet Amee Nassrene Broumand”
If the Beast pushes you into a corner, do you come out swinging with haymakers? Or sit down cross-legged and meditate? Both could, conceivably, be actions that lead to salvation depending on what type of mood one might be in on any given day. Do you fight fire with fire? Or apply jiu–jitsu techniques in a way that wears down the aggressor striking out against you? Sometimes it is best to step out of the way and allow that which is evil to self-destruct from within. Sometimes, however, it is best to rear back and punch a bully square in the nose.
Continue reading “‘Five Aces’ – essay by Scott Thomas Outlar”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 
The Colossus of Estacada by Matthew Spencer
The name misleads, slightly, and was coined for marketing purposes. In fact, the bronze figure measures thirteen feet tall—outsized, monumental perhaps, but not colossal. It stands contrapposto with one hand outstretched, palm inward, as if beckoning the visitor to approach. A thin but charitable smile creases the face, although patina has rendered the expression somewhat difficult to read, as have the iron security bars installed to ward off scrap hunters. Continue reading “The Colossus of Estacada by Matthew Spencer” →
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