sf&d | may 2012 [disembody words]

iv | SF&D

C. Martinez | Old Filmstrip: WW I: British--Medical Museum Leeds

Leg off 10 seconds. More-like 50 seconds--realistically 30. Blood squirt black--RUN! Three men. Pale flesh--blacks and grays and meat--sliced away--RUN! goth teens. Dangling ribbons of white flesh, wrapping, stitching, folding … Amputee leg parcel. 1 housewife braved it RUN!--her husband. Dew on upper lip--gold pendant on her pink swathed breast rising and falling.

SF&D | v

Steven Minchin | A Piece of Vincent Pick up your ear Use it to wipe your eyes Listen to your last breath Now lay down Take our confession We let you suffer To cleave a piece Of genius

vi | SF&D

Ryan Mattern | Prayers Outside your body, in a pasture four miles from your house, God is whispering your secrets to the neighborhood children.

SF&D | vii

Eryk Wenziak | Charles Bukowski’s To The Whore Who Took My Poems after Derek Beaulieu’s Flatland: A Romance of Many

Dimensions

viii | SF&D

Eryk Wenziak | Untitled, 2011

SF&D | ix

Carly Berg | Transcendence

Crystal only drank clear glasses of gin and tonic on ice, because they were invisible, as was she. Her boyfriend said, “You have become so… colorless,” before he left. She went home to her parents. Her father said, “No wonder. You’re space-y.” Her mother said, “I can see right through you, Missy.” And she could. Crystal didn’t care. She just put on her cellophane bikini and floated around in their pool.

x | SF&D

Daniel Hedges | Carry the Spirit Forth

Out among the ptarmigan we debunk our attention from everything that crosses in the night. Suddenly the mind goes blurry and with shifting abstraction the pixels shift to the Hyocinth MaCaw, dizzying the mental storm, and allowing for moments of Albatross to enter the visual field. In our sublime encounters with field-guide aesthetics, we carry the spirit forth.

SF&D | xi

Len Kuntz | Heavy

We were poor, so we butchered chickens. Mother used a hatchet to lop off their heads. Afterward, my brother kicked each carcass in the ass, sending the birds caroming down the hill with blood spurting wildly. That was years ago. Now Mother’s dead and my brother slow dances in a tuxedo. He and she are the only couple. Even in the dim lighting, you can tell his bride is pretty. My brother is a stock broker. He’s the one who’s gotten heavy. He eats well, all kinds of meat.

xii | SF&D

Alexandra Isacson | Honoring the Mother

Inside reflections of broken second-hand mirrors, tribal dancers lifted the moon. The moon mirrors were forgiving, coming in all ages & sizes. In the hum of drums, wintered pecan limbs framed the crescent chorus. Hips & feet twisted, fermenting the stained earth. Clay goddesses snaked their arms, circling in flames of gauzy pomegranate skirts. Supplicants bathed in the draped hem of marble illumination, sculpting themselves in the infinity of triangles & mirrors.

SF&D | xiii

Lynn Hoffman | After 2

xiv | SF&D

Lynn Hoffman | Dressmaker

SF&D | xv

Simon Jacobs | Dedication #51 You swallowed your teeth one by one, felt their little edges nicking your throat as they went down. Then your eyes rolled back, one and then the other, making your neck bulge, your face turn red. Finally, fully occluded, your tongue doubled back, and you swallowed that too.

//for Robert Kyle//

xvi | SF&D

Simon Jacobs | Dedication #52 And you, you were the one left struggling to pull them all out again, even after his heart stopped trying.

//for Kelly Winter//

SF&D | xvii

Jeanine Deibel | Which World Are We

I can't complete my circle. I keep starting over and ending asleep under a crescent moon. My dream is recurring. You're dangling a thread above me. I chomp at it—like that magnetic fish game. Once I grab hold with my teeth, my head pops off. The dream is over. You're pointing at me, eating salami. I bite your finger.

xviii | SF&D

Rosaire Appel | looksee (blame)

SF&D | xix

Rosaire Appel | looksee (blackout)

xx | SF&D

Jacques Debrot | PəlP fɪktʃən (i)

He’s sitting cross-legged on the bed showing off his tattoos. The red Texas bat inked on his throat. The Chinese dragons on his shoulders. He lifts his shirt higher, stretches the skin on his chest and lets her finger the crude wreath of roses superimposed over his nipples. It’s two in the morning, the room hot as an attic. She pushes him down on the bed and straddles him. Her hair smells like soap and pot and when he closes his eyes the room floats a foot off the ground on the hum of the great throbbing ice machine outside.

SF&D | xxi

Jacques Debrot | PəlP fɪktʃən (iv)

A severed hand claws its way out of a boggy Louisiana graveyard. The hand is badly mangled, the wrist jagged with shreds of sinew and tendon as if had been sawn off. All night it drags itself slowly through the woods, fingers digging into the earth, to reach its first victim. Pretty and skinny, with red hair and green eyes, she’s just put out a cigarette in the kitchen sink and, slightly hung over, gone outside to retrieve some weed from her car. It’s six a.m., still dark. A refinery of some kind is lit up behind the trailer park and a luminous gray mist hovers in the black trees that look like paper cut-outs against the lighter blur of the sky.

xxii | SF&D

Amelia Cook | Milagros (i)

I’ve tried to keep them close as skin, rebuilt each one in poem. These are the darkest prayers I own.

SF&D | xxiii

Amelia Cook | Milagros (ii)

It comes flashing pincers swerving tail from folds of sheets salty with life still damp shoes hidden by shadows of the ceiling fan light dark light dark light dark

xxiv | SF&D

Amelia Cook | Milagros (iii)

A question: How long does it take you to write a poem? An answer: My poems take my whole life.

SF&D | xxv

Rachel Springer | You know a muscular love when you see it

They look nothing alike, until they smile.

xxvi | SF&D

Rachel Springer | Advice for the recapture of fugitives Open the lungs. The faster you blow, the more you feel.

SF&D | xxvii

Featuring

Rae Bryant | Statement // Rae Bryant | Photograph // Rae Bryant | Woman with Black Villainous Bouffant // Rae Bryant | Dear Director, I Have a Fantastic Film Idea // Rae Bryant | My Grandmother Told Me Stories about Snakes and Aliens, a Monk Man and the Devil // Rae Bryant | Dear Mr. Prinze Jr., Mr. Lillard, and the Set Crew of Wing Commander, // Rae Bryant | When I Was Nine I Lay in Bathwater and Told My Mother My Breasts Were Different Sizes // Rae Bryant | Mother Gave Me a Curio Full of Franklin Mint Teacups

xxviii | SF&D

Rae Bryant | Statement

[disemBody Words]: I search for moments of disembodiment. Pain or joy or awkwardness when physical presence becomes ancillary to the spaces between the real and the perceived. It is the only act of spirit to which I can relate anymore. A faith in infinite diversity of consciousness. And the method by which others choose to ground or not to ground is a kaleidoscope. I am forever enthralled with its shapes and colors.

SF&D | xxix

Rae Bryant | Photograph

xxx | SF&D

Rae Bryant | Woman with Black Villainous Bouffant I once saw a vintage burlesque postcard of a woman with a bouffant beating another woman. The bouffant was dark. It rested on her head like a disembodied villain. She held a small wooden paddleball paddle minus the ball. It lay on the second woman’s butt cheek and it really got me thinking. Real deep. The woman was in a rage and artful way. Bit her lower lip. Crazy eyes. I wanted to bend over her knee.

SF&D | xxxi

Rae Bryant | Dear Director, I Have a Fantastic Film Idea Think Hunger Games meets Twilight meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Dorian Gray. Now, close your eyes. Imagine a black-walled room. On each wall hangs a pin up poster. Sarah Michelle Gellar, Bella Swan, Katniss, Oscar Wilde. When a virgin gazes on a pin up poster, the subject grows younger like a poster vampire sucking the life out of virgins and into its pulp. At eighteen, the subject leaves its poster and is a real girl. I should say the idea is copyrighted. Not that you would steal it. I trust you completely.

xxxii | SF&D

Rae Bryant | My Grandmother Told Me Stories about Snakes and Aliens, a Monk Man and the Devil

The snakes charmed little girls into bringing them milk and bread. The aliens took my aunt and left a copy. The Monk Man stole children and kept them in a cage. The Devil came to your door any day of the week. Grandma never said how to avoid snakes or aliens or the Monk Man, but she told me what to say to the Devil. Get thee behind me, Satan. Get thee behind.

SF&D | xxxiii

Rae Bryant | Dear Mr. Prinze Jr., Mr. Lillard, and the Set Crew of Wing Commander, I very much enjoyed being your SF pin up girl, my photograph on the wall of your space jock quarters, backdropping your I love you buddy scene. Mr. Lillard, you gave such a heartfelt testament to Mr. Prinze’s friendship and his unfortunate fighter pilot background. A personal high point to be there with you. If not for me as a whole, for my face and breasts, as I hope they shed a glow of sunshine over the sadness your characters suffered that day as you fought the interstellar war against the evil Kilrathi.

xxxiv | SF&D

Rae Bryant | When I Was Nine I Lay in Bathwater and Told My Mother My Breasts Were Different Sizes It had been weirding me out for days. Other girls hadn’t yet gotten their breasts and mine were growing in odd proportions and so I asked my mother if something was wrong with me. Did I have a disease or some such thing? My mother stared down, me in my bathwater, and I offered my breasts up to her, pushed at them and pointed. I said, See? I was a plate beneath magnifying glass, a bug on a sidewalk. She frowned, turned to the door. You’re fine, she said.

SF&D | xxxv

Rae Bryant | Mother Gave Me a Curio Full of Franklin Mint Teacups They are covered with hummingbirds. I loved them as a girl. Can’t much stand them now. They match nothing. I fantasize about putting the teacups in a cabinet, hiding them away, or serving them for my daughter’s birthday tea party until they have broken one by one and lay in a heap to be mended. I will tell myself each Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthday, the cups need mending today if I am to serve them with turkey.

SF&D | xxxvii

Matt Marinovich | Indoor Smoking

His landlord must have told him a hundred times that he couldn’t smoke inside the house. He’d quit years ago, but now he liked sitting in a room with the windows closed, watching fresh blue smoke add itself to the general haze. In a moment, she’d come downstairs and knock again, and he’d play stupid, then promise he’d go outside and smoke like the rest of them: lank, stooped, glassy-eyed, calling the stray cats their own private names.

xxxviii | SF&D

Kenneth Pobo | Starunstruck

Think of you. And me and daffodils and. Tommy James and the Shondells. And the E = MC2 night. Did you know that someday the stars won’t admit that they once ate lasagna in our living room? They’ll be snuffed cigarettes, memories looking for memories.

SF&D | xxxix

Kenneth Pobo | Pull Harder! In a world where Davy Jones can die at 66 on the very day that I’m singing “Daydream Believer” to the person who I was in 7th grade, the most beautiful piano note planets beg for music, hidden in a cosmic closet, door closed. Sharps and flats can’t open it.

xl | SF&D

Kenneth Pobo | It Isn’t Easy to learn that Elvira Gulch and Auntie Em are having a torrid affair so Auntie lets Elvira have Toto. MGM says blot that out in Technicolor. On his knees to Professor Marvel, Uncle Henry shrugs. Dorothy turns out fine, dances with a tornado every Saturday. Builds a hotel for hurricanes.

SF&D | xli

Black Market

Adam Bogar | A very small part of this great system // Robert Vaughan | They were reaching for their mother’s breath

xlii | SF&D

Adam Bogar | A very small part of this great system some people are funny others are religious and have a V-shape a We, one can understand therefore, to be restrained to the mind of man —He Said He Was Going To Kill Me (in Chinese)!— O gunshot wounds—illic tabifici generantur semina morbi!— will soon be better pretty soon

//written with title and words excerpted from “Allegories of Reading” by Paul De Man, “Information: A Very Short Introduction” by Luciano Floridi, “Lysergic

Acid” by Allen Ginsberg, “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” by David Hume, “Carmina Elegiaca” by John Milton, “The Spirit of Laws” by Baron de

Montesquieu, “The Measure of Madness” by Cheryl Paradis, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, “A Man Without a Country” by Kurt

Vonnegut, “Come Up From the Fields Father” by Walt Whitman, and “, said the shotgun to the head” by Saul Williams//

SF&D | xliii

Robert Vaughan | They were reaching for their mother’s breath Wherever I turn the air needs water and in the dark my pillow, abandoned stone, stone, stone, not a drop again, the sky rubbing against my legs all the pieces must be found, make this cup half ecstasy, half adrift With those hefty walls a bank even this tree :a stranglehold And the dead can’t wait, they crouch as if its stream would slow What a long way- they know this bridge as if before its crash

//written with words excepted from “Hands Collected: The Books of Poems (1949-1999)” by Simon Perchik//

xliv | SF&D

Poems

Christine Brandel | Morning // Jai August Jones | Hot Slip // Michael Dwayne Smith | Pretty Barstow Waitress

SF&D | xlv

Christine Brandel | Morning

This morning I awoke in my garden. Above me, a body hung from a branch. My sister. A pear.

xlvi | SF&D

Jai August Jones | Hot Slip hot slip slide summer butter nosedive knife tip spread almost missed the bread

SF&D | xlvii

Michael Dwayne Smith | Pretty Barstow Waitress

Opens her blouse like clearing a table, sunlight flirting like a tambourine on her finger-stained skirt.

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l | SF&D

sf&d | may 2012 [disembody words]

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