diaphanous micro

 

 

 

new poetry:

WALKING TO DALLAS (unpublished chapbook)

OUTSIDE  DALLAS
At the horizon rooftops
Jitter angles angels
On noisy wheels of light
Oh sweet arrival
Play backwards gospel
Racket and roll
I found this map in an attic
From the window I looked down
At the road drilled by cars
And beyond its metal blood
The long low ups and downs
Of grass, the more and the less
Till pink and blue house boxes
Rode the wave of the hill
Above dinosaur bones

At roadside I hop a fence
And heel down the slope
To a creek     crack     cut
In grass-natural as dragonflies
Flick here and are gone
I walk among bleach trinkets while
Green-eyed water argues routes

INSIDE  DALLAS
Drainage tunnels
Beneath the concrete utopia
Whisper forever

It’s older here
I crawl into a side-tunnel
That squeezes my ribs
Till I reach light
Beneath an iron grating at curbside
Dogs bark     A ball bounces
A car rushes by, its radio spilling AM
“…drivin me outa my miiiiind…”
I go back, worm-ooch
To the bigger tunnel
Follow it to the opening at the creek
Crawl out to walk along limestone shelves
Watch out     Watch for surfaces
Water     Air     Wall     Wallop
I look up at empty skies
They’re an invasion route
A 7-mile high flash silver cumulus
Comes walking on threads of rain
What have I called?

Two     Inside, outside     Terror
If I am both
What I see is as much me
As my bones
I did not make Dallas  up
I am Dallas
If I am both of two
I fall into the earth
Walk
Carefully
On water     On air
On nothing

 

NARTHEX

In the narthex   I see
White steps to the choir loft
As the churchdoor coasts closed
And shut off the ratchet
Of earth movers
In  the housing development nearby
The pop of hammers
Chalk dust rising     whine of a saw
I enter the cool dark kissed
At the door by holy water
Behold the nave     the cave
Cave canem     beware the god
The votive candle pleromas
Dispute precedence     each
More lonely     more only
Than the others
Who are all pretenders

Knee on the kneeler

Earlier I walked
A mile and a half
To buy a 49-cent paperback
On the cover     Raskolnikov
Smoke darkened ikon of a murderer
I’ve killed the place I’m going
But will still go
And dare it
©2021

 

STICKS & BONES (Meat For Tea Press, 2017)

SAD  FOOD

I walk through the carpeted living room with its dusty closed blinds and Dad’s desk pushed against the window trapping the blinds that can’t open now when you pull their strings. The lamp with a bad posture looks over insurance ledgers.

There’s a heavy wet smell of heated canned corn and canned spinach. Pork chops have been hurt badly. The food is in its final stages now, the corn glistening in a pool of pale yellow juice from the can, which is in the trash, already thrown away. The spinach is a lonely wet pile with the pork chop bone poking it grotesquely.

Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  From the TV den, dad raring back laughing so hard it gets his cigarette cough going. Kah! Kah! Hand on his mouth, forehead bunched.

Mom inserts a potato chip in her mouth and the mouth mashes down, moves from side to side as the chip is crushed and macerated. A wave travels down her throat as she swallows. Her eyes stare like those of a doll. On the TV, a red nosed clown walks into a pole.

I sit down to eat. My face, a pimpled harvest moon, hangs over the plate. The food wonders if I’ll abandon it. The trash can is an approaching open mouth.

There’s a dog at my feet, whimpering, peeing in ecstacy, its tail beating the floor. I drop my hand to its ears, and it goes insane with joy.

I’ve given this account of things to my high school counsellor, who remarks in amazement, “These confessions are a cry in the dark! This is it! The lode! So long I’ve wanted to save you, and now, boy, you’ve come clean!”

On the way home, the school bus crashes. I don’t know if I should include that in this essay.

 

ILLNESS  OF  THE  PIONEERS

Doctors assign the name “schistic rigor” to the condition of a settler, a Missourian perhaps, who experiences the misfortune of hearing a joke.

The first symptom is “okurancy”:

the settler eyes the joker, amazed at the pretentiousness of speech itself. He is already doomed. The joke has settled in his blood.

The second symptom is “translation,” usually manifested as animal torture.

The settler, with mouth awry and eyes starting from his head, seizes some heretofore favored pet, visits some unspeakable torment upon it, and proceeds to the next stage of his illness, rigor itself, accompanied by gustatory schisis, popularly known as laughter.

The horrified family drags the returning breadwinner from the wagon, binds him to a kitchen chair, and applies caustic poultices, until his symptoms abate.

It is expected that he will then try to infect his family by retelling the joke. They begin loudly singing hymns while holding their ears.

Hard as it is to believe,

“joking saloons” have recently been established

in some towns.

 

ARTISTS IN THE UNDERWORLD (Human Error Publishing, 2019)

SUPPOSE

“Your granddaddy is a fussy, snooty man. He didn’t want your mama marrying your daddy back in nineteen hundred forty three. They all lived in a big mansion in town and we were trash to them.”

“The Big House?”

“Yealt! I had come up with your mama from San Antone where your daddy had met her at the Air Force commissary.

Your granddaddy didn’t even want to let us in the door. Your mama was 17 and had already been married and divorced once. They were Catholic so to them that meant she was ruined.

“We had walked from the bus station downtown and we were tired. The old man stuck his head out the door and said every blamed room in the house was taken by your aunts and uncles who were still teenagers  living at home.

“While he was holding the screen door open, talking, I took my taped up suitcase and turned around and started walking past the bird bath in the front yard toward the curb,

“And that made him shout, ‘Here, now! Here, now! You just come on back hyah! We’ll put you up somehow! Where did you think you were going?’

“So there he was yelling at us.

“And all the Hunts, you know, have persimmon mouths, pressed together and turned down. Even when they smile, it looks bitter.

“So there we were, moved into the house, but they didn’t like it.

“When we took a bath later that first night, Mammaw told us not to run more than an inch of water in the tub, and both of us try to clean up in that. All the kids bathed that way, to keep the water bill down.

“Your daddy wasn’t due home on leave for another week and all during that time the Hunts tried to convert your mama so the Church would let her marry a Catholic, but she wouldn’t convert.

“The old man said he wouldn’t mind if we cleaned the house a little bit while we were just sittn’ around wait’n, but he found fault with everything I did.

“Now listen here! I cleaned house for rich bastards all through the nineteen thirties when your mama had to live in an orphanage because as hard as I worked,

“I couldn’t feed my kids.

“One day your dad walked up the front walk in his uniform,
carrying a duffel bag. The next day at the church the priest refused to do the marriage.

“Immediately the Hunts jumped on us and yelled, ‘No! No! No! Don’t get a civil marriage without God!’ But the courthouse is exactly where your mama took your daddy.

“They had to walk there because the old man wouldn’t let them use the car. They came home married and the Hunts gave them goggly frog eyes and made persimmon mouths.

“At the end of the week your daddy had to report back for duty, and your mama and I were forced to stay with the Hunts for the rest of the war.

“I wish

“we could have gone overseas and got shot instead.

“Now just suppose…

“That a forty-one year old woman whose blond hair had turned brown, on its way to turning gray,

“Should decide one day to go sit on a park bench with a good view of the street, and should wait there

“’Till she saw an expensive but very old car come poking along ten miles under the speed limit because the prissy 45 year old man driving it didn’t want to waste gas.

“Suppose that when she saw this car,

“The woman opened her purse and took out a pistol,

“Then waited till the car slowww-ly turned the corner,

“Then pointed the gun at the back window, and shot a hole in it,

“Then watched

“As the car pulled caaaarefully over to the curb and parked, observing all the parking regulations.

“Wouldn’t that be a fine way

for a forty one year old WORKIN  WOMAN…

“To spend her lunch break?”

 

DREAM  IN  WHICH  QUEENIE  THE  DOG GOES  COMMUNIST

Note to dog lovers: Queenie the dog recovered from the dog bites she got from Bet, the other dog. She didn’t become a Communist. Now quit thinking that. Dreams are dreams.

The man on the radio in the living room sounds scared, trying to talk quiet like he’s in hiding. His words come like pebbles against a window.

“The Reds have almost got us now. They’re everywhere.

“They’re walking into your living room right now, looking at the sign on the wall that says God Bless This Happy

Home and reaching for it to rip it down and stomp it with jack boots.

“Communists…

“They’re sick with rage, mad, rabid.

“Rabid dogs, that’s what they are!

“They’re here!

“They arrived in the night while you slept. They came on transport trucks. Mad dogs!

“They could be anyone.

“Your neighbors could have turned in the night and decided to greet the dawn as Communists!”

Robby’s sitting in the living room at David’s house. The spring on the screen door came loose and the door hangs open. Chickens walk around outside worrying the hot red dust, scratching and pecking. Edna, David’s mama is in the kitchen making biscuits.

David walks in the door with the .22.

“I almost got that rabbit, but he hopped just as I was shootn!”

He falls on the other couch.

“Whoo, it’s hot! Look at Queenie! She’s so hot she’s about to fall over! Here, Queenie! Here, girl!”

Robby looks at the doorway where Queenie has just struggled in. A second look. Queenie isn’t right. She stands swaying and red-eyed next to the screen door, strings of saliva dripping from her mouth.

The radio guy says, “A new day!

“A new day…

“As a Communist!”

Queenie ignores David, her old master, and takes a trembling step toward Robby, falls over, gets up. The red meat of her right hind leg is exposed. She’s too giddy to lick it, and parasites have come, maggots, come to suck the sweet tit of decadence. As she sways and stumbles toward him, he climbs up and perches on top of the couch back. She moves closer.

The radio guy says, “They move in…

“For a meaningful discussion.

“That’s what they say it is. ‘Just a meaningful discussion, pal!’

In the kitchen, Edna pulls down the oven door. The biscuits look up at her,

Waiting for instructions.

 

 

BALLET FOR MURDERERS (2021, Human Error Publishing, 2021)

 

THE  MURDERER  MEETS  THE  TERRIBLE  CHILD

The murderer has outwitted his pursuers. He sits on a gravestone as the sun rises one more time over the cemetery.

He starts hearing a voice nearby. There’s a kid out there messing around among the stones, talking to himself.

“My parents are being good today. They came out earlier to watch me. I told them the conditions were right. But they only shrugged.

“I have special gifts!

“I can push subtly upward and float above the grass between the stones. You stones! See how I surmount you? Now I permit myself to drift to earth. I don’t have to, but I choose it. I’ll walk to the house and climb the steps just as a normal child would do.”

The Murderer listens. The kid makes a quiet ratcheting sound. The Murderer thinks it might be laughter.

“I will impress my parents. See? I’m stepping off the top step and floating outward continuing to make walking motions. Hah! Steps are not for me!

“My parents–what are they doing? They’re walking back into the house!

“IS THAT HOUSE BETTER THAN ME? IT IS A GRAVE, DO YOU HEAR?

“They’re gone now, but still I hang in the air. They can’t stop me! Slowly I rotate forward. Rotate. Revolve. Revolution. The rule of revolution is that you cannot look into the sky when it is below you,

“Or it will become hungry.

“You’re still here. You don’t ignore me as my parents do. Come with me. I’ll show you something. Oh, I’m so excited!

“Now we’re on a hill. Look where I’m pointing! A panorama! There are fields over there full of wheat. Take my hand.

We step from the hilltop and now we’re flying!

“As long as you clutch some part of me, you won’t fall to your death.

“You didn’t know that, did you?

“Let’s play a game! What if I were to become like a cloud and start to dissolve?

“Yes, hold on tighter. I like that we’re better friends now.

“We’re passing over the wheat, very low. I brush my hand against it. See? Like that! Now I will show you an orchard.

Do you like peaches and apples? We will drift among the trees. Try to pick an apple! I can!

“What have you done? You’re clinging to that tree! You’ve broken contact! Now you’ll miss it! You look silly back there hugging a branch. Good-bye. You were a bad friend, and now you won’t get to go over the cliff with me.

“Now I’m going over the cliff!

“There is a deep blue space below. If I were a normal child I would be afraid. Being afraid might be fun. But it’s not for me.

“The expanding shape below is fascinating. Now I see the sparkle of the waves. Oh, look! Rocks! I’ll stop just short of them and begin slowly

“To rise.

“I wonder what it would feel like if I were to swallow the earth.

“Hello there, you walking on the beach. Should I swallow it? No?

“Hm.

“I’ll rise now and go home. I had a conversation! Oh, I’m so sociable!

“Here I am again at the orchard. The wanderer’s return. Look who I’ve found! You’re still here, bad friend!

“You used to be a murderer.

“If you knew all the things I’ve been, you would be impressed.

“I know where there’s a path to lower places. Come with me. This is fun! Come on!

“I will allow no more disobedience!

“I must say, for a murderer, you’re awfully frightened.”

 

IN  THE  LOWER  PLACES

Now, reader, you will hear with surprise an account of the Murderer’s progress in the lower places where his guide, the Terrible Child, impresses him with his special abilities to pass through stone or metal walls by merely leaning against them till they submit.

Also through fires do the two souls venture,
unconsumed.

They come at length to a chamber where ardants, or eyes, or little flames innumerable,
circle in a gallery. Or perhaps their circling itself is the gallery.

Or perhaps there is no gallery.

The Terrible Child remarks, “I have joined their rout at times and made to eat them, but they had no taste or meaning.”

At that, the Murderer says, “I will go to them.”

The Terrible Child says, “Take my hand then.”

They rise and join the rout, the Terrible Child indifferent but the Murderer possessed, for the ardants are portals.

They are souls. They are love. They are knowledge. They are eyes.

They have found him.

He has found his downfall.

Eternal love for what he has killed.

Ballet for Murderers by Richard Wayne Horton

 

writer statement:

My recent direction has been toward shorter proseforms with strongly focused speech dynamics.
Most of the poems in the my new, unpublished chapbook, WALKING TO DALLAS, are a reimagining and reframing of two long Dallas poems that I’ve been composing since the 1960s. I’ve published transitional versions of these two root poems, but the first and last poems in the chapbook featured in diaphanous micro 5.2 are newly created. The second poem, also featured above, imports some lines from its root poem, but is substantially expanded.

My first chapbook, STICKS & BONES, serves as an introduction to the genres and moods I’ve explored since the 1970s, which are often dark or absurdly funny. From the first, I played opposites–rich resonance achieved with the sparest of language. My work has become increasingly short, not as a goal in itself, but because explanatory prose is an unwanted invasion. When I stopped using it, the voice took over and the important parts of the piece moved forward.

ARTISTS IN THE UNDERWORLD, my second book, is essentially two books. The first, ARTISTS…etc., is a set of published dark genre short stories.  I think they’re kickin’, but the second book, A LONG MOMENT IN THE SOUTH, is what interests me more. The flash fiction units are chronologically arranged (early to mid-1950s), and the reader begins to know the characters as the set moves on. Voice is once again completely in control, and side stories or events in the subconscious can sometimes be implied without words, which makes the piece more insidious.

My third book, BALLET FOR MURDERERS, is told in short prose poetry units, and set in 1950s to 1970s America. In the 17^th century a penny ballad, sometimes alternately spelled “ballet,” the kind sold on the street, might tell in verse a simple story of a thief or murderer pursued through many an adventure until finally “attached” (taken into custody) by authorities. I wanted that simplicity, even crudeness of narration, but with a downfall more apt than corporal punishment.  

 

KRYSIA JOPEK interviews Richard Wayne Horton: 

When did you begin writing and publishing? What was your initial genre?

I began writing in the late 1950s, just to play around and try things. In the 1960s I developed a grabby kind of realist style, using it on journal entries. I spent the entire decade of the 1970s at UT Austin experimenting with all genres and lengths. In 1976, I connected with a set of gonzo Austin absurdist and late Beat poets, and began publishing poems and short prose around town and in little lits. I did write longer stories but often broke them up into titled micro-chapter-like sections, each with its own pop. I was trending toward what would later be called flash fiction or micro-fiction. It seemed like my poems were really stories in lines, so I either put them aside or reformatted them. I keep junkersand promising torsos around for years, picking at them ’til they finally decide to pop.

I’m curious how you know when you’ll write a poem versus hybrid or fiction. Is it just intuitive, organic (content fitting form)?

The piece manifests in the form that’s organically right for it. I shepherd that along. Maybe “the voice” writes the piece, and I let it have its way. Maybe I ride the voice or channel it. When I write line poetry, it’s because I want to build connections with shorter units. A set of lines could be called an event unit. A space between event units creates a pause to let the event arrive, or to transition. Some event units can be quite long. Others can be only one line, or even one word. There are poems of which I’ve fashioned both a prose version and a line version. I have prose poems arranged in event units: blocks of prose separated by blank lines.

When did you find yourself drawn to writing hybrid and why?

In the 1980s, I began being impatient with stories that were only stories. I joke in one of my pieces: the point is not the point. But I also came to despise form and artful language for its own sake. The piece as it plays out has to activate something outside itself, some unstated dynamic in the reader. In recent years I’ve had a discussion with Joshua Michael Stewart about what my short prose pieces can be called. Flash fiction? Prose poetry? A hybrid of poetry and prose? The language is flensed, bone-like, like that of poetry, but clean as it is, it carries an attitude and sets up a rich, often hyperreal event with cinematic imagery, dialogue and action; something that seems like it’s happening right next to the reader.

Can you describe your writing process from idea to finished piece of writing? What are your “writing habits”?

I compose in every free moment when I’ve got an idea or project. Otherwise I read or check social media. I cannot write from prompts. In a sense, I don’t make pieces up, and I certainly don’t use imported plot structures such as might be taught in a course. Perhaps I hear news or gossip that suggests a piece, or I take a trip to deep memory, bring back an incident, and fashion it into a piece of writing. I wouldn’t relate to a teacher’s composition idea, but if I had to, I could find a similar idea that I could develop. It could be that I might break all of the above rules if I suddenly discovered an open path to create a piece I really like. Rules are not for obeying. They’re for understanding what might be done.

What authors have influenced your writing and how so?

King James Bible–beautiful craziness in golden age English. I read it many times for the language and archetypes.  I’ve continued to think of the creation story through the lens of Platonism, Gnosticism, Seneca, Ovid, and Jung.

Poe, Stoker, and pulp horror mags–fun with Eldrich lingo and drama. Crudely effective spotlighting.

Whitman–-narrator talking intimately to the reader.

Hemingway–taking clutter and pose-prose out of the telling: foregrounding the act and talk. Collateral damage for Hemingway: his own poses are fairly plain.

Spillaine, Hammett, Bloch, Cabrera-Infante–clean tough action lingo. Hammett and Hemingway met in Hollywood in the late 1930s. It’s unclear who influenced the other the most.

Benn–pathology shock poetry, a kick-in-the-head thing I’ve played with in a couple of my pieces.

Trakl–color and image-coding combined with unexpected richness that makes it through the chopping knives of his editing.

How has the publishing world changed from the beginning or your writing career? What do you think about these changes?

It seemed to me, as a frequently-rejected writer in the 1970s that U.S. poetry in many prestigious journals tried very hard not to be likeable. Snarling in my writer’s garret, I pointed to the arid, impeccably-crafted, prize-winning poem with its touches of gentry humor, then the critical squib afterward, while pretending something deeply moving had taken place in the poem.

Though I sometimes laughed at the excesses of my Beat and absurdist poet friends in Austin, I hopped aboard their movement to get around the blockage and find a home for my outsider lit. Life goes on. I think the Beat movement really stimulated a rising acceptance of diverse modes of expression and engagement in U.S. journals, even prestigious ones. Some still have a house style, or they favor a style exhibiting markers of writing degree programs, but alternative venues are not hard to find. Gotta keep your day job, though.

What are you trying for as a writer?

Voice truth, which forms both a subliminal and material connection with the reader.

 

biographical note: 
Richard Wayne Horton writes short prose, hybrid forms, and poetry that sometimes have a hyperrealist, surrealist, or gothic feeling. He was nominated for two Pushcart prizes and is the 2019-21 Massachusetts Beat Poet Laureate. He has published three books: Sticks & Bones (Meat for Tea Press, 2017), Artists in the Underworld (Human Error Publishing, 2019) and Ballet for Murderers (Human Error Publishing, 2021). His work has appeared in Southern Pacific Review, The Dead Mule, Meat for Tea, Bull & Cross, Danse Macabre du Jour as well as in other journals. He currently resides in Western Massachusetts

Richard can be contacted via Facebook: www.facebook.com/people/Richard-Wayne-Horton/100010550442058/

 

 

 

new poetry:

our lady of sorrows has entered the building. (excerpt)

1
after love the terrible divide. today I am dancing in a whirlwind. I have blood under my fingernails. dance, lady, dance. grief is blind. dance naked, dance long.

2
madly the idols break free from their prison and drop into the world.

3
I fell against the glass, the mirror, the light, the moon, the window, the kiss. I washed his face with my tears.

4
we break like tinder I said. there are no glass idols. where I come from glass shatters on contact.

5
the picket fence was her undoing. she never recovered. her remains are/were impaled like jesus coyote on the cross. we were hotwired for an uprising.

6
I frequented those ruins by day, by night I clung to my prayers, reciting rosaries against the nightmares that appeared more and more frequently.

7
those days I wrote stories about madness that had taken us all, and the voices that plagued me by night and by day, forgotten stories that I buried deep in the recesses of my mind, calling the God to save me and promising anything in return. my life. If you want my life—around that time I was juggling ideas and words to encompass a state of living hell. I stopped around that time I began to paint faces that came to me automatically from a few marks on the canvas to fully found persons who were my advocates to the underworld when I had begun to understand through my dreams. my companions were the endless hordes encased in dust, wandering in and out of the wreckage. and my dreams came in greys and blacks, charred around the edges fraying testimonials to an obsolescent God. let bygones be what they are.

8
I wait. beguiled as I am by the impenetrable light of your eyes, the consolation of the infinite dream dark as it is, in this garden of mutilated flowers.

 

THE UNREMEMBERED

1

dream ghosts lingered in the room

after I awoke, like lovers after a storm,

an intimate absence folds me into your reverie,

I conjured you up.

I hold no grudges.

2

the ocean doesn’t belong to anyone.

wake me broken wake me holy

broken forms of anarchy.

broken and besieged.

where is the mercy in that.

sing to the common man.

my father’s cross.

the double-cross.

3

death is a cross.

an unholy measure.

an intersection.

we always turned left.

 

the unremembered.

un-born. un-present.

un-being. un-lived.

un-seen. un-sought. un-redeemed.

un-comely. un-claimed.

un-holy.

4

the howling wind invented language.

the cello is a lonely instrument.

gone. worlds in/formation. a prayer wall.

waylaid. self-conceived.

my painted faces grew wild and furious,

the coup.

the ragman’s daughter singing the white-skin blues.

 

IN TIME OF PLAGUES (excerpt)

1

when we were young, deathless and wild, held our secrets close

to the bone, you nailed me to the wall with your promises,

what is a revolution, you cried, what is a war that I cannot fight?

your trembling Joan of Arc tongue bonded to the fire,

an oracle of the end times,

an apocalyptic dawn still waiting for a resurrection,

and now the plague dogs are gnawing at our bones.

we make our pact with life.

I dedicate this to my morning ghosts.

at some point we’ll all be legends, she says.

he says, mother I am still weeping.

2

when the night dropped into my arms,

when the streets teemed with silence,

when the howling dogs fractured my story,

when the backwards exterminators unlisted history,

forging lies into stone, the beak doctors

were stitching the plague into the tapestry of the world.

the howling dogs of pestilence have settled for a bone.

and I was up all night, reading glyphs by starlight,

holding onto the stars with both hands.

isn’t it what comes back to you when you put your hands together

and scream into them, I said?

isn’t it?

 

I never liked the finale, a sort of double-cross, she said,

your unfinished  stories that stretch for miles but never end,

your endless tales of war and mayhem,

I am tired of your meanderings of poverty, she said,

dragging me through the mud and the tears of crimes past,

one foot into eternity and the other clinging to your bit of wreckage,

I’m tired of it all,  and she wrote letters to the Prime Minister

and never mailed them. I knew a lady once, who wrote letters to the dead.

3

the sea is dark and ominous, but the weather report says sun,

I’m not a fan of sun I’d rather have rain and storms,

something to pit my strength against, I fade and die

in the sun and its garish noon time vulgarity. a tasteless show and tell,

too bright, too loud, and dazzles with a false bravado.

she told me the sun was on the horizon and I was glad to escape,

the letters were an ecological disaster, she added,

words and words that reeked of anarchy,

if you eat your own words, you’ll go blind, I said.

4

I kept painting hazardous pictures of the plague gods

and the menace of fascists slogans and guns, down with fascists,

she wrote in the margins in black ink, and poured holy water over them,

her way of counting the dead, creating prayer walls for their souls to pass through.

5

the body holds onto its stubborn dreams

wrapped in fire, a living place that hell forgot,

and she was alarmed at the sound of her own voice

chanting spells and shouting obscenities while the plague gods

watched our heroics from above, waiting for their chance to ride again,

like the barbarian brought to life in some antediluvian reincarnation recovery,

the Holy Ghost is a water bird. what’s in a name, anyway?

some of us busied ourselves  in a sea of infinite questions,

while the grief birds carried our prayers to heaven, forgave our vulgarities.

the shadows were longest just before sundown

and then the morning ghosts prepare for another dawn.

it won’t end until the beak doctors finish stitching the plague into the history of the world,

and I am alone with my own mad kind.

 

I remember the kisses of your mouth like it was yesterday.

 

MAD SHADOWS

I have nothing, I have nothing, I have nothing, I have nothing, a kind of defection from love, divine apostacy, I am a country divided, the poor root gone missing.

cut from the fold.

cut from the fold. I hone my skills. I am from elsewhere. not here.

not here.

what blasphemy rules hells? I run from you, hide,

find solace in the beloved surround.

my solitude is a god, a mother, a lover, a sphinx, a partial eclipse, a circus of divine clowns,

a memory board. a swamp dreaming its own cathedral of monkeys,

 

I want life, to pull words out of the shadows, corners of obscure dreams,

I want life, to speak in colours and hues as words slip over my tongue and into the world.

I want the dawn’s first breath, to stand with the cowl still holding the flesh away from the light, the flash of divine intervention, a decree. the first breath.

awakening or dying? the speak.

 

who defines intention, longing, the shape and sounds of love? want? desire? who decides? I’m cold. the desert reeks of stories.

I have nothing, except these few bruised lines.

I am painting in the faces of the children who will inhabit the earth, we can’t get enough of them, she says. if I die, I want you to take good care of every one of them.

all new poetry ©2022

hybrid, mixed media art:

 

 

 

 

 

 

artist statement:
My poetry is born out of my love affair with words and my passion for charged play and exploration of the hidden, the mystery at work beneath our consciousness. My poetry has grown out of a sense of social outrage, an immense love of this creature world, wild nature, and out of my own journey through madness and grace. It has grown out of a precious relationship with love and death and hope. If my work has a calling, it is to give form and character to the unseen and unheard, the shadows, the untouchables, the unredeemed–and to stretch the boundaries between madness and sanity as well as between the banal and the mystical in an attempt to restore our quaking humanity.

I am presently interested in producing works to acknowledge the potential of language to access deeper states of mind, to reframe experience, to explore the boundaries between genres and poetic form–while holding to the creative poetic species as a measure and gauge.

links to more poetry, chapbook and full-length book of poetry (that can be purchased), a review of What the Dead Want by Krysia Jopek, Paulette Claire Turcotte’s Avant-Garde ZINE, and Facebook group

SAID OR said (chapbook)

What the Dead Want (full-length book of poetry)

review of What the Dead Want by Krysia Jopek (Canadian Poetry Review, page 4)

BANNED POETRY Paulette Claire Turcotte’s ZINE

Paulette Claire Turcotte’s Avant Garde ZINE

Facebook Group: Alternative & Modern Arts, and Review

 

biographical note:
Paulette Claire Turcotte is a Canadian author, visionary, and outsider poet and artist. Her work has been published in numerous presses in print and online. She is editor of Banned Poetry, cdris/ARTS Press, co-founder of Split Quotation Press, a founding member of the Pacific Festival of the Book, Curator of the ZINE Alternative & Modern Arts and Review and AVANT-GARDE poetry ZINE. She has been recipient of the ANTHOS Poetry prize and a Canada Council grant for short story writing. As well as two non-fiction books, she has published three chapbooks of poetry with her visual art, a full-length collection of poems, What the Dead Want (Ekstasis Editions, 2019) and two poetry chapbooks, The Silence in the Centre of Bone (SAMARHANOR Press Editions, 2019) and SAID OR said (Trainwreck Press, 2020). She has a forthcoming memoir as well as a new poetry collection, Incantations and Holy Spells (poems for apocalyptic times).

She utilizes mixed media, paint, charcoal, ink, and constant experimentation with images in her visual art to build layers and text in paintings, sketches, sculpture, multi-media prints, and mixed-media art. She’s influenced by her connections to the natural world, her love of wild nature, ancestral connections in dreams, and by many years of Jungian studies and analysis. She works instinctually, honouring the flow of material from the unconscious and the images that emerge.

She is presently exploring the dynamic in word and image in various forms from digital works and prints, to working with mixed media in fabric and collage. Her latest hybrid artworks and prints are the result of  years of combining techniques and experiments in painting and drawing.

new prose poetry by Charles Rafferty Read More

 

introduction by krysia jopek:

I fell in love with the prose poems (in from Innuendos in a Minor Key) that Mike Cole sent me—the six seeds that morphed and evolved into this full-grown, granulated, virtual poetry show, a day’s dissolutions. The selections from the six unique poetry manuscripts that Mike chose function like six movements of a sonata, unified by his signature, seemingly-effortless tone and style that subtly carry the reader across the surface of precise language and syntax into new poetic territory again and again: “patina of offal,” “distillation of crushed star,” “where party lights are the eels’ fluorescence,” ”a galaxy of meanings/that look like stars,” and “birds were swept up in dust devils of spirit/that rendered them silent with dizziness.”

The selection of poetry that follows exemplifies Mike Cole’s versatility with short, discreet prose poems; poems that utilize line breaks and complex enjambment/syntax; prose poetry (in the two selections from Missives) with a Beckettian even-keeled tone and discursiveness; poems with very short lines of ten in a perfect column structure; and very short poems. The statement of poetics that follows this extraordinary mini-ouvre allows readers to look through the window of this poet’s writing cabin and watch the poet wait for poetry to breathe itself into (human) being.

Please enjoy!

poetry by Mike Cole:

from Innuendos in a Minor Key 

What Was Intended
37 You can, in fact, know what was intended. You can see it in the way the breeze makes of leaves and limbs such easy and graceful sweepings through the light of almost any day. It is there in the way a child regards the dance of dust swirling through a band of morning sun. In the whispers and then breathless and wordless urgency you hear through the wall between your solitude and love.

xxxxx

Waning Light
23 We had hoped for something almost other. We had been both to and away. We were making sure we hadn’t been followed. We had left passion of the old sort to those who could still use it. We were developing the habit of sitting in the waning light watching the leaves and shadows move, and we caught ourselves repeating what had never and now even less mattered.

xxxxx

The Taste
25 It tastes like the air that only a long climb gives the mouth to breathe. Like her hair caught on your lips. Like her fingers after she has peeled an orange for both of you. It tastes like something the apothecary gave you to share: a clear mixture that will convince you both that you are gods before it quickly kills you.

xxxxx

Come and Go
27 Something of the other and much of the more met and became lovers. They whirled and then tangled, they wanted and then had, and in the end, because it is never something that can go much beyond its beginning, they smiled and went each his and her way feeling what had been was what was meant to both come (as they had) and go (as they would).

xxxxx

Probably
44 Probably when the tides turn on themselves and the moon rises up and eats the sun. Probably in the next century when you and I switch places behind our faces and your smile becomes my grave expression. Probably in a Never that has become Always and at the depths of a mountain that is standing on its head at the bottom of the Mariana Trench where the party lights are the eels’ fluorescence.

xxxxx

Euphoria
60 It felt like walking across a lake next to a floating moon. Like drinking the distillation of crushed stars. It felt like taking up residence in a daffodil and having all the light warmed and yellowed. It felt like playing “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago on a balalaika as the background music for the coronation of the archangel of a just re-gilded heaven to which only the homeless were admitted. Like riding a unicorn that had borrowed its wings from the daughter of Pegasus and whose horn was a neon orange that was recognized in the next universe as a herald of the arrival of euphoria.

xxxxxx

 

from The New Alchemy:

Waiting
There is always the possibility
that something quite celestial
will arrive in a blue stretch limousine,
wearing the same sandals that bore Christ
out of the desert with a song so simple
even snakes were charmed into praise,
and birds were swept up in dust devils of spirit
that rendered them silent with dizziness.

The chauffeur will be the poet who was estranged
from her muses when they tempted her to jump
from so high above the Styx that she suspected
subterfuge and chose instead to weave her gowns
of metric and sonal intricacies that ended up
having the exact character of a cast iron
chastity belt from which the only escape
was looking hard and long into the eyes
of this savior of sorts who found his rhythms
in the air above a canyon over which he waltzed
on a slackline dyed and woven by virginal chorus girls
who watched and wondered how this divinity’s
tattoos could fluoresce in broad daylight and all move
in directions dictated by a power neither they
nor the updrafts that lifted their deliverer’s waist-length
dreadlocks into a cloud of breakdancing medusas
could ever explain.

xxxxx

Re…. 
Relax
Realize there’s no hurry
Realistically you won’t
reach an end anyway
Rest
Reassess what you are
Renegotiate with mortality
Read
Reconfirm your resignation from the real
Reap only what no one else needs
Reach
Reason with the residue of dreams
Recount the way you realized your
redemption
Realign your reflexes
Re-educate your regrets
Refuse
Refocus recollections
Recoil from rationalizations
Relax

xxxxx

Advice To a Friend Suffering From Disillusion
I would say
that you are
in the last aisle
of a delicatessen
that stocks every
variety of fatigue
next to the blue cheese
and feta and just beyond
helplessness that permeates
the lavosh so completely
that hope cannot be restored
even by grape leaves
perfectly rolled and stuffed
or olive oil
so virginal one drop
on the tongue
conjures the most nubile
and willing Greek goddess
any soldier fresh from Troy
or Ithaca could envision
stepping toward him
out of a doorway
filled with steam.
But that shouldn’t suggest
any absolute resignation
to eternities of starless
nights or loveless
dawns, but rather
the need
on your part
for calculated naiveté
garnished with an astonishment
of saffron and sage
and washed down
with a flask
of elderberry wine
entombed with a king
who was so infatuated
with eternity
he forgot what the living
had given him for his
journey.

xxxxxx

 

from A Bouquet of Stars:

Clarification
Let’s make it clear now
that his is a way of singing
that has a strange appeal
only to the dispossessed
and as such will be heard, if at all,
as a theremin’s distant moaning
by an audience that isn’t listening
but is nevertheless eased
by his song
toward the numbness
of both clairvoyance
and death.

xxxxx

Advice He Received from the Experts
She or he or they
said, or seemed to be saying,
“You aren’t trying hard enough.
You have to study the intricacies
and be able to recite the rules.
You have to bend both yourself
and your materials in ways
it would have seemed
such things could not be bent.
You have to break before the impossibility of it
and then try again with even more abandon.
You have to lose the only thing
you were sure you couldn’t be without.
You have to know that if you arrive
at the end you seek,
the way back
will have dropped away.”

xxxxx

He Receives This Response
            From the Editor:

We are looking for structure
that gives evidence of a rigor
that could only have caused
a discomfort not unlike torture
of the type that those clever
machines of the Crusades
or the British Court might have
exacted upon the bodies of the
too pure of heart whose last
cries were echoing anthems
that both terrified and inspired.

xxxxx

Upon His Interrogation by the Canon
—And what do you think will happen
as a result of your lack of rigor?

—I think
the day will split open
right here beside me
and a voice from before
even your time
and that at first seems
exactly air moving
will cross through
the translation of this
first of morning’s light
and tell me in my own
simple language
what to sing
to make time
step back and wait
for my permission
to begin again.

xxxxx

Lost
There was a poem
he couldn’t find.
It was nowhere
and everywhere.
It had a body
that had no shape.
It was outside of gravity
and slept near an unnamed planet’s core.
It rode a dream from one star to the next
in a galaxy that housed the imagination.
It was dressed like a child angel
and like an old man dead on the street.
It sang once to the tune of a great river
in a country it would never visit.
It ate only the dust
that arose and dispersed
when a bristlecone pine
beginning its 2000^th year
was pushed to its repose
by a hundred mile an hour wind
that moved even rocks across the faces
of the White Mountains.

xxxxx

Aflame
He thinks of Vallejo eating almost nothing,
smoking hand-rolled cigarettes,
spitting the shreds of tobacco
between his dried lips,
crazed by the black horses
thrashing through his waking dream,
and of Lorca smelling the slaughterhouse
and the Hudson River with its patina of offal
and setting it all to the rhythm of metal-flanged heels
on the moon-fringed tiles in Barcelona.
He thinks of the unnamed and never to be known one
aflame from so far within that what she becomes
or how she is regarded cannot shred the fist
that grapples her to the thrumming engine
carrying her back into a galaxy of meanings
that look more like great fires than stars.

xxxxxx

 

from Missives:

25 Knowing the day of the week has come to be of almost no importance to me. I am pleased when I don’t know the day of the week. The next to go should be the hour of the day, though there are indicators that make an estimate of the hour all too possible. If I had developed other skills, I would have something more tangible and possibly more beneficial and useable to show for my time making whatever it is in this case that happens to be made of the only medium with which I have learned to work—words. I drank a beer because that sometimes loosens the flow of words, but after the initial stimulation, it can also bring about lethargy and then even sleepiness, which become inhibitors of that same flow. In the long run though, I may be led toward, or, through no conscious sense of direction or clarity of purpose, stumble upon the kind of revelation that in the religious context seems only to be discovered by the poorest and most desperate souls who have no reason other than their simple and absolutely blind faith to hope. Think of the status attained by the miracle, whether imagined or real, of the Mexican peasant whose sarape was stained by roses with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It is time for me to quit today. There shouldn’t be a time to quit. There should only be a time to go on. The need to do other than the one thing that might lead to what has not manifested itself before and will only assume tangible form in hands that are intent on waiting for as long as it takes to shape whatever the air hands them should be set aside so that the waiting can be as pure and purposeless as the miraculous demands.

xxxxx

26 Evidently Emily Dickinson carried scraps of paper and a pencil with her all the time and used them to record lines or snippets of lines intended for possible later use in poems. Many of those bits and pieces have now been published in small books. One of the things that seems to have also been true is that flies, though possibly not as big as the one I am presently hearing, buzzed where she was writing too. As it turns out in my case, the fly is trapped between the screen door and the outside door here. There is a hole in the outside door where there was once a doorknob when the door was in use in a Bay Area house from which it was removed when the house was torn down, and the door was brought to the salvage yard called Urban Ore where I bought it along with several windows and brought them here to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada to install in the cabin I built of rough-cut lumber milled from beetle-killed pines. I need to cover that hole so flies and bees and even on occasion small birds don’t get in here through that hole and then through the space around the screen door. Emily Dickinson was equally concerned throughout most of her day with such practical matters. It was reported, though, that she recited lines of poetry aloud while she was in the storeroom skimming the cream off of the milk which may have come from a cow that her father owned. More likely the milk came from the cow of a neighboring dairy farmer. Had Dickinson lived in the first third of the 20^th century, that dairy farmer could have been my grandfather who was in North Hampton only a short way from Amherst where Emily was cloistered (for a little more than half the century before) in her father’s house and at night in her upstairs room composing poems and sewing them into the little fascicles that she knew would be found after her body was taken away to the family plot. The fireplace in her bedroom was bricked up and fitted with a small wood stove that kept her room warm through the night so she could sit at her writing desk, reportedly 18” square, and be transported to a realm that was not inhabited by any other human of her time and place but seemingly by the spirits and possibly echoes of poets who came both before and long after her—if such things are possible, as they probably are not, but it might have felt to her, as it sometimes feels to me, as if such times can be inhabited by such voices and presences. My mother would have only been vaguely, if at all, aware of the poet who would have been nearly her neighbor, and it is certain that they would have had nothing to talk about, except that Emily would have no doubt been interested in and maybe intrigued by the fact that my mother played the baritone in the community band that gave free concerts in the North Hampton town park on Sundays and that she sometimes marched with that band in town parades. But my mother would have found Emily too strange to be of interest and would have regarded the poet with the same wariness as she did the Smith College girls she said she saw walking too close together and hand-in-hand along North Hampton’s main street. My mother would not have found the line “I heard a fly buzz when I died” to be anything more than strange.

xxxxxx

 

from The Glad Oblivion of Light

She still doesn’t know
exactly how it happens
or how it happens that sometimes
it does
and other times it doesn’t
though it seems it eventually will
which is why she must
at least sometimes
stay there longer
waiting to be taken up
by whatever hands or wave or dustless dust devil
that arrives to elevate her to a place
where she can
at least for a moment
see

xxxxxx

 

from A Distant Place:

50
there were always
near the end
things abloom
that seemed they should be
far beyond their season
and he would pause
put down the heaviness
he had been carrying
too far and for too long
and sit for a while
maybe beyond a while
where the delicacy
and brightness
of the unexpected
flourished

xxxxx

And Finally
I would recommend
denying you ever wanted anything
and then drilling a hole
in the forehead of dawn
and crawling in to watch
what shadows do
to prepare for the day’s
dissolutions.

all poetry ©2021

 

post-introduction–finding my way back [poetics]:

I became involved in writing during the poetry renaissance that Philip Levine and others brought to Fresno State College and the dusty, hot, foggy San Joaquin Valley of California in the late 1960s. I have been hunting down poems for the more than 50 years since, though teaching high school English, Spanish, Creative Writing, and other subjects for over 30 years severely limited that effort. But in the past 11 years, I have spent most mornings waiting on the arrival of poems. Though over the years I have written and published carefully-constructed narrative (and some lyric) poems, I’ve never enjoyed that approach to writing—beginning with a topic or experience and building a poem from that central idea—so I have gradually returned to an approach to writing that actually served me best as an undergraduate when I first discovered poetry. That process involves allowing a flow of words to gradually lead me toward a state of mind in which poems take shape on their own, a process in which I serve only as the receptor and recorder of that voice. I know that this approach to finding poems is anathema to most of the poetry establishment of the day, but at this point in my life (at 73 years old) that no longer matters.

The section titles between the groups of poems published here refer to the titles of book manuscripts I have assembled of my poems. I have one manuscript of poems from the years 1968 to 2010, and 10 more manuscripts for the years 2011 through 2020. The selections included in diaphanous micro 4.7 are taken from the manuscripts covering the years 2012 to 2017. Many of the poems in these manuscripts have been published in various print and online magazines, but none of the manuscripts have been, as yet, published as books. My intention is to publish selections form all of my manuscripts in a single book at some time in the future (or not at all). For now it seems more important to go on following the trail of words wherever it leads.

Thank you to Krysia Jopek for accepting my work for publication in diaphanous micro. She is doing something truly unique and important in this online magazine. It’s a valuable forum for amazingly varied and thought-provoking approaches to literary and visual art. The featured writers and artists push our perceptions and approaches to our own art in many new directions. I hope my poems serve that same purpose for diaphanous micro readers

 

Mike Cole reading “Therefore, Sing”:

 

biographical note:
Mike Cole’s poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Laurel Review, Stirring, and Red Savina Review, among other literary journals, as well as in the anthologies Highway 99 (Heyday Press) and Some Yosemite Poets (Scrub Jay Press). He holds a Master’s Degree in Poetry Writing from Fresno State College. For 30-plus years he taught high school English, Spanish, and Creative Writing. He lives in the California mountains near Yosemite and is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley

Yosemite Poets: A Gathering of This Place

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ARTIST STATEMENT: FEMMEGLITCH

Intuitive. Sign. Deletion. Obliteration. Constructive. Beauty
These pieces are glitches (digital) using three different subjects or topics that are all interrelated: t-shirts appearing in social media ads, images of the sound of my voice, and images of my body. My work concerns the intersections of sexuality, voyeurism, performance, Capitalism, and gender more broadly. I am influenced by asemics and abstract expressionist women like Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler.

The glitch is not the environment of the thing, it is the thing itself. I am less interested in exhausting the definitions of asemic writing (if the glitch is ultimately denying meaning from a semantic form is arguable) and more interested in seeing the possibilities of the glitch. I wrangle the “data bending” on phone apps until I get the desired image. That is creative and productive. This does not impede, however, the obliteration of the original image.

Most of my glitches start with ads on my Facebook (on my phone) that offer new complexities when considering its form. I am now introducing Capitalism, data mining, privacy infringement, assumption, targeting, and an inextricable combination of those that can only begin to attack the implications of a thing. I screenshot the ads for t-shirts that appear in my feed (based on the above) that usually show “positive” messaging for and about women, or perceived “feminist” messaging. Glitch apps then layer, destroy, and rebuild what I have consumed. Then I can resist or subvert by taking ownership of the whole mess. I make it what I want it to look like.

I use glitches to break down patriarchal structures. I think of the glitch as a sex act. It is a dominant/submissive binary. There is intention in glitching that is beauty. We know it is not ugly. The ultimate infringement of the digital—our human mistake of knowing and understanding.

Femmeglitch: I have used this moniker or description that includes gender. I think identifying the gender in the act is claiming the social and cultural implications of oppressive systems and the glitching is bending those systems, often to their demise. This makes glitching an art form.

new poetry–Gordon Hilgers

ETERNITY BESIDE A DOOR 
I think I finally reached the human
inside myself. He was no homunculus,
or simulacrum. But bitter sun-yowling
that echoes inside the uncertainty of
dreams, and deeper cries; primitive
homilies—of utterance, about utterance,
how the first word burbled past the lips,
the fearful lunge beyond loneliness,
a hair-in-the-butter spectacle whereas
where became nowhere, meadowlarks
whistling beyond the windowpane: this
was me. Only for an instant, no lilies,
no blooming, no real sky, a point where
a song squeezes back when you grasp
its hand in the dark, yellowing cotton
adrift in the absurdity of daylight. I am
early morning, I follow footfalls of future,
I knife at the shore like a glint shooting
from a brook, then I go, or went, waking.

THE GOD OF DIRT CLODS
Lividly lost, you lie here
beneath starlight’s lost shimmer,
memories of blistered walls
disrupting your delusions of lucre,
your fiction kindling a laughter
that is unnecessary and black.
Dream of your ashen Avalon now,
all its gray angels barking at the sky,
your own breath hollower
than usual. Who looms over
innocence at the wrong end of day?
Who knows its funny flaws,
its dustpan verbosity, its secrecy
the chambermaids clutch?
You whittle intrigue until razor-thin,
your lust a mountain retreat,
ghost moments everywhere,
no cure for lack as galaxies creak
or shiver, a listless, murderous
whim of reasoning. To dream of it,
heartlessness, mosquito’s reflex,
twitching in bleeding dawn, this life
your alien landing in the peat.

AT THE EVE OF REVOLUTION
Oblivious before the Marxist unknown,
a future-perfect noun gone library-blind as
expectation of the letters will come
amid rumors of rubbish, a jail-cell alive
with endings, water-fountain full of running
small children from the rain because
the myth of the lighthearted is rutted and
raw under the noonday light: Oh, I live
so confused. You do not need to tell me
what I never will know, this endless
trick of all, the most luminescent hour
ever studied, furrowed bandages singing
right where death begins: I start-out
desperate to begin again and condemn
what never was, a saying of solid ground,
ground of being, ground of dream, love.

WAVE-TIP REVERIE
I remember roots
finding water, celebration
out there in the underground
some somnambulists missed
as thorny slivers shipped-
in from Albania, possibly Naxos,
broken berths, harbor locked,
beachside beer-stand neon-lit
and looking for girls.

What repairs are there inside
the uncertain future? Leavening,
ventriloquists vanquish all
the hopeful flowers, out where
the absentee bedside calls
via coincident clues.

Flat faces hint all night, a braille
lividly commercial and on TV,
scratchy beneath hands
smoothed like paved roads
where bumps have fun. This
is the good error, her brevity of
whip-snap sighs, oozy
bits of blink

as ancients chatter into history.

LEFT BEHIND
You’re wandering, lucidly apart from
various dreamlike confusions where sleep
tugs at one stranger’s clothing strangers
might dub a mind, others an animation
or holographic image. Emanating
from your life’s fantasy, you are
the breath of a Chinese dragon,
the creature known as Lung or Long–sign
of good luck, power over rainfall. Groaning
in childbirth, your mother dreamt of you.
Your father tells you her eyes flashed as if
carp, gold flecks lurking in a vexed pond.
Now you simply go. Perhaps some watch;
no matter. Ten thousand miles from home
is but a step in a sky of gloaming grief.

THE CLOCK VERB
A so-called dove with a stick alerted you
deluge or the end was nearing for a black season
which had brimmed an unintentional metaphor
for chalice with a celestial ocean. How the flecked birds
swiftly neared Columbus’ tiny boats, too, that ache
akin to this day,

only warmer, a desert gone to abasement, all this
from a muddy sky of clay. One day, our forsaken worth
will crack apart, first kiss, sudden grief, a saddened wish
unfulfilled, this thingness of myself gone to below
the way bodies fall, an invisible ephemerality brightly
left to dream. Now you lift,

loving blush wind, sails muttering in codes of old linen,
then olive Sargasso fondles greening keel, new nativism,
pressure’s end, an octogenarian child, a shied grasp
feeling from the shallows if the unreal is tactile,
her fingers wet. I took a breath of this, a long whiff
when my life had gone crazy

into the blizzard. Then I began again, as I always have,
as I plant my grapes late and by the stars and moon,
my back to undertaker’s smile at a black road’s dead end.

EDITORIAL COMMENT
Go. Write more mangled approximations
as if to immortalize how the ancient madnesses
sought to tunnel into what breaks the heart open
into goodness or mooniness. Tonight is a sight
of shepherds scanning the sky in a search
for higher treasures

or of a barroom Romeo searching for the right glint
in a sleepy girl’s eyes. Pyrite mistakes itself
for gold, and uncultured accommodations of Sartre
or Camus rock, each part of the desire trip. Love is
now a gangland protection racket, how Crips dub
their dope murder a cap when reason must
be destroyed,

where a life is the stone that finally fills the sea.

SACRED BOOK
Out here in the whitened barrens,
you seek to reinterpret eccentricity with sand,
which isn’t easy. It’s the way we all
sleep in our shadows, or how we do not know
whether anything means more than
the one crowded dream we remember best.
I’ve never reached the Barrens here,
at least not in my sleep. I met a sassy beauty
with black hair, and people I don’t know
kept telling her, Do not trust him! because this
is how revolutions are supposed to be
a stammer into starting like locomotives lost
in the cold. I met one stranger, said,
This is reality, that is civilization, and this is
the people’s will, and over here it’s
merely me and the girl. I held-down the room
for nearly an hour. Then the cops came
to arrest everyone but us. Beyond a circle
resides more circles, and then the Barrens,
which watches us always from far places,
quick to kiss suddenness, everyplace
a grim new adventure, small days we learn
each unsure step deeper into infinity.

TELL ME
What proof would lie in night’s remains?
This thing, awakened by insistence-as-being:
What is a discovery that all has been forgotten?
Nightfall, typically becoming in red roses
where darkness rises in the east–this mystified
tendency to name it birth–belongs to no one,
even if the man downstairs turns-up his hip-hop
as if he’s waiting too, or if the dove sees
exactly what a coo might mean.

Tell me why there are moments when sleep
brands me with embers, when emptiness is my
final recourse–as if the future is shipwrecked,
the sea presently bloody yet implacably peaceful.
Say to me, There is light in being buried alone,
as if the angels can sleep through insomnia, as if
airport gates mysteriously open,

or as if no one could dare to own an empty life.
I’ve worked around the nonexistent clock, have
danced to broken radios, have deafened
all I could speak beyond grasping, Nothingness
unwilling to hear. Sometimes, unpleasant pain is
the pleasant gift because nobody comprehends
because unseen faces enthrall entire worlds–
those that insist on belonging.

I admit it. I am part of some vast loneliness,
all the foregone galaxies, way out there beyond
the speed of light, persisting as ghosts because
their light is homeless after they’ve gone dark.
Any lunatic can bear this moonlike honesty
like teeth,

and no one says anything, especially not me.

all poetry ©2021

mission statement (poetics):
I’m not one for missions. Paging through recent editions of The Best American Poetry, I discovered I’m apparently not marching in step with those who advocate poetry as a device bent toward social commentary. But then I’ve never had much for what I call the Poetry Billboard 100. That’s not to claim I’m not interested in poetry’s role in effecting social change. I am confronted with the world, and with its sometimes-antithetical human concoction of a world, daily. I often end confused by both, especially by how their collisions shoot out sparks. That’s where I begin: right in the middle of the confabulating and mystification. Sure. I could go with this: “This poem is thinking of ‘creating’ itself (pome) as manifested as a Chinese Pidgin English translation from an American English translation from the Malay, and that from Pashto by way of a number of ancient French translations of a compendium of ‘monad theories of ontological hypotheses’ shoved through a bowdlerized ideation of Derrida’s theories of deconstructionism about some bird I saw that almost got hit by a transit bus this morning at around 10:37 a.m. CST. The versification will be 99 percent Google translator and less than .0001 percent imagination, the rest of the 100 percent pure energy dominated by keyboard strokes,” but why bother?

This is why I am sometimes vilified.

I want poetry that plays as it demystifies, poetry that releases me from the 21^st-century’s spellbound infatuation with factual information. After all, if I wanted to be a newspaper columnist, I’d have dwelt on punditry. Is it irritating when someone extols an op-ed familiar as “a poet”? If not, perhaps it should.

biographical note:
Gordon Hilgers has published in Cimarron Review, Red Savina Review, Sequestrum, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. He has a degree in news writing. Go figure.

 

introduction—Krysia Jopek

The moment I saw Sylvia Van Nooten’s “Tango Dance” in a Facebook group, I knew I wanted to feature a virtual show of her asemic art in diaphanous micro. Her multimedia collages utilize ink and watercolors on the two-dimensional surface of paper to contrast and play with indelibility and fluidity, permanence and timelessness, sculpture and dance, product and process. Her titles contrast the linguistic with the purely-aesthetic language of asemic writing. The reader/viewer is actively involved in the human construction of a multiplicity of subjective meanings against the backdrop of potential existential meaninglessness. Her abstract compositions, like that of Kandinsky, create shape and flow while invoking color as “a power which directly influences the soul” (Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1912. Translated from the German by M.T.H. Sadler, 1977). Please enjoy this sequence of Sylvia Van Nooten’s beautiful visual art in A Love Song to Chaos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

artist statement

My work has little to do with consciously deciding to create a specific thing. Rather, I will find a shape or a color and see where it takes me. I love ink and watercolor because or the way they blend and create interesting drips down the paper. One small drip of blue might turn into a goddess with silver writing. Collage gives me another point from which to start. By suspending my need to “control” what I am doing, I’m able to create organic forms that often speak to people of different elements of their own thought processes. Asemic writing is what, to me, pulls the pieces together into coherency. Although the writing has no specific meaning, it still has the authority of the written word. Thus, I can be obtuse and concrete at the same time.

biographical note

Sylvia Van Nooten is an asemic artist living in western Colorado.  Asemic art, with its pastiche of “language” and images, allows her to merge texts and painting, creating a hybrid form of communication, which is open to viewer interpretation. Her multimedia collages have appeared in The South Florida Poetry Journal, Experiment-O Issue 13, Raw Art Review. The cover of the Summer 2020 edition of RAR features her visual art.

more on Sylvia’s art

She can be contacted by email: [email protected]

If interested in purchasing any of Sylvia Van Nooten’s visual art, please contact her by email.

You can also find her on instagram:

 

introduction by krysia jopek, Founding Editor of diaphanous micro

It’s a pleasure and priviledge to feature new poetry by the nationally-acclaimed Gerard Sarnat. The first section “from WIPING 2020 SLATE CLEAN  [5+],” a section “from KAFKACETERA  [3], the second section of “Irregular People: M-W-F,”  from his book HOMELESS CHRONICLES: from Abraham to Burning Man (Pessoa Press, 2010), a brief statement of poetics, and previews to four of Sarnat’s published collections of books, all available for purchase on Amazon.

Sarnat’s post-postmodernist, experimentalist poetics builds off and beyond L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. The short lines “from WIPING 2020 SLATE CLEAN  [5+]” scroll vertically but cannot be read quickly because of the surprising jumps within lines and from line to line, the composition’s superimposition of original imagery (abstract and representational words) and contemporary political references. Sarnat critiques the highly-complex, disturbing political reality—skewed by former, twice-impeached president, Donald Trump, his refusal to concede to president-elect Joe Biden, and his dissemination of fake news to his equally-delusional followers. The first line with its apropos reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth parallels the doomed Macbeth and Trump, especially now as the Senate Impeachment Trial is due to begin in just a few days.

In “Transformation,” the second section “from KAFKACETERA  [3],” the poet utilizes longer lines to create a creative, poetic narrative for the reader to experience as the event of the poem unfolds horizontally versus vertically as in the first selection of Sarnat’s poem featured in annulets. This section of Sarnat’s longer sequence juxtaposes Ashberian everyday American idiom (rooted in the important modernist poetics of William Carlos Williams) with provocative, philosophical inquiry. Sarnat incorporates references to our shared American TV and film tradition with references film heroes: “this latest loopy as if I metamorphed / from Tarzan to Charlie Chaplin.” The second stanza begins with “Daddy, I loved you as the sea horned moon” and speaks to the poet’s close relationship to his children and grandchildren.

Please enjoy annulets! We eagerly welcome comments, shares, and new followers of our diaphanous micro Facebook page. Thank you for reading / spending your valuable time here!

new poetry:

from WIPING 2020 SLATE CLEAN  [5+]

      1. Out Damn Spotify

Mac music faced

ending a weird year

 

perhaps Pence,

acting as President

 

not of USA

(unless Trump quits,

 

is pardoned)

but rather of Senate

 

rules in favor

of motion to throw

 

out Electoral

College results…

 

but no entity

has standing to sue

 

so then Flynn’s

martial law ensues.

 

Today you ‘n

I maintain minimal

 

expectations

beyond making real

 

sure garbage

trucks still come here

 

plus filling up

the bronze birdbath so

 

at least robins

can feel clean: males

 

(they’re much

bigger and redder)

 

one-by-one dip

in while their ladies

 

hang back

waiting to use what

 

could be

maybe considered

 

this Jewish

family’s mikveh*.

 

* ritual purification

from KAFKACETERA  [3]

     2. Transformation

Doors just opened. But this latest is loopy as if I metamorphed

from Tarzan to Charlie Chaplin. Obsessed with onomatopoeia and

assonance boxed sets?  Give me a break: no Hemingway Left Bank

celeb seductee, if muses stalk moi, a Cheeto-eater in underpants

they might stalk anyone. Exceptionally dedicated never to publish

medically (Pops’ published over 400 so far), here I am at 64.

 

Daddy, I love you as the sea the horned moon.

The sun unconcerned continues its arc.

A she-wolf calls me home.

Martini glass near bare

one last golden egg, the germ I must grow and share

releases.

©2021

from HOMELESS CHRONICLES: from Abraham to Burning Man (Pessoa Press, 2010)

1. Irregular People: M-W-F, 

i. Monday 

Head of the queue, once proud pro QB, traded his rifle 
for a gun, bizarro ex-con Gerardo charms my inner Howdy Doody,  
     “Hey, Doc Gerard, my brothas don’t buy we’z cousins!”

A hooligan calls hisself Morphyne on the clipboard, 
just in from the tulies, bullshits a med school bud from Willets, 
name can’t recall, wrote him Vicodan, dog ate ‘em – orders more.

“Sorry, Sir, we don’t do pain scripts here. I’m no shopkeeper. 
      Community clinics work better that way 
              for most everyone in the long run.”

     “Screw you, dude, I was told you was different, 
           but you’re a prick like the rest.  
Better be careful – or …”

Covering my back, big black cuz puts an end to that, 
      taunts the outsider, “You’re on the nod, tomato can, 
      – it’s time to move on, and make it quick.”

       Injecting her weekly STD cocktail 
through vermilion slattern Capris, I remind flaming Maria Diana 
      this ain’t the place to transact charnel house commerce.

My Chi-town chum Sam unhooks his bike from the train’s eco-rack. 
       Boom box atop paraphernalia balanced on handlebars, 
                     crossing the ties, he rides over his latest paranoia. 

         “Ger, I’ve definite proof your smirks fibbed all along 
about us both attending O’Keefe Grammar School – why screw  
  my head up the butt of your cryptic uncathartic clinical shit?

 If you closed your eyes, maybe you could finally see something. 
I’m gonna sic Legal Aid on your fucking friendship lip service ass 
                   should you refuse to cease and desist.”

Alma Rose, all kindhearted lard and grins, heartache and breakdowns, 
fiddles brilliant water color beach primitives of now foster twins: 
 I’ll buy one for rent money, try to get some into Stanford’s Fair. 

 My fave Mona Lisa sashays in, mustache trimmed, cig hung. 
      “Doc, is you collecting gutter art or buyin’ runty people? 
In any case, them free sample shemale hormones sure work great!

Ain’t it time you start ooching them Christians 
to raise that long green, get me on the tits and cunt fast track? 
          By the way, what color is they, Poles or Italian?”

A charming diabetic OCDer, Jill’s sexy ex-librarian fingers 
   finger Braille while sipping Styrofoam tea and sugar 

– no NutraSweet ‘til we reopen day after tomorrow.

2. 67% Hopperized Bathos, from Melting The Ice King, 2016

Freshboy eye candy larva, after Latin class in the Harvard Yard, this puerile grub 
put out 2/3’s the hard yards required to acquire Life Magazine’s worn mustachioed 

thrift-shop-Brooks Brothers-tweed-jacket-torn-leather-elbow-patches + pipe persona

An apostate commonly caught up in the wash of a sunny big square state, 

I got taught nodding Yessir to Pops and Gramps about pumping gas, slopping 
the hogs then squeegeeing their crap off the pickup, in the end is what really counts.

Absconding self-conscious introvert, I bathed in Waldorf Cafeteria shadows 
of cigar circles whose prodigies fueled my piggybacking doom: Disregard pale fools
who raised you, kiddo. That’s what this damaged rube from the other side of the Rockies 

did while the splintered men’s room mirror futilely attempted to dispense PEZ. 
50 years later Nordstrom redoers impart, Crayon remaining hair. Bleach teeth. Switch
out bifocals for contacts — which preps this moldering fart for a less than gala college reunion.

a brief statement of poetics:

“Real” life  suffuses my work. High-stress medical career, leisure around family in a forest, confronting climate change. Humor and poetry interact with each other to keep this mid-septuagenarian feeling energetic, happy, and useful. Brave poetry is important to me because such gyrations elevate life, both by reading others’ work (think Rumi, Sylvia Plath, Frederick Seidel, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen)  and creating my own which expresses Sarnat’s voice, makes me happy, perhaps keeps me young(er) Gerry.

more poetry collections by Gerard Sarnat:

 

Gerard Sarnat’s website

more information on Gerard Sarnat

biographical note:

Gerard Sarnat won San Francisco Poetry’s 2020 Contest, the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize and has been nominated for handfuls of 2021 and previous Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is widely published including in Buddhist Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Northampton Review, New Haven Poetry Institute, Texas Review, Vonnegut Journal, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, Monterey Poetry Review, The Los Angeles Review, New York Times, London Reader and Review Berlin as well as by Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Penn, Chicago, and Columbia presses. He’s authored the collections Homeless Chronicles (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), Melting the Ice King (2016). Gerry is a physician whose built and staffed clinics for the marginalized as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. Currently he is devoting energy/resources to deal with climate justice and serves on Climate Action Now’s board. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with three kids plus six grandsons and is looking forward to future granddaughters.

Cutting-edge Architecture and Critical Social Relevance—brief introduction [Krysia Jopek, January 2021]

I’m privileged to feature young architect Kristen Anderson’s vital architectural project in diaphanous micro‘s first issue of 2021. Please enjoy her professional architectural designs that propose a highly complex and artistic way to utilize abandoned buildings to create a place of community for those displaced by poverty. Her innovative designs incorporate contemporary architectural theory and practice to envision a feasible, beautiful structure and site where a displaced community can thrive in the natural environment that is incorporated and honored.

RE-CONSTRUCTIVISM IN THE ABANDONED FIELD: The creation of a new architecture through the process of demolishing and repurposing abandoned structures

ARTIST/ARCHITECT STATEMENT: 

Re-constructivism in the Abandoned Field is a conceptual project that is concerned with the development of a new architecture that demolishes and repurposes abandoned structures left behind by temporary enclaves. Abandoned sites are not always a result of the temporary enclave condition; however, many large fleeting events leave behind architectural and structural ruins. By using the remaining residents of Vila Autodromo as a test community, this project expects a successful method of repurposing a site that will attract other people with the drive for a similar lifestyle. The strategic process utilizing a single crane derived from the grid analysis of the past site—creates a clear organizational strategy for how the other abandoned arenas could be manipulated at a later point in time. With the successful implementation of this strategy on the Cariocas Arenas using the local test community, similar success when applied to the rest of the site would be expected. The design strategy for this new hybrid landscape created from built materials can be applied to other abandoned sites as well. Demolition breaks these buildings down to merge with the site once again, while simultaneously repopulating and bringing a revitalized spirit to a once barren site.

The temporary enclave, an enclave that arises when there is a need for a zoned cluster of structure and infrastructure in response to a fleeting event that exists as both a boundary condition and as a porous entity—inspired the development of this project that simultaneously acts as a barrier and as a means of intersection between communities. The intent is to explore the ways in which intersection space derived from a glitched grid can be used to design hybrid structures of architecture and landscape for communal and recreational use. Specifically, this project impacts the past inhabitants Vila Autodromo, a favela that was largely displaced by the construction of the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Barra Olympic Park by Wilkinson Eyre. The concept of the inhabited “wall,” or boundary space, would achieve the porosity necessary to fulfill this unifying task by manipulating the existing site plan until it achieves the properties of a field condition. The hybridization of architecture and landscape into one coherent whole ceases to be a barrier; rather, it becomes something that knits the community together as a self-sustaining entity.

The proposal is designed for communities that need open shared space to grow. Landscape, park, and other agricultural programs will be the catalyst; businesses and homes propagating outward from developed zones is the future goal. The design swerves the principles of landscape urbanism, or urban conditions developed through landscape design, to fit into a new mold: to create an artificial landscape condition within by utilizing elements of architecture that serve as a driving force to repopulate the site.

The 20 families that remain in Vila Autodromo will act as a test community for this architectural catalyst that will eventually attract other past inhabitants back to the site. An analysis of the former site plan of Vila Autodromo led to a strategy for how to manipulate the existing architecture. In this analysis, a seemingly unorganized favela site plan became one of multiple grids overlapping and intersecting each other. The particular moment when multiple paths crossed created a radial language that inspired the placement of a single crane on the site to be used for both dismantling and reassembling the buildings in a systematic process. The successful reuse of the Cariocas Arenas will result in a new architectural system that creates a solution to human displacement and new agricultural space while incorporating the abandoned architecture resulting from the existence of temporary enclaves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kristen designed RE-CONSTRUCTIVISM IN THE ABANDONED FIELD: The creation of a new architecture through the process of demolishing and repurposing abandoned structures in her fifth year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Bachelor of Architecture program.

KRYSIA JOPEK’S INTERVIEW WITH KRISTEN ANDERSON—January 2021   

What aspects of architecture excite you the most?

Architecture has always been a passion of mine. I love how a single building can have distinctive impacts on different people. What excites me the most about architecture is that it is an ever-changing, often experimental, form of artistic expression that builds up our surroundings. Like all forms of art, not all architecture will be loved and praised by everyone, but buildings are fundamentally a part of our daily lives. Architecture can be thought of as beautiful, thought-provoking, controversial, lasting, etc. and what means nothing to one person may catch the eye of another. Personally, I enjoy knowing that I can use my creativity to positively impact the world around me.

When did you know that you wanted to be an architect?

When I was a little girl, my mother worked from home as an electrical engineer. She would “bring me to work with her” in her home office where I had a small table set up next to her desk. I would spend hours at this table drawing elaborate scenes of buildings and houses (or so I am told, as I was too little to remember!). Somewhere along the way, my mother asked if I wanted to be an architect. From then on, I told people that I was going to be an architect when I grew up. This is all before I really knew what being an architect meant. As I got older, learned more about architecture and had the opportunity to take drafting courses during high school, I knew that pursuing architecture as a career was the perfect choice for me. Architecture school was nothing like I expected, yet it only helped solidify my lifelong decision to continue on the path of becoming an architect.

Do you think you were born creative?

Like all skills, my abilities to draw, paint, and build needed time and practice in order to become as strong as they are today.  I do believe, however, that being creative is an intrinsic part of my personality. From as early as I could hold a crayon, I was doodling and drawing pictures, but creativity is far more than artistic talent alone. Being creative also means being imaginative, and from what I’ve heard of myself as a very young child, I have always been quite original and silly. My creativity and my ability to see the world a little differently has definitely shaped me into the unique, sometimes quirky, person I am today.

Did your childhood surroundings influence / cultivate your proclivity for artistic creation?

My childhood surroundings played a major role in cultivating my artistic ability. My parents have always provided me with support and encouragement in my artistic endeavors. They instilled in me an understanding of and appreciation for the creative process and encouraged me to create beautiful things.

How was your university experience at RPI in the Architecture program?

My RPI School of Architecture experience was amazing! The five-year program continuously challenged me and helped me grow both academically and creatively. Now that I am working in the industry professionally, my appreciation for the strength of instruction I received at RPI has only increased. The encouragement I received from my instructors and peers helped me realize the extent of my abilities and the work I am capable of producing. The mix of technical and artistic education provided throughout the program was a great balance for my skill set. Looking back on the five years, I couldn’t be happier with my decision to attend RPI’s rigorous program—and I am very proud of my degree in Architecture.

Did you have certain professors who mentored you?

My professors definitely had a profound impact on my education. Many of the professors who taught my introductory courses and studios were also my professors in later years as the curriculum became more focused. This allowed my professors to see not only my work ethic and my technical skills, but also how my designs transformed and improved as I advanced through the rigorous program. The personal level of which these mentors got to know me helped guide my work to reflect more of myself. They provided much-appreciated guidance and support as I transitioned from being a student to an employee of an architecture firm.

How were your peers? Was the atmosphere and environment supportive and/or competitive?

My peers in the School of Architecture contributed heavily to my happiness at RPI. I was friendly with so many people in my major, both in my class and in the classes above and below me. The environment was supportive. Because of the many collaborative group projects, lasting bonds and friendships were formed. That’s not to say there wasn’t plenty of healthy competition!

How did your semester studying in Italy impact your creative work?

My semester abroad in Italy changed my life. It was the first time I had ever traveled to Europe, and I immediately fell in love with the new world that this opportunity opened up for me. Studying abroad was always a dream of mine, so I took every moment to learn about and appreciate my surroundings. The architecture in Italy is so different from what I was used to in New York. The semester in Italy studying Architecture helped strengthen my love for ancient and classical architecture. One specific example of the impact the experience had on my architectural eye was mastering the act of “looking up.” The ceilings were works of art in all of the spaces I had the opportunity to explore. So often we forget to design certain parts of a building that might seem insignificant, so the architecture in Italy taught me that when I design I must think about every angle, view, and experience that a person can have in a given space. My semester in Italy also strengthened my sketching abilities and the way I look at the descriptive geometries of a building or space.

Can you describe your process from idea to finish product when designing a project?

My design process usually begins with analyzing the surroundings of a site where the project is to be located, including using grids and projection lines to understand existing spatial relationships. My designs are usually products of this initial study, which leads to sketches, study models, iterations after iteration—until I find a form to work with the program and parameters of the particular project. One aspect of designing a project in RPI’s architecture program is that none of those design projects were ever really “finished.” Even after a final critique, we would be asked, “What are the next steps?” or “Where do you see yourself taking this design further?” Although I have “finished products” in my portfolio, a design project is never truly finished; more can always be done to enhance the design and function of the conceptual work.

What media do you prefer to work in?

I typically use digital media for my architectural drawings, including AutoCAD, Adobe Illustrator, and Photoshop. I particularly enjoy building physical models, which allows me to see a project come to life in 3D.

What are your favorite schools of architecture, time periods, and why?

My favorite time periods in architecture are largely influenced by the time periods I was able to study in-depth at RPI. For example, I have always enjoyed the classic elegance of the Renaissance and the opulence of the Baroque periods that I experienced in Italy. In addition to the Italian architecture I studied while abroad, I have a strong appreciation for Gothic architecture with its monolithic forms, gorgeous stained-glass windows, and complexities with technical innovations such as flying buttresses and vaulted ceilings. I am also a very big fan of Victorian houses. The whimsical design elements create a unique character for each Victorian home, which really speaks to me. I have a dream of owning a beautiful Victorian someday with a wraparound porch and elegant tower.

My own love of architecture grew out of my doctoral studies; my primary areas of interest/focus were twentieth-century American poetry, postmodernism, and post-structural theory (deconstruction, specifically). How much theory did you study at RPI and on your own? What theories most influence your work?

We studied a fair amount of theory and history in our courses at RPI. Deconstructivism played a crucial role in my thesis design by inspiring me to deconstruct, reconstruct, and create a fragmented architecture based on the process of reusing parts of existing architecture. RPI professors did a great job leading us to precedent projects that could influence our work. Rem Koolhaas’ thesis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, PV Aureli’s A Field of Walls, and Peter Eisenman’s Rebstockpark were all precedents that greatly influenced my thesis design and concept.

How are you enjoying your first job as a professional architect?

I have really enjoyed the first year and a half as an employee of Hoffmann Architects. We specialize in the rehabilitation of building exteriors; therefore, I work on restoring existing buildings and get to contribute to a critical niche in the architecture field. I enjoy working on older buildings and learning how to create innovative, effective solutions to existing problems that buildings face. My coworkers are great, and the firm has exactly the environment and culture I was hoping for. The firm as a whole is also very supportive towards my ambition of  becoming a licensed architect.

What is your typical workday like?

My typical workday starts bright and early with an hour-long commute on the train into Grand Central and a 10-minute walk to my office in Midtown. Typically, I work on project representation through drafting and other necessary paperwork for different phases of a project including writing field reports, editing specifications, and reviewing submittals. On a really exciting day, I partake in site visits where I assist in inspecting the roofs, facades, and plazas of old hotels, churches, and university buildings around New York City. I was a bit nervous the first time I had to climb a scaffold (19 stories high!) but the nerves subsided, and I now look forward to the days when I get to be out in the field. My typical day also consists of lunch breaks in Bryant Park with some coworkers or a good book, and most recently, ice skating at Bryant Park’s Winter Village rink.

What are your hobbies and interests outside of architecture?

Outside of architecture I enjoy many other artistic forms of expression, such as drawing, painting (using mostly watercolor and acrylic), crocheting, and anything that can be made crafty. I enjoy reading and being outside, especially in nice, warm weather. I love trying new things, and right now I’m doing my best learning how to ice skate during my lunch breaks. I have become more adventurous and have started to travel more since my semester abroad. I was supposed to take an exciting trip to see the gorgeous castles and churches of Germany and Austria in September 2020, but then COVID happened. I can’t wait to reschedule that trip!

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:

An honors scholar and recent graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Bachelor of Architecture Program, Kristen Anderson is pursuing her lifelong dream of working as architect. She is currently enjoying her first full time position at Hoffmann Architects in New York City, where she works on the rehabilitation of building exteriors. The passion she has for renovating old architecture stems from her interest in classical buildings and her studies in Rome. Throughout her career so far, she has participated in historic preservation work, educational, institutional, and civic architectural projects. Kristen is also an active member in her community with a commitment to service. She dedicates her design and community action experience to many volunteer activities.

LINK TO KRISTEN’S ONLINE PORTFOLIO: https://kristenanderson39.wixsite.com/portfolio

new hybrid/short poetic fiction by Ariel N. Banayan—introduction by Krysia Jopek

In the seven short hybrid texts featured in moments of rest, Ariel Banayan skillfully and seamlessly fuses prose poetry and literary fiction, thereby erasing the boundaries of each genre. I find his hybrid writing to be exciting and inspirational. It’s as if he’s taking James Joyce or Virginia Woolf into the 21st-century, adding in dollops of poetry and contemporary cultural references to his long, complex, and beautiful sentences that mirror the complexity of human consciousness and experience. His craft is meticulous.

In the interview with me that follows his new hybrid writing, Ariel discusses his writing process, literary influences, the MFA program in which he is currently enrolled, the contemporary publishing world for fiction, and the challenges that he faces as a writer.

It was a pleasure putting this issue of diaphanous micro together with Ariel. Please enjoy moments of rest!

 

new short fiction [hybrid]

Solitude Sentence

. . . an empty vessel lay in the room’s darkness while beyond the night’s blurred gaze, draping over the world like some dull blanket, waited the iPhone blinking with drowsy glimmers that dimmed, shined, dimmed and shined, again and endlessly again, into the dismal room while thoughts of sleep and time taunted via glowing rose spirals until dusted glasses worn beyond the bed and glared at the red iPhone reflecting by the tint of a moonless sky; an icon, at last, was tapped on, and the night’s darkness brooded over once again into the empty room while the hollow eyes, mocked by those glowing rose spirals, still gazed at the screen dimming in unison with its own soft light, forcing the dismal body to turn away from the device once a blank piece of paper and pencil excavated themselves from the room’s darkness, letting eyes mind go numb by the night’s endless silence still sketching its pencil with paper to write an empty vessel lay in the room’s darkness while beyond the night’s blurred gaze, draping over the world like some dull blanket, waited the iPhone, blinking. . . 

 

An Incident

The wind felt sharp as it swirled through his hand spread wide like a plane’s resting wings, and his fingers impatiently tapped while hanging outside the car window. The other cars, basically parked in the middle of Wilshire, watched an ambulance swallow the poor pedestrian bemoaning his broken rib bones and missing shoes tumbling—practically striding down the street like some restless ghost figure cursed with a howling past—perambulated throughout the streets of Los Angeles thanks to the unsettled Santa Ana winds forcing hot air to swing traffic signals to swing like a haunted metronome. It is such a shame the expensive traffic cameras, looming over every street corner, never caught the victim’s state of mind, an infernal epiphany of pain, when steel struck flesh and an internal bone snapped in two.

 

Sea Glass

A speck of the glass’s luminescence peaked above the beach sand and pierced the gaze of a collector endlessly watching the shore for misshapen objects, hoping they would return joy to the wildflower-picking hands now wrinkled like some old coat. The collector could not fathom any time spent alone without some special someone to hold and share the discovery of that shining sea glass miraculously smoothed over by years of whipping sea torrents into an amulet of dull colors. It was more than a mere kaleidoscope of light beaming onto the sand once that sea glass, held to the sun like some astronomer’s telescope, reflected out onto the overcrowded Santa Monica Pier.

On a brisk Saturday morning, the usual sounds of carnival games chimed over the performers singing their typical melodies. And as the beam traveled over each performer carefully using a hand to block the stray ray piercing their left eye, it roamed towards the boardwalk roller coaster, rife with screaming passengers zooming by to dip near the ocean like a flying beast aching for a playful splash or two. The sea glass then reflected its ray of light onto the very edge of the boardwalk where a young soul sat alone in the silence of the extended Pacific, thinking about its vastness while chanting the sea was not a mask to nobody in particular. In a sudden fit of curiosity, the sea glass’s beam irked the right eye, forcing her concentration, as well as a neglected book held by a loosening grip, to slip into the depths of the ocean and ruminate in murky waters. It may loom for an eternity, thought the reader, or perhaps until the tide bloomed during a full moon, churning the shores stronger than the other nights, bringing all the other misshapen objects to spill onto the beach. They’d spill to shine their bright or dull or even radioactive specks of light towards the lonely beachgoers hoping to find the glory of lost glass pebbles molded by the sea. Some may claim that a mighty artist sculpted it like a piece of marble, thought the reader. Others may forget to use the right words when describing that tidal sensation of surprise.

 

Piano Dust

The thick layer of dust on the piano seemed more like a thin plastic film, Marie thought as she swiped a damp towel across its dark, wooden frame, recalling the moments when her father would sit on its bench, calloused fingers curled over the same keys, playing some notes while her mother, standing in the kitchen with a sponge, scraped a metal tray fused with burnt lasagna. She would sing along to his renditions of that one Errol Garner song, “Misty,” which, at the time, felt like a gushy melody of grown-up love that children such as herself would never understand, her mother would say. Until now, Marie realized, once the dusty air’s scent, lingering the living room, brought tears to her eyes, and she finally understood the beauty of those romantic duets. During those shoddily-crafted dishes, and her parents would eat and do nothing else but give off an awkward orchestra of loud chewing noises and heavy-nostril breathing. That was when she and her siblings, in their blessed innocence, distractedly gazed at the television without having the faintest clue of the dire finances her parents never maintained yet somehow convinced others that all was well. Her father would lie to the teachers, telling them everything was alright. The children were not worrying and bickering their rosy little cheeks over the used toys and inherited clothes. Especially the ripped jeans Marie had once loathed since they did not merely belong to her older sisters, but her mother back in the 1980s. Ripped jeans were now in style, he would claim proudly. Those were the days, thought Marie once she opened the piano cover to find hidden between the piano’s keys an aging photograph of her mother sitting on her father’s lap; both with a rare smile only seen in glossy photos like this one, reminding Marie of the purpose of her visit to the now empty house. She tapped two white keys down, listened to the out-of-tune piano, and let her mind flood with seemingly-forgotten memories of her former home filled with books, now decaying on some dingy bookshelf next to the flowers. The Flowers were still everywhere. They were the ones her mother admired so much, especially the silly daffodils her father secretly loathed. He loathed them all, she remembered, except for the bright pink orchards. He always refused to smile at the flowers, but Marie knew he loved it when her mother brought them home, giving the living room a sense of color; they were all dried now, wilting in the vases placed delicately throughout her empty home now crowded with dust lingering in the air like stray words forgotten by a grieving mind.

 

A Moment of Rest

After sitting in the sun for an hour, Edith felt the skin on her hands stiffen against the park’s summer heat. The muscles in her left arm, despite feeling strained after holding a book near to her face, remained sturdy. She did her best to focus on its sentences despite skipping over a few words now and then. A squirrel, carrying some trash in its mouth, scurried in front of her feet. She felt a new sense of motion irk in her peripheral vision, so she lowered the book and watch the squirrel’s route back and around a distant tree rife with flowers. They were grand floral spirals, she imagined. A mild breeze blew around the large plant, forcing its foliage to tremble. Edith’s left hand, now shaking from holding the book, eased itself closer to the grass as her tired lips murmured the only passage she recalled from her reading.

“But Lot’s wife looked back, and…”

She slouched her spine deeper into the curve of the bench and felt its concrete warmth radiate into the exposed slit between her shirt and trousers. Her eyelids began to droop, and her heartbeat eased, letting the wind overpower her breathing. The skin on her face, veiled by an indescribable peace, continued to stiffen against the sun’s warmth.

“And she became a pillar of salt.”

Her body, now sweating against the summer heat, felt the tingling of a ladybug crawling on her forehead. Edith smiled while motioning her right hand to flick the insect away from her scalp, but her body refused to obey. A numbing sensation filled her hands while each blood cell, tumbling in a clumsy rush throughout her veins, hardened to the rough texture of sand scraping and colliding in the slowed circulation beneath her skin. Edith’s muscles, once flexible, stiffened into smooth, plastered cement; her skin, no longer warm, continued to harden against the summer heat until she felt her pulse clang, bringing the now ceramic heart to a shattering halt. Her many bones, seeping in a glossy marble, no longer kept a spongy inner consistency. The lungs froze in a crystallized web of quartz and shining stalagmites, becoming the only space left hollow and damp from her last inhale. Her stomach solidified into a well of obsidian, pouring into the intestines to create a catacomb of food, preserving the excrement as fossils stuck in amber. The sweat on her forehead, now converting into small crystals of salt, felt delicate enough to be shoved off her body by a mighty breeze.

She suspected her chalked liver feeling soft if it somehow grazed against her other organs, but a chilling feeling distracted her in this moment of rest. She frantically visualized every microscopic cell and molecule in her body alchemizing itself into sedentary matter until her soft brain disintegrated to sprinkle fine diamond dust in the hollow portions of the skull; her vision of the sun evolved into a blank screen of soft light while the eyes, still half-covered by two immovable concrete eyelids, would harden into two spheres of speckled granite before the sun set.

A gray pigeon flew by the immobile body, landed on the polished head to nuzzle inside a nook behind the left ear as another ladybug, this time wearing a pure red color without spots, crawled up from the book still clenched in the unmoving hands. Despite the sharp incline of the slouching pillar-body, the animal moved at a calm pace, braving a few spiders stitching a sticky web around the knees and ankles. After recalling the existence of its wings, the ladybug flew off, and a squirrel eventually wandered over to the body. It cautiously sniffed the book, climbed onto the still torso, then fled to a spot in the park with less sunlight.

 

The Homeless Fart

It was near a lonely tree when I first let my wind out, out with the sound of the rustling leaves chiming over my own senses, chiming beyond the mere lawn of Rancho Park and further than the gathering places where people picnic and play recreational sports like tennis, golf, basketball, football, soccer, badminton, tag, capture the flag, baseball, flag football, swimming, Frisbee tossing, croquet. It all evokes cheer inducing activities with crowds to collect the vague notion of unity and the senses. I always adored those senses but only truly felt them once the particles of my gut, dispersing in pollinated drafts of fecal trumpet sounds, erupted at the sight of a rainbow appearing in the sky and my heart. It was not just me leaping at the glow of Old God’s promise and the Calamus tribe flag. I floundered in a stupefied yet restless palpitation at the oneness mentioned earlier with the world once words failed. I babble to the world, and nobody hears those words. Words, with their naive smiles, could never possibly grasp that feeling except only in the passing of gas in short, subtle toots to the park’s pine trees still growing quietly across this entire park after so many years of residents toiling over useless affairs such as the conflict regarding who really owned the oil seeped deep into the earth. That damned oil fermenting in the nearby land before the dawn of humanity. The damned oil asking residents where the dividing line should be placed to define where the a golf course begins and a public park ends; now I feel a gust of wind, hidden as some sublime force, sweep up my brown draft of personal air as my hand, still leaning against the pine tree in a fit of gasping exhaustion, stroked along with the shift in the gentle breeze. I am brushing a new touch. I am changing the mood of the world with my farts. What was once my holy scent is now carrying itself out and over the well-trimmed grass fields fenced off for those golfers patiently aiming with a careful eye towards a bulls-eye shot. It was a goal I already gifted them with my homeless wafts curling up their noses. I hope to burn nostrils and seep my chemical affairs into their white clothes. I hope to dirty their scent of fresh laundry detergent and liberated sweat, tinting them all my microscopic brown shade.

For now, the wind is careless and cold. My bones even ache as if it may rain sometime soon. I hope I may find some shelter tonight against the mighty air.

 

The Mirror

It was difficult for Jacob to look in the mirror at any moment of the day, especially when he brushed his teeth and, instead of merely watching himself massage prescription toothpaste over every single tooth in a calm clockwise motion, kept noticing every detail of his face magnified and stretched out beyond everything the dictionary defined as hideous. His pores felt visible and his nostrils, flaring and breathing and untamed like some horse snout, flared as he grazed the opaque scars on his skin and recalled when Big Benjy barged into the silence of the bathroom during their younger years. Jacob was very aware of the dangers from shaving, forcing his hand to tremble, both then and now, in fear at the sound of that foul beast of a brother. He still felt hatred as well whenever naming thinking of that monster. He hated all his tricks, especially when Big Benjy tried to convince the younger Jacob that the reflection in the mirror, that one right there in front of him, was the real Jacob. It even shivered with a hand clenching the very same toothbrush while the other Jacob was the actually reflection of that real boy. The real Jacob was still walking around somewhere in bliss while the fake Jacob just meandered like a stunt double always waiting to look back in the mirror and confront the true Jacob face to face.

While he examined the skin under his eyelids, Jacob recalled another moment when Big Benjy, in a horrible attempt of teenager humor, told little Jacob of the legendary Bloody Mary. Her pallid face always loomed in the mirror’s peripheral spaces like some semi-transparent photograph and haunted all the poor souls staring at themselves in the mirror for more than 16 seconds. The grotesque Countess, who apparently watched everyone with bleeding eyes, had fallen into a similar trap of vanity on the day before her wedding once her own reflection brought shameful tears of shameful to crawl down her face and, at possibly the worst moment, her soon to be husband, Septimus, marched in to witness Mary’s smeared face. Apparently, he tossed himself right off the balcony in the midst of London’s warm summer night and she was forced to wait and wither in shame while horrendously grasping at the mirror with a stained red hand for eternity so all those like the grown Jacob, who just realized he was still staring into that mirror, would hoped the foul woman would come and finally rescue him from that mirrored world at last.

all short fiction ©2019

 

a conversation with Ariel N. Banayan & Krysia Jopek [November, 2019]

When did you start writing fiction seriously?

Well, I’ve been writing both fiction and poetry since the end of high school in 2012, but I only began writing seriously towards the end of my undergrad in 2017. I like to think that was when both reading and writing became a vital and powerful space for me to explore the world around me. There were so many things I wanted to read and explore, especially as a native to certain parts of West Los Angeles, as the son of Iranian Jewish immigrants, and as a person living during an unprecedented technological boom.

What inspires you to write?

Right now, I can honestly say that my biggest motivation to write comes from exploring the limits of other art forms like film/television, photography, and music. I really enjoy the idea that storytelling can convey a different shade of an emotion just based on the presented form and medium. Writing then becomes such a thrill since I get to navigate through my own relationship with what the written word can show and tell to an audience, as well as what it can’t do for them. Sometimes I fail at it all, and I at least hope for a graceful landing. Other times, it becomes such a thrill just trying to see how I bring that sense of novelty to the written word. It’s fun.

When did you first publish and where?

My first published piece appeared in Anastamos, which is Chapman University’s graduate journal. At the time, I had just started in its MFA program, and I didn’t really involve my writing with people in the program. But I was given the opportunity to submit some horror of mine, and it was accepted just in time for Halloween, 2018.

What is your experience of the current publishing world for fiction?

So far, the publishing world seems both open and unforgiving for contemporary writers. I still feel really inexperienced to even consider this question, but I’ve heard stories from people who have been rejected countless times and were on the brink of giving up their hopes and dreams, only to have their work finally accepted. However, I also think that the world of writing is shifting as well. I’ve heard agents and publishers explain the importance behind a writer’s social media presence and how those numbers give the work a better pitch on a marketing perspective, which might push a YouTuber’s ghostwritten memoir over writers. No disrespect to those YouTubers and online personalities with published pieces of work out there, but I still believe that good writing is good writing. Readers will always want writing that moves them and accomplishes everything promised by the writer, even if certain levels of experimentation are pushed aside.

Can you talk about the value of your MFA? What have you learned that you wouldn’t have learned elsewhere?

So far, Chapman’s MFA program has taught me the importance of organizing my time to write, how to really engage with the world of writing beyond the workshop, and the overall reality of the writer life. I used to think a person could just write a single piece and throw it at publishers or websites or whatever to accept and share at their liberty. But that’s never been the case. I now know a person needs to be much more open-minded and involved around those types of opportunities. I’m also grateful to be in an MFA program that provides a class about the writing world at large. I never imagined how writers like ourselves are situated in the publishing world until it was openly discussed in that class.

How are your peers? Is there a sense of community in your MFA program?

Community is the most significant value of an MFA program, and I’m so happy for the one at Chapman. I understand how people can hold a particular brand of skepticism towards anyone voluntarily paying more money for more schooling. However, the specific MFA environment at Chapman University forces one to understand how vital a community is for the writing process itself. Pretty much everyone in my program comes from a unique background and identity that gives every interaction so much life and variety. Every workshop becomes an exciting and vital environment where we can all just lean back to see how and why different tastes affect the audience. I’ve realized parts about my style and taste that I would never have imagined without my MFA crew. And the support we lend to each other makes a difference, too. Sometimes writing becomes such vacuum of one’s energy and time that I begin to worry if it I’m just letting waste flush down the toilet. I know those moments of panic are based on my insecurities, not on my actual ability to write. Still, the way we support each other as writers in my MFA (or any community, to be quite honest) becomes the best motivation to keep on writing, no matter how much the words and stories “stink.” And I know I would probably get the work finished anyway, but the community makes me feel less conscious about those flaws while also helping me understand the best way to overcome those insecurities and keep on writing.

What have been some seminal texts that you’ve studied in your MFA classes?

The Completed Works of Wallace Stevens, Guillaume Apollinaire’s Alcools, Forrough Farrakhzad’s Sin—are the some of the most recent books I’ve finished that have given me a unique outlook on my writing and thought. Along those lines, I think working with Carolyn Forche and reading her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, has shaped how to value my place of a writer and explore what that all means in our weird, contemporary atmosphere.

Will your thesis be a collection of short works or a novel? Do you write novels as well as short fiction?

My thesis is starting to solidify as a kind of hybrid. It’s going to fall as a collection of short stories inside a novel or a novel containing short stories. Either way, it’s going to be a compilation of connecting shorter works placed within a context of an outer narrative structure like One Thousand and One Nights. I definitely have some novels planned that I hope to get to one day, but I guess I need to tackle one task at a time for now.

Outside of your MFA program, do you have a community of peers with which you exchange ideas and/or work?

A good majority of my closest childhood friends are involved with the arts in some way. As consumers and producers of all these different kinds of expression, we bring such a unique perspective to everything delivered in front of us. I’m so grateful for that dynamic and their friendship even when our tastes diverge. It’s such a perfect situation since we also mostly come from the same cultural background and love to celebrate and explore what we have to offer for each other.

What do you typically read on your own?

I’m such a bore when it comes to reading anything other than the plain fiction and poetry books piling up on my never-ending reading list. I’ll always love defining works within genres like Gothic fiction, but I’m not too particular about what I read. Good writing can come from anywhere at any time, and as long as the writing blooms from a valued place/perspective and it’s well written, I’ll want to read it.

Who are the writers that have influenced you the most?

Joyce and Kafka, definitely. Both writers speak to me on a more personal level that enters the realm of the ineffable. I don’t know how to accurately describe the phenomenon of reading their works, but it’s something like an epiphany of recognition, like a piercing spotlight shining onto my body. I’ll never forget the first time I read their works and realized I wasn’t alone. I hope one day I my writing can bring others to that similar moment of recognition.

What is your process from the inception of an idea for a work of fiction to the end product? Do you have any specific writing habits or rituals?

Sometimes I just stare at a wall and mentally explore whatever feelings come to me and how that could be contextualized as a narrative until I feel like I can write it thoroughly. Other times, I force myself to write and shove through whatever cluelessness that’s taunting me not to write, which is a skill I’m learning to develop. Typing with my eyes closed is a habit I’ve recently picked up. My laptop screen sometimes strains my vision, so I just let my fingers take control. That then becomes an excellent excuse to edit the work as well.

What is the goal for each piece of fiction that you create? I realize that each piece is different, but is there a specific goal (or goals) that you have for the reader of your creative writing?

With these specific pieces here in this issue of diaphanous micro, I really wanted to explore how language could enhance or limit the reader’s perception. I wasn’t really insisting on presenting a solid story with the typical moments of storytelling found in most fiction. While those traditional aspects may be present, I was more concerned in situating a perspective based on whatever mental circumstances the pieces themselves allowed. If there isn’t a character there to perceive or enact on those feelings, I still wanted to press my hand against the invisible walls of those constraints and feel them, if that makes sense.

Do you have any hobbies that complement your writing life? That provide thinking time for writing and/or a needed break from linguistic experience?

I can honestly say that playing an instrument and playing video games have such an essential role in my well-being and artistic output. I can’t imagine my life if I never played the piano or picked up The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as a child. I’m so glad I never stopped experiencing those other art forms. They both give me that space away from writing and the linguistic experience while also making me engage with a non-verbal form of storytelling.

Do you think it’s essential for a contemporary writer to be engaged with social media? Why or why not?

While it certainly helps, I don’t think it’s important to have a huge presence or sense of engagement on the various social media platforms. Like I mentioned above, social media presence can really “sell” you well and give you an outreach to a larger audience. However, I do think it’s important to have some sort of involvement with social media, even if you send out a few tweets a month or upload some random stuff onto Instagram every now and then to experience whatever the hell a meme is/can become. The culture that’s emerging on social media platforms and the internet overall are, in my unqualified opinion, going to become a zeitgeist for the next few generations of content creators and audiences. I couldn’t help to think of Fitzgerald when I read this question, and how so much of his writing is just reacting to whatever the 1920s retrospectively meant to him. Even though I don’t believe in cyclical time, I think still that everything going on nowadays, particularly in social media and content platforms like YouTube, falls under the same cultural high you’d find in a Fitzgerald novel.

What advice do you have for other writers?

Read everything you can. Read whatever makes you think, makes you confused, takes you out of your comfort zone, brings you back to that comfort zone, makes you angry over its incompetence, shakes you to your core, makes you feel like you’d never accomplish a great piece of writing, and makes you realize you could do it better. And take the time to watch a little Seinfeld now and then. It’s good for your soul.

Are there any challenges that you personally face or find you need to overcome as a writer?

I really began reading and writing to see how I could break past all the fear and guilt I always felt in my life, even if that meant getting lost in more abstract, outdated language or just giving up. While the discomfort never stops, I know my reaction to that discomfort can change and adapt for the better. I know that challenging oneself in this day and age is probably one of the most energy-consuming things a person could ever do. Still, I guess that’s the only way we grow as artists and people even if it means failing, dusting yourself off, and rising to start again.

How did you learn about diaphanous micro?

I had brought in one of the pieces published here to a fiction workshop, and it was not well-received at all. I took a step back and asked myself where I could submit this type of experimental writing. I began searching for more hybrid and experimental places to publish. Then on one chilly California day, I received a notification on my phone from Google. It was like some digital divine providence.

Is there anything else that you would like readers to know about you as a writer or fellow human?

There’s a quote that really resonates with me, and I feel like it says more than anything I could ever write: In reality, I’m actually very fun – Nathan Fielder.

 

Ariel N. Banayan tours “Tehrangeles”

Los Angeles Review of Books — Ariel N. Banayan

A Burning Itch by Ariel N Banayan — Anastamos

So you’re in an MFA program–now what? by Ariel N. Banayan

Ariel Banayan [Arlel Ban] on Twitter

Airel Banayan [Arlel Ban] on Instagram

 

biographical note:

Ariel N. Banayan is an emerging writer born and raised in West Los Angeles’ thriving Iranian Jewish community. He received a BA in English from UCLA in 2017 and is currently pursuing an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing at Chapman University in Orange County. He also co-hosts the monthly reading series, Write to Read, where emerging and featured authors throughout Southern California are invited to read their work and drink a beer in front of an audience. Previously, his writing has been featured in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Anastamos, Chapman University’s graduate literary journal. Most recently, Brilliant Flash Fiction long-listed his writing in their Fall flash fiction contest.

 

 

 

 

introduction to bleeding backwards —Krysia Jopek [November 2019]

Feast your eyes and brains on diaphanous micro 3.15: Heath Brougher’s bleeding backwards, the most mammoth diaphanous micro to date! This issue will actually be printed as a physical book by a different publisher in 2020. I’ll let the poetry, visual art, and statement of poetics [aesthetics] speak for itself. Enjoy!

> > >

pliant verse: new poetry

Flac-Id-I-ty

 St(upid)ate sponsored stale bread  ,,

death-de-fin(e)alellà

striven d0wntowne d®own wa-

ters  ,,  shuttered streets

of youth  ,,     ß~~~~~~~~~à     sca(rry)rs

of an (Om) eternal ethno-oracle

fugal(ism)ist  ;;  bombdust  ,,

[howdy horn heisGordon]

suey slop(ed) surgical(ogical)ly orn(amaste)amental ;;

a manna his wor(l)d  ;;

proof pops out(whorled!!)ward

polar(bear)oid snappen

snatchery drownt in wat(tons)er soupà

the naked thighs of Janeà

fully tempted Kierga moon

lusty 99 thousand y(onder)ears

br(right-here!!)ought for a(n) Apex [WHOOOOO!]à

ash W(ittnessing)ednesday [trash     =     this]  ;;

bottom of the 9^th

for a broken oriole—

            otrawise  =

                              finite;;.

 

[[[[[———-DO NOT USE IN POEM!!————]]]]]]

[[[[[[dopers worship Uranus, strung o(ooooohhhh!)ut a(ha)tta ho(we)me plate!—

h(ipster)it me a gr(h)and sala[om?]i]

[a haircut in the 8^th inning [(?????)]

[dopers like baseball but baseball likes to fuck with the doper’s head with infield fly rules and what(ever!)not]]]]]

 

Confidence of the Many

 Accidents—happen–

(faux)stance

of   a   hid-

e(i)n

haph(ologram)azard

we(eek)akness ;;.

 

Stir

Fr(om out)eak coleslaw frisk  ,,  om high down

Apis quopom of tin  ,,  of tin(n)y~~~~~à  ,,

,, ;; ,, !! .. • ;; € ,, [%~& = +] ,, :: ,, ^^ {*****}  ,,

plaintiffs Walpole  ,,  Oakland vapor

doorknob Wicklow  ,,  weeblow lapidary

 

—we’re gonna g(oogle)obble up the mustard seeds the i(diots)ngrates spit out—!;.

 

Orb

Monroestopsis  ”  Montreal

 

Bloodpoisoning  ”  BloodFlint

 

Op(youless)ence  “  Omnibus

 

Thrombosis  “  Thumb(at)tack

 

Nearing Asparagus

Original ingre(e)d(y)ients à[0Oo oO0]ß

rhutabeggar rutaugular  ,,  rheu(barb)my  ,,  r(hoo!)ooms ,, 

nearing asparagus says a road sign  ,,

typo-tato  ,,  sq(i)sh soon ripe enough

to sizzledance with olive’s oil(spilt)y veggies rife with Vitamin Z (vitamin z)

cooking up what was dug upà     (0à[om]ß0)

from s(z)ounds of b(lowingup!!)ursting seeds planted in dirt months before; ;.

 

[—-DO NOT USE IN POEM!!—–]

 [[[[[Wel(l that’s about it, folks!!)come signs direct brief inhabitant(sentience-full)

straight to the Ex(ist for a short amount of time)it sign before

the li(v)fe-forms barely catch one of those breaths of Oxygen

this p(eculiar)articular planet is famous for!!]]]]]

[[[[[“’Nearing Asparagus” is honestly a sign my dad once saw while driving down some old country road around Lancaster County. He even had a plastic reprint of the sign made that I own to this day. Apparently, story goes: He was driving down some backroad and saw a sign that read “Fresh Fruit and Vegetables Ahead.” After a few more miles the sign reappeared, this time with an even closer mileage attached. THEN, apparently, a sign appeared that read simply “Asparagus in 5 miles.” Then “Asparagus in 2.5 miles.” And, finally, the fixer: a sign that simply read “Nearing Asparagus.” If you ask my dad he will tell you to this very day how much he regrets not stopping right then and there and “borrowing” that final sign. It’s a regret he’ll have to take to his grave. He DID remember exactly the color, shape, and size of that Billboard so he could have replicas made and this explains why I’ve had a “Nearing Asparagus” sign hanging somewhere in my bedroom since my mid-teens. It was a diamond-shaped sign, all in white, with the words, in big bright green font, spelling out “Nearing Asparagus.” And let us not forget that the sign had a green, curvy outline at its edges. In fact, IF the publisher lets me show you this sign in this book, I WILL show you the sign. True story.]]]]]

 

W(r)ench-eater

Noonish grindle

girth obituary  ,,

 

elder aura time pressure /—à

unwrapped Ea(terofacid)ster/

Mendoza line Freakfest/ {Freedomfest}

ripe lice/

liquorish blood  //—àà

 

San Antonio guit-tar–(0)-feedbac(rack)k(wards)  ;;

Pavlovian response to hummmmmmm(anesque)mmmm  ,,

humm(om)mmmnmmm(mmmmm)mmmmm(um! um! um! um! um!) of motors  ;;

indent(ured)ed interstate/demonstraight~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~> [ode to odd uncles!]

frail white sneakers   //|\\   tenn–is shoeless Exist(ential)ence

revels in the real re(V)eal of a Multiverse of black sox and white holes  /

apply pressureà

gaseous drainà

land of rotten spicketsà

 

we are     n o t   (t) h e r e     anymore  ,,

we are (un)officially among the Elsewheres

of Sentient Existence—death of course always

a very(muchquiteso) possibility of a wormhole

into another dimension of perception of creation

of such heavy Suchness in this current realm of 8 sensations

are more than likely rendered useless to the fathomlessness

of a denseness of Multiversal fullness which likely feeds us

a continuation of its Continuum of an Eternal Essence

founded in Endlessness of various senses ;;.

 

[———DO NOT USE IN POEM!!——–]

[[[[[I’m talking E.D.s! Extra-Dimensional-being type-Elsewhere, motherfucker!!]]]]]

[[[[[when a Human, with their 5 of 8 senses known of on this planet, all tuned to just the proper setting, looks out onto the sunrise/set we do not see the magnetic field—this is accepted and usually shaken off with a sort of cavalier ignorance that has become the hallmark of human arrogance as we gaze with perfections made of purest personification, instead of meekly dismissing the EGO, we actually argue whether or not the Dimension stacked atop ours even exists to begin with  !  We were fine to dismiss the fact that we  were eyeless to the magnetic field but DID NOT go so far as to dismiss, or call into question, its very Existence, since Science has assured us of this with an such endless recurrence that we wrestle not with its Thusness but have formed a nearly latent acceptance of its presence. YET… when that idea holds heavy ignorance or flat out unknowingness of Existence, humanity will hold out a resistance, and, at a usually dangerous insistence, ask as to why it was never completely informed of this during its usual indulgence of useless information so oft eaten of to find their spot among the weak obeisance they’ve come to call Existence only to find out that their own weakness and lack of curiosity when matters turn to all subjects concerning Science, that this information, once relentless, was muted and hushed due to the dull and dim and dumb observance that Science and Scientific arrogance that human perception usually finds boring as if its Multiversal acceptance is more of a nuisance—thus it becomes unwanted, careless and obsequious in these all-too-human perceptions that thrive on the convenience of their utterly false Manmade obsessions and, instead of removing these horrid repressions, would rather gather comfortably in the warm, deceitful pockets of obvious  IGNORANCE  instead of embracing the utter Truthfulness of Human Existence and instead sit facing the wrong direction simply because it’s tilted to a more Truthless spot of convenience concerning their ULTIMATE duty of embracing the Truthfulness abound that is not nearly as easily accessed but is, at the end of the day, the   only    direction for the human mind, its perceptions and proclivities and unperspicuous tendencies, to sway among this multitudinous Multidimensional Mulitiverse;…]]]]]

 

Another Orb

 

diiiiiiiiiippin dots  €€  iiiiiiiiicecreeeeeeeeam  ,,

 

diiiiiiiiiiiimpling dots  **   iiiiiiiiicecreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam  ,,

 

dumpling dots  ¥¥  I scream!—;

 

Summer Murder

S h (r) i n e s er(adicated)ected/ / / / /

in a glitt(t)er-I mutt(ttttt)ering murmur–

            ing moment-0(mori)

of fa(t)ede(a)d memori(a)es ([(memory-YAH!)])  ;;.

 

[[[[[————DO NOT USE IN POEM!:———–]]]]]

[[[[[[“cut your nose upon the spansule”]]]]]

[[[[[[“impressionario Gn(om)es  =  GiANT  laWN shamE”]]]]]

[[[[“tacky {though I’ve always thought in a good kind of way = like something you’d see in a music video for an alternative band from the early-mid 1990s}”]]]]

[[[[[“eighteenth inning grass”]]]]]

[[[[[“it is twenty-nineteen-84!!”]]]]];;,

 

Technocracy

Radio legs

lay the television’s eggs

all warped… (wh)rip-

ed ed ed(en) e(n)dà

w h o r l e dà      /     whooshed     /

[back in b(l)ack singing sugary songs of surgery]

 

Aleece             al(l)live  Phifee ;;;;; FeeFee

tonal vibratory soundt(r)ack

 

bite      bit        biting               offa(l)  ,  a little

…………………………..atta boy!à

,,,,,second

circle   of   a   stitch

on road(t)/rip(t)

ricknamed       “what/what?”~~~~~~à

every;;

prod of gray thumbp(rint)ick

or appeal~~~~à~~~~~~à

dust in one’s grieving

cha cha grrrrrupt

&                                                         explode into erupt

& then(n)

NON-EX–IS(?)-TENCE!!.

 

Off-White Autumn

Iscariot sparrow  =

wildamounts of melted waxwings   |

lunged through aisles of orch(id)ards  ,,

cr(u)ashed crisp

into fold of dishevel,..;

     .            ;         .         ,

&/or

litmus test————à

mucus penetrated, perturbed—à

……….de–flated……….

 

a human in wolf’s clothing

@ aisle #8

instead of cloud #9  ,,

#9 #9 #9 #9 #9 #9 #9 #9 #9… ((et-cet-era))  ;;.

 

Protocol(d)

Re(re)c(h)ord the grapefruit juice

in its midair tan(TrulyTantamount)trum ;;à invi(nc)sible

 

Hear ye! Hea(he speak so wrongly)r ye! Hea(d spun so crookedly)r ye!

 

Parliamentary      P-r-o-c-l-a-m-a-t-I-o-n-s     State     a (@)

means to an end

of Humanity

is officially

with(in)ered visibility;.;.

 

Primarily Draining

Crushed crimson;

flowers drink

from the sky

until their heads turn to dust;

a blood-red powder

rides the tail of the wind;

infecting; this is not blood;

blood of years; of yore;

of crisp age; taken on

more pallid and dry formations

shaped as crooked-looking wizened wizards;

 

remember it! ;

it wafts through post-postindustrial air;

as; you; read these very; words;

 

Spark

Longface; Harvard bomb;

not hungry; saddletoes; pick

your shape; scrape the sky;

atomic Yale; infectious mediocrity;

joker card; bent secret; missiles

take out menstruating teenagers;

this is thus—the thusness is this;

slow diver; flawless dream; copacetic

cotton candy; blink; blunk; bloonk; faded paint

gets a second coat; wolverines

and snapdragons giggle; chaos

rises and erupts; babies strung out

on Gerber; the Earth rolls out of its cage;

 

All Eyes Elsewhere

Your many mopey ideas

at least I failed every time you asked

at least we still have eyesockets where our eyes used to be;

to go; to fit;     all connected just like a computer’s visceral wires;

veinlike; red/purple strings singing swinging in the wind;

we feel around; but don’t find;           our eyes; that is;

maybe just plywood for no reason;

notthatitwouldmatteranyway;            how in the whorled would we reconnect them?;

how’d; we; implement them in a fashion befitting of usefulness;

re-implant them

to bring forth a lost and gone sensation  that it’s tantamount to BEYOND FUCKED UP

in how we took it for granted; grunted; gradual grudge; grunge

is what; we will eventually find ourselves; neckdeep in;

whatever hazard          there will be   waiting for us;

like all the fairytail books say; an ending is inevitable;

though YOU knew this from the get-go; right?;

of course you did!;— which is funny;— since you don’t

even exist and never have in among these endless existential

that run so Multiversinally amuck!;

 

The Churning Of

Rainy whispers stab through fog;

tumble of seasons; humid; inhuman;

difficulty drawing air;

overflow; noise of rasp;

the destruction of all—

ceaseless; distortion persists;

the burden of unseen things;

unbreathable air thrives—

hangs as if stapled to the sky;

 

slouching hominoids everywhere;

 

Hollyward

These vain I watch

talking through thrust jewel;

they lay on their personal island;

secret tropical privacy; flashing;

the mental patients—; they want us to know;

“I’m angry that you see me

on the island where I wave”;

lies through thick air; diamond air;

sparkles flick chaotic luminosity among starry daylight;

the hollow and their conformity—

their contest of and for popularity;

you eat the baby salmon eggs on the noon porch

next to the street with all the busy camera shops;

through the years it will of course

collapse and bloom the true monster of You

turned headward toward the light— now your enemy—

Nature’s redemption; hollow cracks undeniable; waves of wrinkles;

pristine tablecloth acned with stains of bright karmic mustard seeds;

 

Downrose

I am a peripatetic [not the bad kind]

in the adjective form of the noun—

that is, I pace while in deep thought;

I’ve burnt trails in my livingroom carpet

during times when the headpressure hits

and all thoughts aflutter;

I’ve been to plains of thought with my own perceptions

no one else has ever been to;

[should I thank my slight epilepsy?];

seen the world; reality just a word

from such a boiled-down standpoint

of strippedback horror and

and how nobody really knows anything

and there is no such thing as real intelligence

that people fake and flaunt every day—

and living in this everpresent Manmade reality

even those who are fact-filled

and those who are philosophy-filled are left wondering;

 

every doctor should take down their degrees

from the walls of their office;

sit back and say;

“Yes, I don’t know”;

 

Those Vegas

Humble air not here

—only the squalid dry

and the monotonous plantlife it breeds;

sucked so deeply dull into boredom

that we wager for amusement;

trading snakes for cherries;

building and building over the years;

bright row after row; See to shining See;

eyes rapidly jumping; scattering here and there;

 

observe the electric colors we have wrought—

 

we dot a wicked luminescence among these meadows;

bright and hollow; steeped in the belly

of our parched moneyfade streets;

sins invented to control the herd;

the seeds of sin afoul the plasticlife;

planted by the drunken rapist preachers who harvested this town;

 

Tin Foil Wings

Time flies on tin foil wings

into the not-so-married face of a mirror fracture;

old lady weepen in the garden big teardrop rain

feeds the flowers, birthing only bugs from the dirt—

 

so many children and not one removed from her womb—

 

the foggy house no one visits;

juice orange swallow lonesome morning

reverberates only echoes and shadows as fiends

are scraped from the walls where they bounce

the rapid cuss through the air;

 

days turned non-tepid—the bitter rush of bonechill comes,

regular as newspaper; the eyes flood

smearing ink—a frail blurry life

never lets a focus peek through;

daisies are dull flowers on the cracked linoleum bathroom floor;

she full well knowing, reflected in many-faceted mirror,

that hope can’t fly far on tin foil wings.

 

Sick; Overly Soft

Foodstove unused; no need—

fastfood reign supremely high;

foodstave infected; calorie and trans;

tired bodies; arms reach for

the apple; its purity;

 

unattainable;

 

the gelatinous generation— laying stagnantly

in the chair; the weight of the world;

even blubberbones searching for health

can find none; no oasis; just chemical greasedrippings;

bodyfails; no movement; soured malnutrition;

human interference; trapped here

in this toxic cage; softerskin;

arms are still reaching

for that apple;

 

unattainable;

 

Languish

Stuck; I’m;

now; nowhere

to move; to

think; the random society

has forced this on me;

 

I feel I’ve nothing left to give;

nothing left to offer of

my own broken

insides; battered;

drained, I’m;

 

also;

fuck you;

I’m standing up;

might even spread wings;

 

Catching Cancer

Their highest love-meeting fool

by fool-their cackling laughs mingle

<with the content><candles blow out>

electric stoves (l)amps and razors go on

~someone lives again~  #s are given

to decipher the dead from the alive

[on a metaphysical level],

all coated [in the glistenings]

of a blood{bath} ripe with tumors

[timorous fruit><tumescent fruit]

festering in dense cancer: fun with the monkey

[take the mind off]

——-keeps wiping snot on your shirt——-

as you catch the sickness

in the palm of your lungs.

 

FUBAR

My God!; my gash!; I’ve

never seen a wound of such syphilitic

magnitude than the one you carry in your mind!;—

a truly poisoned person, not by

 

the toxic flowers and air; instead mangled

so deeply by society, hearsay, propaganda—

the confusion machine perplexing the confounded masses—

 

humans shackled and caged by technocracy’s easy essence;

building their Insane Army founded in delusional states of manic static;

amassing; spreading through infection to infection misinformation—

a play upon emotion and any/all rationale is wiped clearly off

 

for most people; hence this personified cauldron is stirred,

and the disease effects the great populace—

similar to mercury-poisoning, thought-poisoning

swims in phantasmagoric waters; the waves

 

soon breaching the land, dark wakings

and black eyes and minds asleep in permanent limbo;

simple robotic slaves of the talking moving picturescreen—

 

the greatest slave empire Mankind has ever known;

 

Sarin Gas for the Soul

Human flesh and burning ventriloquists

are as human as human and what it is to be alive

among the Oxytocin addicts constantly

popping out more life for the death by natural selection;

 

smug glob and hungry for heroin you bite

into not flesh [not human flesh, at least] of the Mayapple,

and I just let you know that you’ll always be in my hurt;

throat thrush talkinghush and drink

the rubies in the Robitussin, the not-healing flush

of shiny toy landmines or the sowers of lemons,

but of the jar of immortality sitting right next to

the machinegun, and as you fall asleep you wonder,

“are there guns in heaven?” and wake to

a farewell, the cleft, the cliff—    two diverse

energies flowing at a simultaneous constant;

 

human flesh spouts its patriotism

sprouting patriotism [war’s main catalyst]

not seeing the filth of the future, instead

I yelled let’s make this the Rulemaker’s Reckoning

in which we swim through oceans of teeth

and mansions of whores to pry the dagger

from their cold dead hands; we eat not

of terror pie but of mint julep

in the fiery nights while the rest of the populace

are forever spun by the spin doctors;

not a true thought to be had; mangled mumblings;

their arrogant smashmouthed words; for we

know that life is rain or shine;

 

all’s strangely quiet at the bustling marketplace;

the professional bridgeburners down the road;

rigging explosives so the bridge will tumble inward; downward;

like falling elevators and flaming lemmingdrops;

vile cakes of human flesh; bullets and babies;

big bloodclouds on the horizon;

tomorrow tickets go on sale for the extinction; smackdab

in america, where everything is never enough;

insatiably always reining supreme; the rug never fully wrung dry;

more always wanted; more always gotten; the scent of sound

conjuring umpires and apes to make the call;

thinking forward toward the present;

slouching toward ataxia day by day

as the clocksucker engulfs more time; slowly but surely

we will have our death guaranteed by american suffocation;

nine more years of winter; all the knives and molars in the world;

the entire heath!;— the vast wasteland!;

america run amuck with cakesuckers who waddle the streets

cracking the cement; did they brazen me out in high

school or did they devour me whole?; Truth be told I checked out

of my own volition and devoured them all!; simply by not playing their games

it turns out every last one ended up selling out except me!;

I am actually grateful for these yuppy idiots; I love every one of them;—

just as I love all the child molesters and rapists before them—

those scumbags made me fucking Invincible!!;

I don’t even “think” for now I KNOW that nothing can destroy me

and that I can destroy and overcome ANYTHING!…

I enter states of ecstatic transcendence when I think about how

no one has even begun to see what I’m going to do to this Human Race!;

I am grateful to each Genius whose eye I may have caught only to let them down;—

for now I have a clean slate for what I am Truly going to bring

and the gifts I have Truly been sent here to offer the world;

for I am the Ubermensch gone terribly misunderstood—

now, I will be able to show you a purer form of me—of Human—of Genius—

that sparkle that caught your eye but was never fully investigated;

my only mistake was in trying to be understood; after all that Plato and Emerson

said about that you’d think I’d have known!;— no more worries now;

no holding back; nothing but my purest Truth to share;

 

biting deeper into human flesh and thought;

incessantly incessant; pantomimes of pensiveness;

the reality of Postmodern Bleeding; humans are always bleeding—

we go suiciding as the suicidish tourguide shows us

the Kill-Yourself Collection deep into the overtone of night;

the scent of silence; of nothingness; black

as a hole; not even stoneflowers bloom in this kingdom of endless eclipse;

sickly jet-setters of the white trash are the ones out scalping tickets

to the extinction just hours, maybe minutes,

before our self-inflicted meteor hits;

feeds us our suicidal dose of starvation;

poisoning ourselves every day; what else can be done

when the Annual Apathy Awards become a daily occurrence?;

ghostshadows acned with acid scars scalp tickets to the extinction—;

 

ravenous masses wave huge handfuls of money in a panicked frenzy;

[an earlier version of this poem first appeared in To Burn in Torturous Algorithms]

 

A Zillion Miles Sublime 

Let there be light

so we can howl at the sun!

 

Let there be warm tendrilesque days

upon which to kiss the flowerpetals

 

strewn across the street

and yards like softpink snow!

 

Let there be bloodflowing and rejuvenation

and a rush of euphoria through the veins!

 

Let there be moons so bright

they cast shadows on midnight’s grass!

 

Let there be wine-soaked life blooming

and yelling belligerence into the fullyalive last bit of pure Earthly air!

originally published as a Poems-for-All book

 

Im

Parasitic world;

hands of wombhoused preborn eat;

drink through the nuzzletube

the vicious fluids that nourish the fire;

so discordant yet discreet;

the heartbeating in repetition;

muffled; veinhead hears through the plasma;

steals the blood; will soon suck the milk—

yet ancient evolutionary birdbrain instinct rouses a tell of connection;

a soppy bellyhoused sponge;

the outgrowth in the bush—

mere and unsevered; stalwart existence;

head throbs;

eat, very eat; every angle a violent angle;

wolverine nights, wolverine days, wolverine skies—

yet still the flickering and taming—

[evolving beyond?; suppression of nature?;];

unborn ravenous glare; alienglare;

the slicing of tubes; inner makeshift plunder;

dehumanize the species; every angel a violent angel;

occupier of the wombhouse

ready to enter the violent circus of existence;

physical!; physical!; physical!; bite off the heads!;

plunder!; rob!; deplete!—

ready to rage and survive;

no longer a bodily parasite;

the Earth is the new victim;

a new wombhouse to so carelessly raze!;

 

[first ever “Spiralist” poem ever written back in 1997 when poet was seventeen years old: “I don’t know WHY but poem made me feel differently when I reread it—it reminded me of an Aura before a seizure—random bits and pieces of facts and emotion, all stringing together—although, I admit, there is WAY too much of a theme to this one” —HB]

 

Deliveries (Random Short Poems Written on Tip Recorder in 1998 or 99 while Delivering Pizzas for the Summer)

Delivery #1

Valley Acres Drive—

It was an Indian Summer

/felt like May again

/I latched the creaking gate

and stepped onto the street

near my Grandmother’s youth.

 

Delivery #2

Sweetgum Court—

Here is the stale cinnamon

for your daughter’s birthday.

 

Delivery #3

Shoehouse Road—

I knew you years ago

as a junkie

/now your voice is smooth

/without the rasp of narcotics

as you pretend to be a Total Stranger.

 

Delivery #4

Lincoln Highway Women’s Health Center—

You are

the thrice mistaken counter

and my name is not Hugh!—

 

I hate train tracks—

 

the Vague is alive.

 

Delivery #5

Marlow Drive—

You sooth

my ears

so soothingly—

your Russian voice

reminds me of Springtime.

 

Delivery #6

North Sherman Street—

I came so far

through clogged rainy streets

all the way to your blurry house—

it’s hard for me to see

past the dollar signs in your eyes.

 

Delivery #7

Bradley Academy for the Arts—

A roomful

of twentyfold applause

and I am

in the arms of the girls.

I will never know

what caused a spontaneous outpouring

of hugs and French [yes, FRENCH!] kissing,

to erupt as I walked in the door

although I’ve heard that “The customer

is always right” and I had the distinct feeling

that whatever this unsupervised roomful of girls

were doing to me, they were most definitely right!

 

You GOTTA love art school girls!!

 

A House Chaotic

Chaotic house;

negativity flowing, disrupting

newly opiate-parched nerves,

hollow heads open and shut

drawers and doors

day and night endlessly

 

up and down steps,

confusion seeping from the drill-hole

in the cranium; electric house,

through high voltage this house courses

electroshock and hyper hands

in a state of permanent fiddle—

 

these bodies that gather

shrouded by wall, have drunk

of this modern electric juice

and the thoughtlessness of noise

is its high hangover—

these are the bumps, the loud bruises,

the certainty and proof of a house chaotic.

 

Hole

I will once again claw

my way out of this hole

I have fallen into,

just as I have many times before.

It’s when those foggy February

eyelids descend, my Spirit seems

to dim a bit. But, as I said,

I will, by means of pushing outward

in a swirling smiley Spiral of mindset,

climb my way back out

and onto the land of the purest

primary colors known to the mind.

 

Hinge Ether Poems

 

Hinge Response to Heller’s Email

                          inspired by Heller Levinson’s Hinge Poetry

Tetra-hydraulic helium teaks homogenized tombstone homebone totem histrionically

correctly upsetly in room vroom dead motion of emoticon emotion

leapless thus far from the materiality of lied languageà

no cucumberian air sockets yet fill the womb

of a plastic garden’s unoriginationà

a therefore refrigeration of forwardable motion is held at bay

the automatonious populace still

not quite ready

to rise and roar

 

The Road to Regretful Road (Hinge Ether)

thinking

to words          sounds

ground down sounds

sound wound unbound round Worldverines

self-reliant Emersonian regret envelops         [gone unlicked]

for waiting so long

to sound          to send

mined words

out into the nounfound newfound land’s cape

of previous decades

seen                 verysimilar verisimilitudeinal             mined words

said by another                                                            and others

who didn’t flounder around

instead                                                             speaking them’s sounds unbound

undrowned by time                             them’s sounds

now abound                mounds and mounds

of other’s sounds

on paper

in book

onscreen

all around

 

hole most twenty years worth of seizure-esque despair

catalyst of stasis          to send mined words

instead swirled

downdrain

headpressure

stare at wall

downdrained of decadal timeframes               lost, found

the screechingclawed silence of inertia

 

More Hinge Ether

How much of

 

Gaia

 

is

 

landscape

 

unveiled Vale

 

big pieces of oxygen

 

postpostpost-Jurassic winds blowing

 

personification of nature

 

since Cosmos is energetic vibration

 

is smelling eternal

 

is heavy with Pineal flow

 

Maya deflation

 

energy crackles up spine

 

bloated lotus blown up

 

Chromosomes wiggle

 

seashells and galaxies

 

all gathered

 

realclosetogether eyes

 

flow with multidimensional flipflap aura

 

Attempted Burroughsesque Cut-Up of a Hinge Module (written 4-25-17 on flight to London)

Bloodbath   omnidracual

Motherwell swells heart well , . ; —it jerks outward

black ‘n’ white seals boulders

unless piss is Rimbaud’s “black air”

errant grief tentacles

under the slippery bloomy roof

tadpole—>    Totalitarianism pole—>

bleached murmur of mirror shimmer grows crimson claws

f      u         n

merge—>   soak—>   seep—>

phantoma’s marry garlicking

whiteness emitting [form of color] black

rubescence grows

forth coils

dancing all over

out with the old

without the nothingness embroidered

I died as a young goat

yet still seeped my seep

my seepage

internal outposts

loop sideways

BLA(N)CK             BLACK

tenebrous cutting off esophaguses  juvenile self destruction protection

hope wish pray for      u-r-g-e’s

nuanced necessary mutation into

n-e-e-d for pressure upon the detonation button

the limpest kind of curiosity

is petty pretty affirmation in-fluence

freedomlessly falling into

o-b-s-e-s-s-i-o-n.

 

Toothless

Don’t snozzle your mask

don’t spangle your smile

don’t childrenly chuckle to yourself

 

birthed to bloom

now lost of blossom

to a muddiness

among a plethora of plumpness

 

rot sprouts ubiquitous sitcom

settles

as if                                         speckled on a blue spreckled sap sucker’s eggs

 

dross imagos   dross talk   dross teeth   dross existence dead  imagos

wire tired—     the guns out already

and of course not one of them            backfires

so very naïve to the abspestose  painting [the work of art — the weak of art]

upon the ceiling poisoning

the air from lobby to roof

 

at every turn of the maze a mirage suddenly springs up—

 

Ceasar knows best

the candyfloss from the candy tree

brings a reader exaggerated focus [say “sugar high!”]

confused imagos—     something tells me the apes will be back

but not immediately—         this poem painful as looking for a haystack

in a mountain of needles.

 

My Hands

My retriever hand burns golden holes

in the sheer sparkliness of Existence itself

when it reaches into other realms.

Not black and empty holes

but bright white holes brimming

with endless possibility, Truth,

the fathomlessness, The Great Spiral,

shining outward, replacing death with birth,

bats with birds—the beautiful ugliness;

of it all pouring out like a sieve

as my other hand pulls open the Tao

for all of creation to see.

 

The 14 of Diamonds

In the density of pitchy night you find yourself

scrubbing off the blood between your fingertips;

you are the riot star giving out riot scars to the people

you killed among the constructive vandalism

and oaken semen as you effortlessly pick a fight

with a man-eating orchid on the moon;

you’ve already killed the Joke-Man

in the Hawaiian Straightjacket; everyone is beseeching you

to screw off your thumb in order to stop this

endless war before they all lose their minds but you won’t;

you’d rather put your lips to the landmine

in the spoiled despair of your life that can only be seen

when the Karmascope peers deep into your skin and closely notices

how your sincere devotion to violence is caused mainly

by your broken suicide machine; stuck in this insidious

post-postindustrial world of rivers full of babyheads adorned with bullet holes;

you scream the infection straight down their throats

as you throw your intimidation around like a green elephant

wearing a top hat while walking upon a beachball

just as the banana split poker game is always split

right down the middle; an icicle prison cell is quite easily escapable;

what is most scary in life among these maniacs

is when the cancer won’t cancel and your shadow begins to detach

from your body; twigbones; itchy horses ask which way

to the broken sky and all you have to do is tell them to look

at the asteroid on the horizon burning down pipelines

and melting diamonds into liquified bathwater

as the eyes of the cello begin to speak of oceans ripe with shale

and toxified mush that was once water; a xylophone of so many fishbones;

 

Account of a Necessary Sonic Mutation

inspired by a short passage in Emerson’s Journals and Letters

Man’s central experiment is a tune—

attended to by other ears

in whole or Van Gogh-style—

either way, this is important—

complaint stretched over the central man

struck by sand and glass—a night owl with pneumonia—

attuned to my asymmetry—

this evolution will sing

as it Spirals asymmetrical discordance—

that thrown and crystallized will sing screeching sonics!—

and my animal will be born

to feast upon the earworthy pangs

still reverberating throughout the rooms of the world.

 

Cut Your Everything

[Cut-up of Minutes to Go done while on phone with Rob Schofield while he was drunk off his ass on bourbon—most words are Cut-Ups of Schofield’s drunken ramblings—only a few Burroughs cut ups ended up making it in]

Agent RE ACTIVE RE ACTIVE AGENT on farm turf

shift hatch of C had that anticipation/ participation of the dog/

police synthesized outside window sudden engagement/

there’s nothing paperwise on me though they knew 3 of people there had warrants

chok seven oclock on a Sunday morning drunk monkey on bourbon

no house without warrant    ///      after that point

I started pulling records on everybody

for all Louvre couldn’t do shit tied to Spain against me some saint’s razor

cha stance raise but they knew I had shit a decade of frozen soup

I had to go though I didn’t want to

So I grabbed my dog and left

but i LOVED THAT FUCKIN FARM!!

RE ACTIVE               FUCKIN”””””” SHERIFF!!/!! Mankind meet this Human!!/!!

I don’t like to give up ANYFUCKINGTHING!!/!! cripple badge

in this /case/ other than Mr. Shannon the Razor Jerk

though I didn’t even know half of the last names!! ß

THERE WAS A RAT IN THE HENHOUSE!!!!!

Election (appearing with the RAT a little bird did as well and told me of a rat—

said they were RESIDENTS!!

active agents in the house detour road and head—raise eyebrow!!//àà

the police knew EXACTLY who they were looking for

lived there, not rather in Africa, carrying out assignment—

it just didn’t make sense/ te see/ ripe toma- toes/ to me

then it did—

WAITING… A HAND POINTING… THE ROAD [made sense, make sense?]

I love my dog more than the farm though

so I HAD to go/xrays c surgery section/no release renewal

all sound eyes cultures essential

I was [in slick streets of cry] gone.

 

Muck

Snip snap

shot of spit

spitshop

angelican spitsoup

snotten spirit

and the foul

rush of cold wind

tearing at the mind.

all new poetry in pliant verse ©2019

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asemica: virtual art exhibit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Conglomeration of Spiralism, Hinge Ether and Asemic Art: Statement os Poetics [Aesthetics]

I like to hurt words. I like to twist, contort and bend them this way and that way. I like to cause them to mutate.

I like to make them writhe and transmogrify into something new. I like to wring Truth from out a collection of obscure words. I like to, as John Yamrus said, risk falling flat on my face in order to occasionally hit poetic pay dirt.

Most editors don’t like it when poets push the envelope of possibility. This is due to the fact that most people don’t have the faintest idea of what True poetry is, least of all professors. Even on the rare occasion a professor understands what True poetry is, the last thing they would do is admit it. They need to keep it caged since their job depends on it. Poetry is pure artistic freedom–something the Status Quo of the literary world will NEVER admit because the “establishment” needs poetry to be something that can be labeled and something you can “out your finger on” and say “this is what a poem supposed to be” when nothing could be further from the Truth.

This collection contains some of my Spiralist poems (a type of writing I began developing as early as age 17) along with a few poems I have termed “Hinge Ether” and which are heavily influenced by Heller Levinson’s Hinge Theory along with some of my Asemic art.

My approach to poetry is to “make it new.” To take the preconceived notion of what a poem is “supposed to be” and bash it to pieces–though not useless pieces. Pieces and fragments of what can be discovered and looked upon in a completely new and different way. Pieces, no matter how mangled, that a bit of Truth can be gleaned from glancing at it in its newfangled state. At the bottom of my experiments with words is a desire to nudge humanity, in whatever way I can, a bit further toward sanity since it is currently faced in the totally wrong direction.

Heath Brougher’s Books — Amazon

Heath’s Facebook page

The Ethnospheres Duality Facebook Page

Vagabond Ink — Interview on Spiralism with Heath Brougher

> > >

biographical note:

Heath Brougher is the poetry editor of Into the Void, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Awards for Best Magazine. He has published nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which are The Ethnosphere’s Duality (Cyberwit, 2018), Tangential Dithyrambs (Concrete Mist Press, 2019) and Change Your Mind (Alien Buddha Press, 2019). He is a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee as well as winner of the 2018 Poet of the Year Award from Taj Mahal Review.

introduction to Heller Levinson’s Hinge Poetry and Poetics — Krysia Jopek

It’s an honor to feature new Hinge Poetry by Heller Levinson, the founder of Hinge Poetry and Poetics. His essay that follows three new Hinge poems elucidates the poetics informing the poems; his approach to language as a living, human entity for which we imbue meaning based on our historical, cultural, and personal realities. The gaps between words, phrases, and elements of the poem function as part of the event of reading the poem; the reader’s subjective experience of the poem that unfolds in time like a musical score, writ with a living entity, language—the meaning of which shifts person to person and as time goes on.

I had the pleasure of meeting Heller and hearing him read his poetry at a Talisman poetry event in New York City last month.

Please enjoy this new issue of diaphanous micro, 3.14 ꙥ!

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new hinge poetry:

Like Eerily they were off. like milkweed. like eerily. like failed rapprochement. passages open. time draws nigh. all along druids spin. arc . a brace of bells. wishful thinking.

retiring the flux of burnt offal. gypsy moth. perplexity. tantamount. color bruised. saying so. says. simplicity is mostly luck.
so grows the lemon tree.

caring has its ogre. sharing its costs. circumnavigation fouls the weather. as if you were. in a manner of. toward the crease. pulling sharp. an entry. that time of day. well wishes.

↓

where to place. the. love.

as a rule. in the manner of notice. calamity strikes.
velocity reeks. the subject was dresses.

among knowledgeable persons it is widely considered remotely yet without ornamentation then preposterous. an inflamed premise. wildly wooly. wastebasket. woebegone. who wouldn’t. not that. with. why not. beforehand. quaint. conductive. endlessly correcting.

timely policies aside. what are the chances. playing odds. fortification. fugitive. a stable of. pass the manners. on the perpendicular. if only. so but when. sliding scale.

debt ridden & lacking proper mastication narratives waned. pickings slimmed. overtures barren. stone-weep. paltry catch. dried subsidies. campaigns flushed. dread-concupiscence.

as if about judiciously over the shoulder across town the season hardly the cold wet you could hear on a clear day cakes burning the streets empty rave the treacheries for a bundle of hay steep lard pulley formations the brass unwieldy yet mold in the surmise attention getters get seekers seek the meek weep meek while inspecting your arsenal please request a show of hands under the bridge
slow tunes move
like water

ostensibly without further ado cut the carrot chive the divide wild side upon decide careers at stake adieus in the upholstery slipcover snatch wipe that smirk the art of forbearance the state of things out of the surreption claw withdrawal even when the likelihood in the line of fire
this
only

 

 

 

 

in the girth of fathom
bellyful range lopey torque emollient aperture cleanse

no longer arriving in pairs bartering from scraps the brink looms, meshes syllabic taunts under the arabesque of shadow

parceling through mid-stream,
from the heap of unrelenting heave,
this
post-
ponement

 

 

 

 

The three horses moved in accord down the road. Cocky sentries assured of their ground.
The man turned from the window.

 

 

 

 

in the pith of vortex

          pit-full

plus plush whirl hurl         wHooshrush

render

reticulate

 

of the aforementioned pertaining

reeks

 

 

 

 

in the robust of query

querulous                     prise   pry

                                        proxy

                     probe

underlay            ://:                  overlap

unloading steatopygous format prevailings

                                                (studies in artisanal atrophy

                                                (alimentary ailing

cardinal claret capitulation

                                               serving

initiali-za-tions

 

new poetry ©2019; will be published in Seep due out from Black Widow Press in Spring, 2020

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Hinge By The Slice — Hinge Poetics

The suggestion that I write a short summary of Hinge Theory threw me into a tailspin. The thought of shortening an ever-expanding & en-fleshing behaviorism was anathema. Then the idea occurred that perhaps by indicating how HT resists shrivellization/ contraction/ summarization, I could approach summarization.

Language is aLive. This is foundational to HT. It should be asked: not what HT Is, but how it beHaves. Language as a living organism is continuously interactive with other organisms breeding extensively & engendering complementarity. Dr. Mary Newell puts it this way: “The connectivities of Hinge Theory introduce an intentional and generative biasing, like a pool table with all the balls commotioning and someone lifting the pool table slightly so all that activity is directed yet responsive to unpredicted collisions, meanderings, & swerve. (With the additional image that new balls are being added all the time as the pool table itself enlarges).”

Hinge does not purport to bring anything new to the proverbial ‘table.’ Rather it seeks to restore Language’s Original Primal Fire. To ignite the word, Hinge employs the module which is a word or a configuration of words that serves to spring (to unleash, to unmoor) the subject into a climate of free fall & unpredictability & by free fall, we mean that we are liberating the subject /word from its normative, conventional context & tossing it into question, tumbling it deconditioned into the void.

A few of the modules in use are: with, smelling, the road to ____ road, in the ___ of ____, fecundating rotational clusters, fusion reconnoiters, & the most recent, tenebraed, catalyzes an entire book. When word inosculates/alchemizes word, the components never lock into place nor do they dissolve into a random turbulence; they both formulate & unravel simultaneously, emblazoned with the Living-Hood of continuous Motility. The frisson (the rub) of word against word scatters the ‘particle’ multi-directionally. Partnering with the ‘scatter’ is the ‘gather,’ a recombinatory process regrouping the components in correspondence with vibrational adhesion (a form of viscous bonding).

Each particle/subject gathers into cohesions, a grouping, what Hinge terms the ‘application,’ formerly the ‘poem.’ This gathering should be seen as an alighting, a momentary pause, tensiled to soar again at the slightest provocation.

The word, by undergoing a multitude of these Modular Chamberings, is in an ongoing state of emboldening/ densification/ complementarity/ & extensionality. For example, “Mermaid” has undergone over 45 applications, swiveling in the alterior ethers of: “with mermaid,” “the road to mermaid road,” “smelling mermaid,” “in the purse of mermaid,” “tenebraed to mermaid,” to cite just a few. Each application both creates its own Mermaid Personality (ether) & interacts/impacts with the other applications. The Particle is always in transition, always on the road to developmental road, shimmering to fulfillment in compounding complementary refractions. Hinge Theory clashes against the current cult of quick-click-reduce, or, of what I like to term the lexiconically static. The Lexicon is a logos abuser, the enemy of the vigorous & dynamic; it is, indeed, a Dynamic Inhibitor.

Case in point: in Webster’s Third, “Melancholia” & its variations take up about 4 inches of definition whereas Melancholia: Hinge as Innominate Limina employs 99 pages to begin the investigation (& I term this endeavor to “investigate” an urge to “mobilize” the logos rather than “staticize” it). & these 99 pages should be viewed as just that — a prelude, an introduction, a wind-up to ignite. There is no such thing as a finish to these explorations, no endings, … they are not sequenced or neatly arranged alphabetically, — the logos is Feral & Un-Cageable, Reproductive & Lusty.

I have recently wondered how our language (the logos) would look/fare without the dictionary (void of reference). What would the “Unmoored” word (the Wild/Feral Logos) look like if it were free to roam, migrate, hybridize.

To view the Inferential replace the Referential.

These comments initiate an ongoing exploration of Hinge Theory. But when asked to explain Hinge Theory, the proper response would be the same as to someone who asked you what the sky looks like, — you would usher them outside, point upward, & say “Look.” Look, then, to the works themselves.

first appeared in Talisman 46 ©Heller Levinson 2018

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Further Reading

The Books:
Un— (Black Widow Press)
LinguaQuake (Black Widow Press)
tenebraed (Black Widow Press)
Melancholia: HInge as Innominate Limina (McNally Jackson)
Hinge Trio: (La Alameda Press)
Wrack Lariat (Black Widow Press)
from stone this running (Black Widow Press)
Smelling Mary (Howling Dog Press)

The Interviews (read chronologically):
“No Rust on These Hinges – A Heller Levinson Interview”
The Jivin’ Ladybug Interview: Heller Levinson, Round 1
“So Much Depends on the Hinge: Heller Levinson”
The Jivin’ Ladybug Interview: Heller Levinson, Round 2

Reviews
The HINGE MANUAL & Related Articles
“Smelling Mary” review by Leigh Herrick, Jacket 38, Late 2009
“tenebraed” review by Alison Ross, Clockwise Cat Magazine, 2017
Heller Levinson from Buffalo this Indian
Hinge Theory: Poetry’s Event Horizon [review by Heller Levinson
Clockwise Cat: TENEBRAED by Heller Levinson

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biographical note:

The originator of Hinge Theory, Heller Levinson lives in the lower Hudson Valley. His most recent book is Un– (Black Widow Press, 2019).

Hinge Poetics asserts that language is a a-live. It is the river liberated from the dam. It is the salmon sharing the river. The sunlight strumming the salmon.

For more on Hinge Theory see:
Dispatches contributor Heller Levinson on Hinge theory and poetry
Talisman 46–Heller Levinson Hinge Poetry
Ephesus Glom: An Interview with Heller Levinson, Part 1 by Jonathan Mulcahy-King
Ephesus Glom Part Two: An Interview with Heller Levinson and Linda Lynch By Jonathan Mulcahy-King
Heller’s books can be acquired from Black Widow Press
or from Amazon books by Heller Levinson

author photo:

Heller Levinson featured in New Mystics [photo credit]

Inquiries: [email protected]

introduction to self-fulfilling prosecutions — Krysia Jopek [November 2019]
It’s a true pleasure to present the provocative digital collages of Leonard Zinovyev in this issue of diaphanous micro, 3.13. The virtual exhibition of 18 images that follows are an amazing sequence by a visual and literary artist. Each digital collage amazes me with its arresting nature; drawing the viewer/reader into its visual and linguistic space. Leonard fuses together seamlessly found art [cultural bits], literary texts, and psychological reality in the twenty-first century with seamless intelligence and a meticulous process of revision [discussed in his statement of poetics that follows the sequence]. He makes the end product look like it was easy for him to create, but the interview attests to the hard work involved in getting these digital collages perfect for him and the viewer/reader. Please enjoy self-fulfilling prosecutions; you’re in for a new diaphanous micro experience real pleasurable treat!

Striving Towards Averaging: virtual art exhibit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Our Motto Says It All: A Statement of Poetics

Throughout history, beauty has been a subject matter of arts. There are as many ways of seeing beauty as there are viewers, a concept best described by proverbs like “Beauty is only skin-deep” and “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Beauty is everywhere. And so is poetry.

My mini-series of digital images, which includes visual found poems and visual texts, is dedicated to human perceptions of beauty – a thing that is not what it appears – due to cognitive bias.

– La nascità di Venere

A poem written by combining lines from essays about Sandro Botticelli’s painting “The Birth of Venus” and “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, as well as comments to a FB post about manufacturers of facial recognition prosthetic masks.

– The Waves

A “remix poem” composed of quotations from Virginia Woolf, where I substituted “beauty” for “averaging.”

– We know what we are

An “algorithmic poem” I assembled from Shakespeare quotes about beauty, altering a few words to produce a nonsense text.

– Striving towards averaging

A simple and clear-cut image that conveys a simple and clear-cut message. The keyword is made up of ten overlapping words “averaging” in various fonts.

– Averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies

You’ve guessed it: this is the way we humans perceive beauty – by ignoring individual unattractive traits while shifting attention towards averaged attractive ones, which is why I see these multiple copies of the same phrase crowded in the middle of the sheet, with the rest of the “canvas” deliberately left blank, as a perfect allegory for the phenomenon.

– h+

Transhumanism and Singularitarianism – nobody explains them better than Shakespeare!

– Kurzweil Remix feat. Shakespeare

A futurologist and a dramatist put their heads together to generate new lines (or to explain the fundamentals of science); but where one’ s a futurologist, two’s a crowd!

– survivorship bias

When mixed together, Wikipedia lines and excerpts from articles about cognitive bias
and quicksand, can tell a dramatic and somewhat confused story of an eastward trip.

– The Therapist

Can anyone recognize this therapist who has a veiled birdcage in the place of his body, with a hat atop of it? A thinly veiled structure in which birds are kept? A Magrittesque image as it is, but everything we see hides another thing.

– Weltschmerz

Facebook comments to a post about an event easily identifiable as the Notre-Dame de Paris fire form a multilingual poem (you can find lines in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Danish), presenting opinions that range in tone from heartbroken to philosophical.

– The burden

A found poem composed of my Facebook friend’s comments – essentially, a comprehensive survival guide to dealing with pathological proof-seekers.

– devouring time

Facebook comments are a prefect building material for poetry. My Facebook friends are wisest friends of all – this time, they succeeded in solving the mystery of time loss.

– Self-fulfilled prosecutions

That’s not karma, nor do negative thoughts create negative energies, we simply program ourselves to make our own bad prophecies come true.

– Trauma

If you are to think of a visual metaphor for a trauma, what kind of imagery readily springs to mind? Haunting imagery. A giant ghostly gun against a barren desert in the background, and a repetitive phantasmal phrase “Have the safety plan in place” running from the top to the bottom of the screen – an image that only lives in your mind, but it is always there.  A monument to traumas.  All sort of traumas – PTSD, inherited traumas, intergenerational traumas, epigenetically transmitted traumas.

– Monsters created by others

Fear not bad monsters that others want to impose on you. Even if those monsters are supplied in boxfuls.

– Don’t let monsters…

Brief instructions on how to hold monsters created for you at bay.

– A Stump in Scarlet

Another “algorithmic poem” – this time, a poetic assemblage from Sherlock Holmes’ wise quotes, reduced to preposterous absurd.

– Our motto says it all

How does “the cheerleader effect” work? Is it real? Averaging? Did you say “Averaging”?? Is the perception of beauty about averaging???

The question whether my own artwork is beautiful or ugly (or both, or maybe even neither) is open to discussion!

> > >

Don’t Let Monsters Created by Others Eat You for Breakfast! — Leonard Zinovyev & Krysia Jopek talk digital art, inspiration, social media, etc.

How did you get involved with translation and to quote your biographical notes, the fields of “technology, science and medicine, including neuroscience, neurobiology, and cognitive science?”

Thinking back on my childhood, I can tell it all started in my school days. It would be a bit of an overstatement to say that I did badly academically when at school, though my teachers said so. I gave preferential treatment to a number of subjects, including history, biology, English, Russian, Russian literature, and physical education while disregarding or even overtly hating algebra, geometry, physics, and chemistry. I have always had dyscalculia – something I came to realize years later, though I have never consulted a health professional for that condition, but back then, teachers thought I was either lazy or stupid or both–a sad commentary on their competence. I worked part-time as a translator and interpreter while pursuing my studies at university; as soon as I graduated, I got hired by a translation services company on a full-time basis. In the following years, I worked full-time or part-time for a successive number of translation companies. Then I became a self-employed translator, and then I worked for a company again before I became a much sought-out translator. It was in the mid-2010s that I was first commissioned to translate a research report in neuroscience. Then there came more papers in neurobiology, neurochemistry, and cognitive science, to name a few.

What fascinates you the most about these burgeoning, complex fields?

Everything! Working on scientific reports and even four-hundred-page-long monographs, I discovered that science was not a boring drag—a discovery that made up for the scientific knowledge I missed when at school. Moreover, I found out that science can be a source of inspiration. While most poets tend to be fixated on their spiritual demands, I think it would be a great idea to poeticize science. Subversive as it is, this is my idea of poetry. And it was from articles on neurophysiology that I learned that the human brain was hardwired, evolutionally and genetically, to recognize beauty and to look for meaning.

What languages do you speak/read?

Russian, which is my native language; English and French in which I majored while in university; I also speak Italian and Dutch. I can read (but don’t speak) Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Danish, and Swedish. I’m now learning German and Norwegian Bokmål, but Russian and English are my only working languages—I hardly ever translate to or from French, let alone other languages.

I’m curious about your formal and informal studies; what you studied in institutions and on your own.

I studied linguistics, pedagogy, and translation studies. But it was not until I got employed by my first full-time employer that I realized how scanty my knowledge was. Being a translator in science (or even an interpreter in business negotiations) is about being able to think on your feet–and having a clear view of the subject you are dealing with. Self-education was the way to go. It dawned on me that I did not have to think like a chemist when I was to translate a research article in chemistry, but I needed to be widely read on the subject to have an understanding of it. And the same goes for what I do artistically–I am a self-taught artist, a self-taught poet, and a self-taught fiction writer.

What led you to begin writing poetry and short stories in the late 1990s? Do you still write poetry and fiction?

In my view, going into the arts–any arts, putting pen to paper, etc., is about being dissatisfied with the authors you read, the movies you watch, the music you listen to, and so on and so forth–especially when you are in your late teens. Back then, I read a lot, yet I was unable to find any author who would more or less exactly live up to my expectations; so I thought the time was ripe for creating art of my own. Yes, I still write short fiction, including short stories, and flash fiction, as well as poetry; found poetry being my top priority. Another reason why I went into the arts was the creative impulses that came from within–I felt like I finally found my vocation.

What prompted/influenced/motivated your “shift” to digital collage art in 2006? Was this a gradual shift over time or sudden?

I was perfectly willing to involve as many artistic media as possible–and that seemed the only motivation behind my “shift” to collage art, so it is fair to say that the “shift” was a well-thought-out decision to try my hand at making something visually unusual and amusing. So, I tried–and failed. Disastrously. I tried again and again, doing more and more visual art. After all, art is about honing your skills. Art is the best of all lifelong personal development strategies ever conceived.

Who are your favorite visual artists, contemporary and traditional? What do you admire about their work?

I revere the Old Masters, and I admire the late 19^th century Russian realist painters – the Guild of Traveler Artists (The Peredvizhniki). I love the 20^th century surrealists–they all are paragons of perfection. I can spend hours, feasting my eyes on their artwork–and probably looking for inspiration! Among present-day artists: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Paolo Canevari, David Hockney, Jeremy Deller, and Barry Kite deserve mention. I like any art that is both witty and thought- provoking.

Favorite writers? I loved seeing the lines from Virginia Woolf, and I’m curious about what other writers you admire/revere.

I am a widely-read person. Sometimes I wonder whether my collage art is more influenced by literature rather than by the visual arts, or vice versa, or, maybe by both equally. Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, René Char, Italo Calvino, and Witold Gombrowicz are marvelous, and I was fascinated by Nanni Balestrini, Karl Holmqvist, and Kenneth Goldsmith.

How much time do you spend creating your digital collage art—as in how long can one image take [I’m sure there’s variance] and also, how much time of your day or week can you/do you typically devote to your art?

Creating a digital collage is always a time-consuming and effort-consuming process that normally takes hours; visual texts generally being even harder to produce than collages, so I devote at least two or three hours a day in any two or three days in a week to thinking over creative ideas, or writing, or making visual images. Sometimes I burn the midnight oil and stay up all night long, intent on cutting, pasting, erasing, and applying effects. Sometimes I can spend weeks redoing an image that won’t come out right. Of course, I don’t stay indoors for that long, but I keep revisiting my work-in-progress over and over until I get it to come out the way I want.

What is your process like from the blank screen to a finished product? I’m sure it’s different for each work, but generally, where do you get your ideas and inspiration and how do you “translate” those ideas into a digital collage? Do you walk around with notebooks, doodle on paper and/or on the computer, ipad, phone?

My brain brims over with creative ideas 24/7; not all of them are equally good. I carry around a pocketsize notebook to commit to paper those worth making into artistic products; thus, keeping my mind clean. The creative process is always much the same; it unfolds inside my head and feels like I have a recurrent urge to establish new connections between old things. While a creative idea is still vague in my mind’s eye, I go surfing the net for appropriate images; eventually, I stumble upon something that I can identify–intuitively–as good raw material for my collage, and that is when the idea begins to take shape in my mind. The rest is a matter of hard work that involves using graphic editors–sometimes, two or three at a time–until I get an image I want.

Why do you prefer digital art to conventional arts?

Digital images are everywhere and are, therefore, readily accessible. They are malleable and workable, and it is fun combining and modifying them to make something unexpectedly innovative. Contrary to popular belief that making collage art is a no-brainer, using raster graphic software is sometimes much trickier than any conventional painting methods, e.g., watercolor or oil painting. Digital collage art is the new rock’n’roll. Digital collage art is easy to publish online and to spread via social media. Digital collage art is never boring; it is the simplest way of sending a clear message to the world: “Don’t let monsters created by others eat you for breakfast!”

Thank you!

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biographical note:

Leonard Zinovyev is a visual artist, poet, and fiction writer based somewhere in the world. He was born on March 15, 1979.

A translator and interpreter in technology, science and medicine, including neuroscience, neurobiology, and cognitive science – hence his current artistic interest in all of the above – he took up writing poetry and short stories as far back as in the late 1990s, and digital collage art in 2006.

As of now, Leonard is into digital self-publishing and composing visual texts, found poetry, and “remix poems,” tapping into almost any source –  from newspaper editorials, business contracts, pop scientific articles, and research reports to classical poetry and even Facebook comments, hacking original texts into bits and pieces to produce something new and ironic.

“Poetry can be found anywhere, and anything can be made into poetry” is his motto.

Leonard Zinovyev’s website 

Artwork by Leonard Zinovyev [prints for sale]

Leonard Zinovyev on Instagram

Leonard Zinovyev on Facebook