summer 2012 I issue 8

erase / disclose
summer 2012 I issue 8
erase / disclose
dislocate
University of Minnesota
Department of English
1 Lind Hall
207 Church Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
dislocate is a literary journal operated by the graduate students in the English
Department at the University of Minnesota.
Copyright 2012 Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the prior written
permission of the Regents of the University of Minnesota.
Publication of dislocate is made possible by the generous support of the
Lerner Foundation; we thank the Foundation for their continued involvement.
We are also grateful to the following organizations and individuals for their
assistance: the Edelstein-Keller Endowment, the Regents of the University
of Minnesota, the Department of English at the University of Minnesota,
the Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota, Ellen Messer-
Davidow, Kathleen Glasgow, Julie Schumacher, SUA, and all of the ghosts of
dislocates past.
For submission guidelines, please visit our website: dislocate.umn.edu.
The Creative Writing Program owes the inception of its MFA degree and its
stellar roster of visiting writers to the Edelstein-Keller Endowment and the
generosity of Ruth Easton (ne Ruth Edelstein). Ms. Easton was born in North
Branch, Minnesota, attended the University of Minnesota for one year, and
fnished her education at Macalester College and the Cumnock School. She
then began a successful career as an actress. She appeared on radio and on
Broadway with Walter Huston, Lionel Barrymore, Clark Gable, Eddie Cantor, and
Al Jolson.
In 1985, Kenneth H. Keller, then president of the University of Minnesota,
discussed with Ms. Easton his plan to launch the Universitys frst capital gifts
campaign in particular, his hope that the frst major endowment specifcally
beneft the Department of English. As a result of this discussion, Ms. Easton
made a signifcant gift which President Keller arranged to match with an equal
sum from University resources, and the Edelstein-Keller Endowment was born.
Ms. Easton named the endowment in honor of her brother, David E. Edelstein,
and his closest friend, Thomas A. Keller, Jr. (no relation to President Keller).
The frst Edelstein-Keller Endowment visiting writer was Isaac Bashevis Singer,
who visited the Twin Cities campus in May 1985. Subsequent visitors have
included Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Edward P. Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, J.M.
Coetzee, Sam Shepard, Colson Whitehead, Vivian Gornick, Tobias Wolff, and
the current writer-in-residence, Charles Baxter. The Edelstein-Keller Endowment
made possible the conversion of of the MA in English and Professional Writing
to the MFA in Creative Writing in 1996. The result of Ruth Eastons generosity
and President Kellers vision is a graduate writing program with a national
reputation that continues to attract the fnest established and emerging writers
in the country. Please visit the Creative Writing Programs website at http://
creativewriting.umn.edu.
The Edelstein- Keller Endowment
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contents
hide and seek
"Do Not Touch the Dust Bunny"
The Collection
My Pink Room
In Kindergarten
On the Bike Trail
Terraqueous
untitled
what?
ellen hughes
Ana Garcia Bergua

Translated by Toshiya Kamei

Kate Renee
Erica Williams
Kathleen McGookey
from Moby Dick
Chris Taylor
Ivan de monbrison
Paul Cunningham
AUTOPSY OF A MANTA RAY
THE BARD WOLF VS. THE TAXIDERMIST
Erica Williams
Erin Lyndal Martin
Colony Collapse
Dennis James Sweeney
My Story by Andy Chen, Third Grade, English Class, Teacher Joy, Spring Semester
quid
lamb
asia ward
Galileos Sidereal Messenger, Abridged
Erin Murphy
Letter from Charles Darwin to Botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker June 27, 1573, Abridged
Kristoffer West Johnson
pledge of reluctance
What wasnt said
Kevin McLellan
zebra
ellen Hughes
chapter 1. loomings
Jason Lester
from Overwhelming Idea Whale
asia ward
Flying horse
bullshit
phoebe reeves
Pastoral Insomniac Spree
Headlines
Exposure: Notes from the Underworld
Ashley Strosnider
cross stitch samplers
lisa mccool-grime
womens stitchery
when the problem is you
luke rieter
ogre
jennifer davis
Kate Renee.
me as a monster
yeti loves bigfoot
untitled
simon perchik
THERE IS SUCH A THING AS AWESOME
Scott F. Parker
bear
jennifer davis
The Unclassifiable Love Stories of Jenny Boully: An Interview
Paula Cisewski
MY DOUBLE
EMPTY NEXT SYNDROME
FLAT LAND PANTOUM with Allison Titus
Emerge
erica williams
Walter Edgewater Creates a Facebook Profile
Kevin Shea
by Victoria Scher and Scott F. Parker
8
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
23
24
25
26
31
32
34
Paul Cunningham
asia ward
36
38
39
Stag Country, No. 1
J.A. Tyler
42
43
44
46
46
48
54
60
65
66
68
70
75
76
78
contents
interview with philip gourevitch
80
86
last guardian
contributer notes
92 dislocate staff
aaron apps and kathleen johnston
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And the next time

they started to kiss,

she ran to hide herself.
On her way to the kitchen, Concha, in apartment 7,
decided to hide herself. During one of those intermissions in
bed, she said, Ill have a glass of water. Do you want it?
Well, Luis said, and waited naked between the sheets,
staring at the lamp. She served water and suddenly, on
her way back to the bedroom, decided to stay behind the
bathroom door. He heard the clink of glasses and a pitcher,
a few footsteps, and then nothing. He thought she had gone
to the bathroom, imagined her lying with her back to him,
and hummed a song. Then he turned on the stereo, put a
CD on, and made sure the blinds were tightly shut, because
there was sun outside; below him, the super was sweeping
the sidewalk, and a woman was taking her dog for a walk.
Then he wondered why Concha hadnt come back. He
stepped into the corridor, saw the bathroom door open, and
walked through the living room, the dining room, the offce,
and the kitchen.
Concha?
Then he heard muffed laughter from behind the
bathroom door. He smiled, found her hiding, cornered her
there, and they made love like savages, against the wall.
Over the next few days, she didnt forget how she had felt
while hiding, alone in the semi-darkness. She told Luis
she had returned to her childhood for a moment. And his
approaching, looking for her, and sniffng at her had turned
her on immensely. Luis felt the same. In their subsequent
trysts she kept playing hide and seek. Concha used up the
closets, doors, and spaces behind furniture. Each time she
became more ingenious at hiding herself. It was like hunting.
He searched for her slowly, even when he guessed where
she was, or when he heard her laughter, and caught her
suddenly. This excited them both. One day Concha said she
didnt know which she liked better: the feeling of lying in
the semi-dark while waiting for Luis to fnd her, the moment
when she felt him near her and her heart beat fast, or when
he fnally appeared and held her as if to devour her.
After a few months, Luis began to get bored. Their
oft-repeated game wasnt fun anymore. Besides, he had a
feeling that Concha was becoming obsessed with waiting
alone in the dark, hiding among the clothes in the closet or
bottles in the bar, and that she forgot he was looking for her.
Each time it took him longer to fnd her, and she didnt give
any signs like before: she didnt laugh, nor did she scratch
the wall, as if she didnt really want to be found. He, too,
took his time, and even used the time to do something else,
make a phone call, choose the shirt he would wear that
day, or turn on the coffee pot. In any case, he thought, he
would have to fnd something else or switch their roles. He
planned to talk to her about it at breakfast, or when they
both returned from work, but he always forgot about it or
something more important came up. And the next time they
started to kiss, she ran to hide herself.
The last time he looked for her, he immediately found
out where she was on the top shelf of the linen closet
because he caught a glimpse of the door closing. He began
like always, a bit bored already, to walk around the house,
calling her, but that time he didnt even take his clothes off;
he pretended not to know where she was. He went on like
that for a little while, and as she didnt give any signs, went
around the house a couple of times and ended up leaving
the apartment, as if to look for her outside. He walked into
the caf on the corner and ordered an espresso and cake.
He stayed seated at the bar for about an hour, reading a
newspaper and trying to keep himself from thinking about
what to do, what to say, when he got home. After all, things
had been rather strained lately, since they had taken to
playing hide and seek. Luis perused the newspaper, paying
special attention to the obituaries and cars for sale ads.
Then he began to head home, expecting that she would
have left the closet by now.
Concha?
The refrigerator and the
water pump hummed inside
the apartment. Everything was
exactly the same. Perhaps
Concha had fallen asleep while
hiding; it would be then the
perfect moment to talk about
the matter, put an end to the
game, and move on to betterW
things. But when he opened the linen closet, Concha wasnt
there. Sheets, tablecloths, and towels were stacked neatly
on the shelves. Above, as always, where Luis expected
to fnd her, a suitcase lay. He looked everywhere for her
like the previous times, but he was tired, saying that was
enough. He thought she might be angry over itd be
natural leaving her alone. He stepped out into the corridor,
went around the block, returned to the caf it was a place
both of them liked and went home, a bit disconcerted.
He sat down to translate for a while, waiting for Concha to
come home or at least give him a call. He called her on her
cell phone and left a long message explaining why he had
left the house and hadnt gone to look for her. If she was
angry, she would get over it and come home soon. Concha
wasnt the type to hold a grudge. What they needed was a
trip, a vacation, maybe to start a family.
That night, when he went out to get some ham and
cheese at the shop on the corner, it crossed his mind that
she might want to keep playing hide and seek: should he
start calling her parents, her girlfriends? But even though
he wanted to fght off the inertia that plagued him, the most
convenient thing was to calm down and wait for her to come
back. Besides, how was he going to explain the matter
without embarrassing himself and others terribly? What kind
of story would he have to make up? How could he bring up
that Concha had hidden herself in the closet? They would
think she was hiding from him, that he was hitting her or
something like that, and he wasnt ready to share intimate
details. He was overwhelmed with an immense fatigue. He
didnt love her like he used to, so he wasnt making any
effort to fnd her. In any case, he would have to face the
possibility of breaking up with her if she ever came back.
But her absence made him anxious. He slipped into bed to
watch a movie, and despite his anxiety and precaution, fell
asleep.
Luis woke up at eight thirty the next morning, expecting
to fnd Concha beside him, but no one was there. He
walked into the kitchen, made
himself coffee, as he did every
morning, and turned on the
radio to listen to the news.
With a cup of coffee in his
hand, he kept looking at the
closet where he was sure
Concha had hidden herself
before disappearing. Not only
had he heard the door shut,
but he had seen it close. A
chair that was usually never there was put aside proof that
Concha had used it to climb up into the closet. He pulled up
the chair and followed suit. Even though there wasnt much
room, he could ft beside the suitcase, sitting with his knees
bent. Then Concha would ft perfectly, because she was
shorter than he was. He pulled the door shut and stayed
there for a moment, trying to feel what Concha talked about
so much, the pleasure of lying in the dark, far away from the
world, invisible. Soon he got bored and opened the door.
As he turned to uncurl his legs, he hit his shoulder against
the back of the closet, which sounded hollow. It wasnt a
wall, as he had imagined, but a loose board, a sliding door.
He nudged it open and found another suitcase a red one
Hide and Seek
Ana Garcia Bergua

Translated by Toshiya Kamei

written by
Hide and Seek

10
dislocate
summer 2012
11
against a black background with something like a mirror.
When he heard noises on the other side, he shut the door
quickly.
Luis couldnt stand his next-door neighbor a ffty-
something architect who thought himself very attractive, like
a leading man of old movies, reeking of cologne, swathed
in gold chains, and always looked down on him, with the
arrogance of someone who owns silk shirts and the latest
model pickup. One day Luis told Concha he was sure their
neighbor was gay, but she denied it. Dont be silly! she
exclaimed. Then she added that Sr. Pando left very early in
the morning on weekends with large black boxes and pigeon
cages in his pickup. Sr. Pando how did Concha know
his name? He kept staring at the closet, intrigued. Then he
thought it was absurd. It had to be a construction error. Later
he would talk to the apartment owner.
In the afternoon he met his friend Pablo for coffee. They
got together every Tuesday and talked about their respective
translations, which both of them were very particular about.
Luis thought of telling his friend that Concha was gone,
explaining the gist of the situation: the game of hide and
seek, minus the sliding door at the back of the closet. But on
second thought, he changed his mind. Pablo would laugh
him off it was a lovers game, a private matter between two
Kate Renee
"Do Not Touch the Dust Bunny"
Hide and Seek
people. Later he went home, expecting at least a message
from Concha, but there was nothing. Everything was the same
as he had left it no one had entered the house, no one had
called. When he went to the bathroom, however, he noticed
that a few things were missing: Conchas toothbrush, her
creams, her deodorant. So she was leaving him. Living apart
for a while didnt seem like such a bad idea, because he was
a bit fed up with everything. He went out again to give her a
chance to take what she needed. After dining and reading at
Sanborns, he went to the movies.
When he arrived home that night, none of Conchas
belongings remained in the house: her books, her clothes, and
accessories were all gone. He found a bra lying at the foot of
the linen closet and placed it in the suitcase compartment, so
that she could take it if she needed it. Early Saturday morning
he saw Concha arm in arm with Sr. Pando, both dragging
some black mirrored boxes, pigeon cages, and rabbit cages.
Bombay the Magician, said a silver-plated sign on one of the
boxes. Luis saw her leave with the magician: he imagined
him making her appear and disappear, or sawing her in half.
Concha would be happy. He only wished that once in a while
she would escape the magician and appear in his apartment.
12
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13
Erica Williams
The Collection
The Collection
In My Pink Room
I lean into my mirror and it swallows me up. A real girl! they
yell and rush to touch me, almost sincerely. Feather boas
snake around my ankles. A shadowy girl hands me a mask
on a stick and some crayons. Isnt my blood perfect?, I
whisper and show her my gouged ankle. Night falls in my
pink room. I watch my mother smooth the covers around
the doll baby in my bed.
In Kindergarten
Fernando yanks my braid and it breaks off right in his dirty
hand. My teachers mouth opens and closes. Breeze from
the classroom window jostles paper spiders on the ceiling.
Busy with glue sticks, my friends fll their work papers
with glistening pictures of ham. Billy talks about weenies.
Sweating, Fernando throws my braid under our table, then
steals an eraser from the girl on his other side. I peek under
the table; my braid, like a determined blond caterpillar, inches
back to me.
On the Bike Trail
After I ride over the yellow jackets nest, the swarm drags
me and my bike underground. What do you have to say
for yourself? My mind empties: allthose stingers! Are
you trying to make this diffcult? They sentence me to dig
tunnels; for how long, they will not say. A drowsy hum
surrounds me, but I surprise them by being excellent at
my job. Each day, more show up to watch me work. They
admire the dirt I push around. They stroke my arms and
shoulders and their light, dry touch gives me the creeps.
They swarm my bike, climb the spokes, slowly turn the
wheels. I should sell tickets. I should grow wings.
Kathleen McGookey
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Women's Stitchery

To cross. To double cross. Such are the things taught to little girls who grow into women
who block out their days crossing and double crossing. Only the double dutch and hopscotch, oI
all childish things, are put away. Yet Irom even these games, women's stitchery takes a silliness
and vanity as exempliIied by the girlhood songs sung on playgrounds everywhere. Consider:

I know a girl named Sarah Sarah
I know a girl or two
I know a girl named Cindy Cindy
Wish I had their shoes

They strolled on down to Orleans Orleans
To the swamps, strolled down
They strolled on down to Old Man Johnny's
Took that old man's crown

He laughed so hard he keeled straight over
Laughed so hard he died
He laughed so hard to see that party
'Girls are king, he cried

While one sees the wisdom in the old man's laughter (and perhaps in his departure Irom a
world gone so daIt), the primary seed within songs such as these Ilowers at maturity into
women's obsession with ornamentation Irom Iootwear and headdress to empty titles, each to be
giggled over as the needle weaves in and out oI linen much like the pointed Ieet oI a girl
skipping two ropes when one should be enough.
There are those who argue that these needlewomen perIorm a moral task both by keeping
their hands Irom idleness and by stitching (among the embroidered herbs, hearts and homes)
verses Irom the Epistles and Psalms to be hung on walls or slept on as pillows, ever present
reminders oI He who truly maketh and leadeth and restoreth our souls. Again one should
consider the rhymes Irom which these same women nursed as children:

Hillary put on her pantsuit
Michelle put on her dress
And what they spoke oI, nobody knows
But only one was looking her best

Here one sees that words, in women's poorly nourished minds, have no power next to
Iinery. The craIt oI stitchery reduces words and the morals Ior which they stand to mere
ornaments, pretty charms Ior petty witches whose spelling is all in vain.
Take your map. A real corner; how it stands lonely, the lighthouse. Mere hillock of background.
Sand as paper. Gamesome, tell weeds they don't grow. Import Canada to a spile. Leak oil,
pieces of wood, carried true. Toadstools before houses. Under one blade: oasis. In a day's
walk, wear quicksand snowshoes. Shut up about every utter island, the ocean, very small
clams. Found no Illinois.
Look, this island was settled. The legend times swooped and carried his lament. Borne, the
wide waters. Perilous, the found skeleton.
Wonder, born on a beach: take. First quohogs, bolder with boats, captured at last. A great
watery belt. In all seasons, everlasting war has survived: food, salt-sea, unconscious. Panic,
his malicious assaults.
Thus naked hermits, their ant-hill overrun and watery, parcel out powers. Let America pile
upon their blazing banner. This terraqueous globe is through. Ships are but highwaymen, they
land without seeking the bottomless. He resides and riots alone, down to ploughing his home.
A Noah's food lives on, as prairie hides among the Alps. He knows at last, it smells like the
moon. The landless gull folds her billows. The land sails to his rest under herds of walruses and
whales.
Terraqueous from Moby Dick
Chris Taylor
Terraqueous
Ivan de monbrison untitled
16
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what?
ellen hughes
AUTOPSY OF A MANTA RAY
art
art, with and without its
ruined sex-parts
withering cavernous
mouth upholstery
chomps the oceanfuture
plankton-empty
the task of the
false and fnal manta
one last cavernous mouth
(and stomach)
exhausted, the contents:
soft segmented bodies
social forces of the epoch
swallowed inside
a veined magicians cape
(slowing movements)
Paul Cunningham
i have
heard so much about
our ruined ocean of manta rays
pillaged phrases
capitalistic language
dadaist amputations gliding,
gliding, contrariant amputations
gliding, gliding the blue
where the last manta dwells
whitegarbed against
foors of deformed corala collection of
twitching cephalic lobes
(slowing movements)
what?
18
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THE BARD WOLF VS. THE TAXIDERMIST
Paul Cunningham
THE TAXIDERMIST:
I hear your fabric whimper.
ME:
I will not continue this pattern of silence.
THE TAXIDERMIST:
I cannot tear myself away from you. I must, your sweet fabric.
ME:
This fabric has seen nothing you will love. Run quickly to your shadows!
THE TAXIDERMIST:
All I have are my shadows! Vomit
ME:
Will paint you a death of painful caresses!
THE TAXIDERMIST:
All I have is my pain! Vomit
ME:
Will paint you the victim of repeated loneliness!
THE TAXIDERMIST:
All I have is my loneliness! Vomit
THE BARD WOLF:
Can you not love? Can nothing rush through your hearts pipes or fatness? Can
your instruments not shriek the effciencies of love?
THE TAXIDERMIST:
A machine most ineffcient. Your fabric whimpers on. I hold myself and my pig
emerges.
THE BARD WOLF:
Your pig is a poem of mans hair. Hair that falls from your fatness and into the
saddest of dreams! I am sick of such dreams! I am sick of such dreams!
THE TAXIDERMIST:
I collect you now.
THE BARD WOLF:
I refuse. You will collect only your shadows, your pain, and your loneliness!
THE TAXIDERMIST:
I collect you now.
CAPING,
knifed backwards the animal from its nose part / a pulling / saw one body one soul shut
off / ripped memory from its bone rip-turned snout from its once-cries and again its
unhappy bone protrudes into my eyes my life the animal from its nose / a pulling / ripped
deer from its antlered skull ripped memory from its bone rip-turned snout from its once-
cries and then its unhappy bone protrudes into the blooded haze of the room its face
slides into my hands / a pulling / saw two bodies two souls shut off / ripped memory
from their bone mounds a carpet peeled from still-lifes / a pulling / thick pouring grizzly
torn from its nighttime fur memories ripped from its bone rip-turned snout from its once-
cries and then its unhappy bone protrudes against my warm hand / a pulling / hands,
we worked together my sadness blade / a pulling / deaf and blind, dried blood raccoon
lowest incisions ripped memory from its bone / a pulling / saw three bodies three souls
shut off
Pulling,
lips and eyes away from those faces / furs surrounding my waist curving into bloodstains
and clothing grotesque this furred shaping / bedroom menagerie
I found the body of a wolf in the forest behind my home. The wet marble eyes reminded
me of a former lovers. I sat beside the furred corpse for almost an hour. Eventually I took
off my sweater and wrapped it around the animal. I carried him back and there were
moments that I swear I could still feel him trying to breathe. Making an attempt. I could
feel him clinging to me.
[He slips, she pushes. He slips, she pushes. Does not cling. Has stopped clinging. Has
stopped breathing . . . ]
I want to dream.
I want to dream.
I want to dream.
I want to dream.
I want to dream.
I want to dream.
I return to the forest in my dream. I smell a system of hearts. I smell a forest of squirrels.
THE BARD WOLF VS. THE TAXIDERMIST
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THE TAXIDERMIST:
I have removed your fabric.
THE BARD WOLF:
You will not remove my soul.
THE TAXIDERMIST:
Your soul is of no concern. Your fabric must be preserved. My pig desires only your
exterior!
THE GHOSTS OF THE UNMOVING SQUIRRELS:
Fear the Bard Wolfs soul!
Fear the Bard Wolfs soul!
Fear the Bard Wolfs soul!
Fear the Bard Wolfs soul!
THE TAXIDERMIST:
This forest is an unhappy one . . .
THE BARD WOLF:
You are lost to this forest! You are lost!
THE GHOSTS OF THE UNMOVING SQUIRRELS:
You are lost! You are lost!
You are lost! You are lost!
You are lost! You are lost!
You are lost! You are lost!
i showed my father
natures tendered wolf
i measured the body portions
dragged out the animal
pulled it into an empty tub
homes river split pink
FLESHING,
i brought wolfs death-costume to fabricless body mine wire frame with my own hands /
a pushing / no hello whines from new body i pressed / pressed half-life to metal pressed
shards of de-boned wolf to skeleton without any muscles / a pushing / my hands
traveled over to form furred limbs fabric reversing all openings / a pushing / proof of
oncewolf taking shape / scratched my body into wolf watched wolf sleep until it broke
open / a pushing / i lay on that beach with you wolf / beach where ghosts still believe
they deserve power
food-copse of violence /
pushing / pushing
BARD,
i named my wolf / i can honestly say i know what it feels like to be constantly spilling
myself into the dead / pulling / i realize that kissing a living boy and kissing my oncewolf
on its forehead is sometimes without much difference / pushing / i fnd a bird with no
heartbeat left /
i cut her from her forever perch /
pulling
pushing / i affx her to the top of my wolfs head / we appear content together / we sit in
my bedroom wired frames fully robed / pulling /
i feel like my father thinks i murdered those neighborhood boys
(odd monsters of stillness and hair)
/pushing/
(his car narrowing along the beachside road / seizing up, falling toward the ocean / the
bodies of boys, buoyant / slackjawed, their kiss-tongues hanging)
/pulling/
i long for the day when violence moves no more
/pushing/
/pulling/
/pushing/
/pulling/
/pushing/
/pulling/
THE BARD WOLF VS. THE TAXIDERMIST
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THE TAXIDERMIST:
My bodys pig has eaten my victims fabric.
THE TAXIDERMIST:
My bodys pig has chewed itself away from me.
THE TAXIDERMIST:
I have murdered myself! Shadows! Pain! Loneliness!
THE TAXIDERMIST:
Cruel! My Bard Wolf victim survives me!
THE TAXIDERMIST:
Hungry, she refuses to chew! She refuses!
THE TAXIDERMIST:
She stares at me. Knows I am weak. Knows I am too disgusting!
THE TAXIDERMIST:
Nothing will devour me! Not even this bad dreams forest!
THE GHOSTS OF THE UNMOVING SQUIRRELS:
Not even! Not even!
Not even! Not even!
Not even! Not even!
Not even! Not even!
(Laughter)
(Laughter)
(Laughter)
(Laughter)
(Laughter)
THE BARD WOLF VS. THE TAXIDERMIST
Erica Williams
last guardian
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Colony CollapseLoners
You can tell me the bees are dying, but what about the bee in the bees?
And how has my skin stretched and known to go on without you, to go on
knowing you died alone, a gun in your hand, a gun which must have fallen
from your hand as you crumpled on the stairs of Memorial Church? I
guess I'm just too much of a loner, you said the frst time you took yourself
from me. The last thing you saidI don't remember. What comes back
are the words I read about the bees: She will die long before her offspring
emerge as adults, mate with one another, and prepare for the coming
winter. Clearly, most bees are loners. I will die before I know exactly what
to name the thing we grew, impermanence or child or simple orchid. I
have heard the body called skeleton lines. I have heard your body called
the body.
Colony CollapseBlack Bees in a Hospital Room
You can tell me the bees are dying, but from here all I can see is the old
church, the one with plywood piers all clad in tartan print. In the white and
shiny of the hospital room, no one has brought me fowers. The frst day,
I had a visitor: a married man who kissed me and asked if I minded. Then
my friends came and brought me the books I'd left behind. Morphine-
laden, I founced onto my belly and made the words crawl the page like
black bees. I put my hands all over the pages and let the bees trail up my
fngers. The bees had worn off by the time the doctor announced they
were going to cut me open. It was as if the anesthesia didn't work. I was
waiting for them to put my organs back in. I was waiting for the bees to
come back.
Colony CollapseWhite Sheets
Look, the photographs say, this is what it's like. This is what war does. And
that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates.
War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
-Susan Sontag
You can tell me the bees are dying, but where are the white sheets to
cover their bodies? In photographs from Oslo, white sheets litter the
youth camp in Norway where over 90 were killed. In a photograph from
Cambridge, a white sheet covers Mitch's body. I wonder if it would be
less stark to see what lies beneath the white sheets. Is a body always and
only a body? I can't believe I said body. What could be so alarming about
a body that we would need a white sheet? In the hospital, I lie beneath a
white sheet as surgeons cut me open. I can't see it, I don't know if there
is a white sheet, why would there be a white sheet what? The surgeons
reassemble my insides. Under the white sheet I am the one of the lucky
ones.
If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what.
-Nan Goldin
Colony Collapse
Erin Lyndal Martin
Colony Collapse
Emerge erica williams
26
dislocate
summer 2012
27
A note from the author:
I found this story on the foor of my classroom in the
English cram-school (buxiban) where I taught in Taiwan. Half
of it was handwritten in painstakingly precise letters; the other
half consisted of additions scribbled in a much more casual
hand between each paragraphs sentences. I inquired as to
the presence of an Andy Chen in our school and was informed
that there was none and, what is more, never had been. I
therefore took the occasion to publish the crumpled story into
my own hands. If I have done so in my own name, forgive me:
the byway of the adult is the only way to lend legitimacy to the
work of a child, however brilliant.
You may read this story with or without the peculiar
additions, which I have rendered in italics. I, frankly, think it is
better without. Nonetheless I have produced the text in full
so that the reader can make his or her own judgment on the
matter.

By Dennis James Sweeney
My Story by Andy Chen, Third Grade, English Class,
Teacher Joy, Spring Semester
Sarah and I play a trick on Tommy because Tommy is
easy to play tricks on. We are so much more and less than we
think. We put his backpack in a tree.
He tries to get his backpack out of the tree. The invisible
fallout foating with his books. He hops up and down like
a kangaroo in the desert. Scorpions and heat beneath its
toes. He misses the bus. It growls and rolls territorially away.
Sarah and I are on the bus. The foors free of spots. We look
out the window at the kangaroo. Orange and energetic and
translucent. It has fngerprints on it.
When we are in the principals offce we call Tommy. The
phone is connected to its base by a whimsical curly cord. He
is sad at home. His cats dislike him. The principal asks if I did
it and I say no I didnt do it. The fear in my eyes as good as a
confession. The principal tells Sarah to be more honest. She
nods with genuineness, trueness, so much it makes you want
to convert to the moral code of a samurai. Sarah says yes she
did it. It was a ft of passion, the momentary devil in each of
us. She says it was only her. She takes the rap. I want to say
I helped. I want to be guilty if she is guilty. The principal says
I had my chance. Her switch from Sarah to me is sharp like
a hermit crab in a shell on an old beach. Sarah says sorry to
Tommy on the phone. Her whole face changes, even though
he is far away. She says to ask his mom if they can play.
/
We are back in class. The windows are irrelevant. Chet
likes to sing the one about the farmer. About grass, about
pigs, the sorts of things none of us has ever seen. The class
tells him not to sing because they are doing their homework.
Teacher Joy, Spring Semester
He stops singing, affronted. Chet does his homework. Writing
quickly, thoroughly, as if. He whispers musical notes. Some
people must be heard in order to be assured that they exist.
Marissa tells Chet to be quiet. To cease existing. Chet is angry
at Marissa. You can see him summon what rage he knows
how to have. She turns red because he says something in her
ear. Her anger is television anger. She hits him on the neck.
Like a person is a doll. Chet cries.
Teacher Joy takes them out of class. Hands on their
shoulders as if they dont know where to walk. We can hear
her in the hallway. The valleys of her speech evade us and
the arcs we cant ignore. They come back after ten minutes.
Six hundred clicks. Their faces are wet. Like they have been
sprayed with a hose. The teacher says to do our homework.
In it there is baseball. Not the ragged stitches of the
ball, the splinters of the bat, but the contour of tradition,
the perfected amalgamation of a century of images. I do
the homework fast because I watch American baseball on
television. The concentrated energies of thousands boxed and
redelivered to a single staring kid in a land of different sunlight.
My favorite team is NYY.
/
In the afternoon Betty and Sally are at the clothes shop.
Racks and racks and racks like little shelters. Bettys mom and
Sallys mom are there too. Somewhere, at least, in the mirage-
state department stores inspire. Betty tries on a boys suit
for working. Though of course what boy works? Sally makes
a face. Her nose crinkled, her tongue out. She thinks Betty
looks like a clown. The staggering incongruity. Betty thinks
she looks handsome.
Sally tries on a dress with fowers. Flowers of all colors
known to man. She twirls in front of the mirror. The dress
bottom expanding into the sloped frills of a cupcake cup.
Betty is not there. A lonesome joy is an acquired taste. Her
mom is looking at underwear. Her fngers sort through the
higher racks. She says dont bother her.
Sally goes to fnd Betty. Breathlessly, her eyes casting
about and then alighting. She shows her the sun dress.
Flowers from her neck to her knees. Betty says she found
shoes with purple shoelaces. Barney the dinosaur, necklaces,
shells. They are better than the green ones. Moss, sweaters,
politics. Sally asks about the dress. The pleasure of the air on
her thighs when she twirls. Betty says she doesnt like fowers.
Matter of factly, shrugging, blinking. Sally cries. Expansive
tears meant to echo through the department store. She fnds
her mom with the underwear.
Sallys mom asks where are her clothes. Already
defeated. Sally says she threw them away. They have
receded to the end of the universe. She wants the sundress.
A renewed solar fare. Sally has to sit on the counter so her
mom can buy it. Her kicks thud against speckled Formica. The
woman at the register has to scan her bottom. She does not
laugh but is the worst of all things: inconvenienced. They take
an hour to get out of the department store. It is a labyrinth of
joys. There are eleven escalators. Silver swords stabbing every
foor at a cruel angle. For Sally the light off the jewelry stands
is sun for her dress.
/
Chet sits on a swing. He lets the wind rock him. His feet
dont like the rubber parts on the ground. They are partial, all
of them, unwhole. He kicks them. The force of a god. They
make a small storm. Boulders of rubber crushing others and
landing geologically. The swings chains are red. Rusty and evil
and tetanus-giving. Chet can hear the cars on the road. Souls
hosted above crammed-in butts. A car door shuts. The mafa
or a family tree. Marissa and her mom walk past the stone
mushrooms.
Marissa sits on a swing next to Chet. Its rubber is cracked
and redding. Both of them look at the ground. It is a black,
particulate sea. Chet kicks the rubber parts again. They are
a sea of shards of ice. He says sorry. They are a sea without
Vikings. Their moms sit on a bench and chat.
Chet stands up. He wants motion, all little boys want
motion, they say. He pushes Marissa on her swing. His fngers
try not to get caught between the chain. She goes higher
and higher. Her stomach is a part of her, then not, then again.
Chet is strong. He gives her his strength like a gift. Marissa
screams. Tiny crimped cords in her neck. She sounds like
a bird falling from a branch. A bird who has learned only to
communicate. At the last second it soars. The fulfllment of the
greatest hope only possible at the apex of the bad. She smiles
at the highest place in the air.
Chet slows her swing down. His face bunched up in
a knot. She giggles when he takes the chains. He is nearly
powerless against the momentum he has created. He asks if
she can do him now. Love is regardless of reciprocation but in
it reciprocation must happen. She says no. Because he asked,
because she is in a mood, or because it is not love? He starts
to turn red. A tomato naked. Then she says lets play on the
bars.
They run over to the bars. They arent rusty, they are
coated in synthetic rubber. Sally hangs upside down with her
knees. The best shape of her whole long life. Chet laughs.
Possibly his frst true laugh. He can see her underwear.
/
28
dislocate
summer 2012
29
Kids make fun of Sally for her new dress. Laughing is
worse than words. She cries. The tears keep escaping from
the well at the bottom of her eye. Teacher Joy walks her out of
the classroom. Shuffe. She goes to the phone and calls her
mom. The whimsical curly cord bored now. Her mom is tired.
She needs more sleep than normal people. She says ok. She
does not bother to pull the phone away for her monumental
sigh. She is sorry.
Teacher Joy brings Sally back into class. Shuffe. She still
cries. Her cheeks have two discernible rivers on them, the Tigris
and Euphrates of the muck of sadness. Teacher Joy yells at us.
There was never anything but silence. She says that Sally cries
because she thinks we dont like her new dress. Its fowers so
many, its complete ignorance of the concept of subtlety. Teacher
Joys eyes dont blink. She is a casualty of education. She says
we laughed because we like the dress.
Its fowers so playful we burst in joy. She
asks isnt that right. There was never
anything but yes. We nod. Black gray
matter. Chet whispers in Marissas ear.
Hot breath on her cochlea. They laugh
and they nod. Publicly. I think they are
lying. A person can even only stand and
still be lying if they dont believe what
they are doing themselves. Betty is next
to Marissa. A lily pad among drowning
lotuses. She wears sweatpants and
sneakers. Bunched up stylessly at the
ankles. I cant see her socks. I bet they are pink with hearts. Her
nod is not a lie.
Sarah never lies either. Publicly. She is at home sick. Part
of me has to be too. Sometimes I dont like Sarah. Proximity
as the downfall of sibling love. In class I miss her.
/
Marissa plays at Bettys house. The rugs loops are tight
and dark and hard on bare feet. They play with dolls and a
plastic kitchen with food. The dolls sit in the sink like a hot tub.
Marissa holds a waffe. It is perfect and inedible. She says
how Chet pushed her so high in the swing. Holding his breath
at each push so he wouldnt grunt with effort. She thinks he is
strong. He wears basketball jerseys. Betty says he is stupid.
Marissa throws the waffe at Betty. She is stunned at
her accuracy. It hits her in the eye. Marissa has never thrown
something and hit what she was throwing at before. She
thinks she is blind. Her eyes are closed. She asks if the blood
is on the carpet. The defnite article. Marissa runs to her. Three
feet of flm-ready material. She has a spoon in her other hand.
Holding it like a knife. She asks are you ok. Whether it is a
rhetorical question means whether you truly care. Betty does
not know.
They hug. The frst-ever hugs of reconciliation. Betty still
has her hand on her eye. She has forgotten it is there. They
say they love each other very much. Plastic food encircles
them. They are sorry.
In the kitchen that is not plastic they drink hot tea. The
hulking mugs next to their fragile hands. Bettys cat hops
on the table. Infnite motion then stillness. Marissa yelps.
Privately. The cat only yawns. Cats at their most threatening
when they yawn with their fangs on display as ancient
tribal weapons plunked into the gums of a living breathing
animal. They smile at each other. Click. Marissa is allergic
to cats. They make her sneeze like
a pirate. She does not care. She is
an autonomous individual. She likes
them.
/
Tommy and I wait for the bus
after school. The bus stop shelter
laughably shelterless. The air smells
like grease. The buildings look like
grease. The bus stops. The squeak of
a giant bat. We get on. It rumbles as
soon as our feet are inside. Tommy
talks about when he missed the bus. Despite bygones. He
says his backpack was in a tree. One of the few. He stops
talking. Like leaving an old woman in the middle of the street.
He looks at me. That was you you bastard but I forgive you if
you will only pretend it was out of friendship. He wants me to
talk. Anything. I do not talk.
Sally sits down in the seat in front of us. She stares out
the window at her refection. Tommy says her new dress is
pretty. Its fowers are surges of sincere life. She tells him to
shut up. Her arms crossed in a harrumph. He says he is not
kidding. She is cooked. She turns shrimp pink.
The bus stops at my building. It sighs as it lowers toward
the street. I dont want to get out. The events a person may
miss! I get out. I press seven. Mom has milk tea for me. Why
does she meet me at the door with it? I ask her how Sarah
is. Her long hair and her effortless good grades. She is sick
again. She is never sick. Mom worries about Sarah.
/
Chets mom calls. My mom talks to her business-like. In
two days I go to Chets house. It has picture windows and
a balcony. It has white carpets. With pockets of yellow and
gray. We sit on them and play with building sets. The atoms of
imagination. Chet is good at building. His blocks are profuse
and their angles are sharp. I want to help him. The diligent
engineer. I want to build the tallest building. High enough so
we cannot see the top. We can name it after us. The Chet and
Andy Best Tower. Chet doesnt think we can build the tallest
building. He is the son of Zen. I tell him yes. Caring is quality.
I put some blocks on the ground. Gasoline in the overloaded
motorcycles tank. He puts some on top. He puts his hands
around my stomach. Then he asks what do I think about
Marissa.
I say I think she is pretty. Like a distraction from the
business of life. I keep putting blocks on the stack. Amazing
how when all the angles are right. I say this is not the tallest.
Immediate gratifcation is its own lack of reward. It is a plan. It
is a living blueprint, Borges map that smothers the country it
charts. I want to build the tallest another time. Transcendent
success requires both hard work and patience. Chet wants
to know is that all. Because I love her. I say she is funny too.
Funny ha-ha. He asks if I want to play video games. The
chalet of imagination. I say no.
Chet goes to the living room to play video games.
Coldness to warmth and warmth to coldness. I build the plan
until it falls down. All plans must fail before they can be put
into practice. I can hear the guns in the play room. Russian
yells cut short. I join Chet on the couch. Which sinks elusively.
It is black and my legs stick to it.
I ask is it ok if I play on the next game. We are stationary.
Chet looks at the television. You can see its cross-stitching,
the black lines under which the colors vibrate. He says yes.
The delay of a million miles of whimsical curly cord between
us. It takes him a long time to die.
Then we play. A united focus on a separate thing. Chet
kills me fourteen times. He riddles me with an endless storm
of holes and blood drips down my half of the screen. I kill him
one time. He says I am lucky. He knows where all the guns
are. You only have to run over top of them to pick them up. I
do not know the buttons. X, triangle, square, circle. When I die
the controller rumbles. My grip goes loose each time. It makes
my hands feel like a thunderstorm.
/
Teacher Joy makes us sit in a circle. Natures patterns.
She says we will play a game called telephone. Natures
games. She whispers banana in Chets ear. A banana. Chet
whispers nanana in Marissas ear. A banana running with its
tongue out away from opponents in tag. Marissa whispers
now now now in Sallys ear. A bananas eyes wide to the
prospect of life. Sally whispers no no no in Tommys ear.
A banana sighing at the approach of the serrated edge.
Tommy whispers penguin in my ear. A bird slipping comically,
moments away from the rupture of its spine. I say penguin.
Into our heads leaps the tuxedoed bird, waddling. The class
laughs.
Teacher Joy says I do not understand the game. She
shakes her head like she is disappointed even if it is with
herself. She says you do not make up your own words. You
cannot just jump into the pile of leaves. You say the same
thing to everyone and you see how it changes. People. She
says it teaches about people.
/
In the afternoon Marissa and Betty visit Sarah. They stand
at the door like they expect something. I sit and watch them.
They are a bad television talk show. Her room is very cold.
Weather. Marissa and Betty pretend that they are not cold.
They comment on atmospherics. I see goose pimples on their
arms. Pointed mounds of vestigial fright. The wallpaper is
yellow. Or is it paint? I think it is yellower every day.
Sarah tells Marissa and Betty a story about a fox that
jumps over a fence. What it chases has shifted to the other
side. They laugh. Ha ha ha ha ha! They think she is very funny.
Mom brings them tea. Spoons clinking on the platter
as she walks. Marissa says no. She waves her arm like our
mother is a waitress. She does not like tea. An unhiding
grimace. Betty drinks the tea. Her lips look elsewhere. I do not
think she likes it either. Alas. That is ok. At a certain point you
gain sight into what matters. Sarah smiles. Past the tea and
goose pimples. She likes it when people visit her.
Betty asks when is she coming back to school. A painting
missing even the tiniest parts is incomplete. Sarah says her
mom will tell her. She wonders who will tell her mom. She
is bored in her yellow room. The ceiling fan fwoops. She is
fnished with all the books in the house. Hardback books with
identical spines meant not to be read but to match. She says
she has learned a lot. About various human situations. Marissa
and Betty laugh again.
They leave. Our mother sees them out. I tell Sarah I think
she will be better soon. She will sprint from bed through
the sprinkler into the street, kilometers and kilometers to the
coast. She thinks Betty is nice. How can we tell these things?
He wants me to talk.
Anything.
I do not talk.

Teacher Joy, Spring Semester
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summer 2012
31
I think Betty is nice too. Images of her bounce in me like
windstruck leaves. I have to do my homework. More baseball
and I have never seen the dust that bursts from a base when it
is hit by a cleat. I kiss Sarah on the cheek. It is wet and salty.
She is a good sister.
/
Sally and Tommy play at Tommys house. They are
inwardly nude. They throw a ball in the living room. They are
thoughtless in their joie. They break a vase that is expensive.
Tommys mom comes home. Makeup can only last so
long. She is very mad. Her face is a smoldering black mess.
She makes them dinner. The wok sizzles for less time than
usual. She asks what did they do today.
They say they read a book about streams. The sorts of
things you want to fnd in back of your house but nobody has
houses or backyards, this is a moral education. Tommys mom
asks what is a stream. She wants them to say nothing. They
say it is a small river. Wadeable were one to know what it is to
wade. There are tadpoles in it. Giant sperm. Then the tadpoles
have legs. Fanciful Olm-like things. After a long time they are
frogs. The duration being unclear. They start out as eggs.
Tommys mom says she didnt know that. Her eyes cant
see the grains on the table, of wood or rice, nor the bowl, nor
what is in it, nor the chopsticks. She does not eat her fried
rice.
/
Sarah gets a card from Tommy and his mom and dad.
Neatly printed letters like telegraph-bringers. It has a kitten
with a balloon on the front. Its big eyes versus its humanish
pose. It says to foat to health. Upward through clouds that
themselves resemble bunnies. Sarah and I dont know what
that means. Infnitely good intentions. Sally signed it too.
Sarah says kittens make her tired. Fuzzy ones. She
closes her eyes. Beneath them she blinks anyway. That means
she wants me to leave.
This time I stay. If only the wicker chair were made for
sitting. It takes a long time for her to fall asleep. You can nearly
pinpoint the moment. When she does I am happy. A lion who
wont have to eat for a month. Her mouth smiles when she
sleeps.
/
At school Chet and Marissa talk about the stream. An
ecosystem of cartoon words. I ask Betty if she knows about
frogs and tadpoles. Their currents of sex. She says she does.
A textbook knowledge peppered with visions. She says they
are like butterfies. Which some people fear they are so like
bats. She likes butterfies better than frogs. Throw beauty to
the frogs. Betty is very smart.
I ask Betty why butterfies are better. Her breath stays
within her. Teacher Joy yells at me. Fiercely. She says do not
talk at the same time she talks. She wishes we hadnt vocal
cords. I say that we want to talk about frogs and butterfies.
Metamorphoses. She makes me stand up. My legs stretch
as they never have at this time in this place. She puts my
forehead on the wall. It is damp and somehow soft. I can
hear the class but I can only see the wall. Its grooves and its
dimples. I am there for one hour.
The teacher talks about rocks. Her eyelids are like rocks.
I do not like rocks. Their conclusions are foregone. I think why
Betty did not get in trouble. Is fairness so important? The wall
is very dirty. The streaks are not black but yellowish. There is
a bug crawling on it. Its legs are bigger than its whole body.
I move my hand to smash it. It fies lethargically upward.
Teacher Joy yells at me again. Her voice digs furrows in hard
mud, having never seen soft. I put my hand down. My fngers
feel waterless. I want to be asleep.
/
The building is tall. It reaches toward the living rooms
sun. Chet thinks about Marissa. Her hair, her toes. He almost
knocks the building over two times. A wavering elephant
saved by its huge feet. I tell him to build. For the sake of the
engineer. I put blocks on top.
Chet goes to the bathroom. He walks like his legs are
broken. I am hungry. The hunger of a painter painting a
mortifed cow. I build and build. The chief architect remarks
on my contribution to the others at the helm of the buildings
design. Chet comes back after twenty minutes. A king
regarding his concubine. He eats something. His teeth are
punctuated with the tendons of beef jerky. He asks if I want
some food. Cool dryness for the gurgle within me. I say no.
I want to make the building the tallest. Piles and piles
of cured wood atop one another into the clouds of the living
room. Chet watches television. Superheroes save women and
everyone screams in exaltation. I build
/
I sit on Sarahs bed. She is wreathed in the altitude of
sickness and the pilots wont let her down. Her room is yellow.
Bananas too sick to be attacked by rot. Her covers are blue.
Robins egg birth crinkled. I tell her about the bus. The old
bus. It is boring now. I yawn like a chameleon. Tommy and
Sally sleep. Their eyes shut with the knotty peace of the
willfully undernourished. Trees go by. Their leaves cannot be
seen to rustle. There are no tricks.
In school we do homework. Lines and lines and lines of
pencil that will fade. Teacher Joy is mad every day. She is the
opposite of Dantes Satan, the origin of gravity not fxed at her
belly but all about her, exerting a force that asks not for impl-
but explosion. I do not think she likes me. Her belly button is a
void. She yells when I talk. The opposite of matter. She does
not yell at Tommy and Sally and Marissa and Chet.
I tell Sarah about butterfies. All different colored ones
fapping frantically. She says she likes frogs better. Even those
without the cute protruding eyeballs. I say I am the same.
I tell her about the building. The building of buildings. I
ask if she wants some blocks. Colors, wood-grain, thin, thick,
quid
asia ward
I dont care, I promise, I dont. She yawns. Her eyelids pulse.
I say we can play with them together. Her from her bed and
me on my knees. She says yes. Yes. She closes her eyes and
curls under her covers. Like a tiny, white bear. She is tired. A
tiny, white bear with a fat seal next to it that is too big to eat. I
think how I am too.
Teacher Joy, Spring Semester
32
dislocate
summer 2012
33
Networks: Imagine jamming, sticking all sorts of things
in your nervous system
Sex: Rachel Mayes & I smoke cigarettes
outside of The Magician, storefront
patrons draw crude boobs & fat
dicks on steamy windows.
***
Lets leave our genitals out of this, okay?
Current City: We need this, the disaster,
childrens parks made of concrete
& steel, disarray, the shock
of something unexpected right
behind you at all times:
a man dying on the sidewalk,
bar with neon pink FAT
BABY on the front window.
Dont you ever let anyone tell you
that you need to know the colors
of whats inside. The test is over.
Birthday: I am alive in the most
unmiraculous time.
Hometown: Jagged remnants of piers
lay waiting in the River Charles.
Relationship Status: & if my lover loses
her hands, or hair, then I leave
the bitch.
Interested In: I try to throw peanuts at the podium poets
Looking For: Just come on, come with me
while I write this. I could use some
companyyours.
Political Views: I am Walter, warrior
ruler!
Religious Views: I have become
terrifed of unmade memories. The split-
lipped God is on the radio broad-
casting silly silver promises.
Walter Edgewater Creates a Facebook Profle
Basic Information
creates a Facebook Profile
Activities: Unlock the dead bolt, stomp
onto the deck, nearly slip, plunk into the weather-
beaten patio chair. Light a cigarette. Take a drag, burp
a little burp. Tastes like Nutter Butter Bites. This is all wrong
I just took that over-the-counter Prilosec. That shouldve done
the trick. WaitIm a writer. Well, I used to be.
Interests: I drink coffee
in my leopard print robe.
Favorite Music: The pace of the baroque
adagio races my chest.
Favorite TV Shows: Stop smiling
& dust yourself off. Youve been made
too real. How did you do it,
you brain-foat barracuda?
Favorite Movies: Tarantula Man starring
Clint Eastwood & directed
by Noir Ell. It hasnt been made
yet, but will be soon. Im sure of it.
Of made movies, my favorite
is The Hustler. Or Jaws!
Favorite Books: Do you have any idea how hard it is
to constantly write your life
into a poem?
Favorite Quotations: Were all going home
aloneyou dont have to faunt it.
***
well be asleep for some time, & then
for some time, well fnish living.
About Me: I am not the Americana.
I am not the Polyanna.
I am not the .
I am not the Laframboise.
I am the petit bourgeois.
I am the Louisiana.
I am the vox humana.
I am the top banana.
I am Oh, Susanna,
wont you cry for me?
Likes and Interests
Kevin Shea
34
dislocate
summer 2012
35
Email: I write dead letters to the disappearance.
Current City: You walk the streets
hoping you will fnd something,
a sign that youre going the right way.
Earlier, you knew the way to the bar
without even checking a map.
AIM: just focused on my hand, twisting balled
scrap paper nervously.
Grad School: No one talks to no one,
that is, no one is really a stranger to me.
I tried everywhere but everything was closed.
College: Something done got messed up
in my brain.
High School: He thinks briefy of his frst
love, she of the crying by the kitchen table,
& then hes driving through the graveyard,
Zeek at the wheel, tumbling tombstones,
ravine-bound.
Employer: Barely Legal
Biscuits. Its our new literary journal.
Position: Im the captain until you abandon
ship
Time Period: long, bare
thread, tired & gold
Location: Such germination
along the Hudson
Description: Its 8:52am & Im just getting up
for my 9-5.
Contact Information
Education and Work
creates a Facebook Profile
lamb
asia ward
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37
Galileos Sidereal Messenger, Abridged
Erin Murphy
NOTE: The following erasure poems are comprised of words
taken from the noted texts. The words are in order and have
not been altered.
With this instrument
of our senses,
behold the moon,
naked and rough
as a philosopher wandering
in Paris or at sea.
Forsake
caution let ABCD
be a cloud, a face,
a hand, the sun
as shadows lose
their blackness
and become one.
Messenger, Abridged
Letter from Charles Darwin to Botanist
Joseph Dalton Hooker June 27, 1573, Abridged
The pretense that science is objective, apolitical and
value-neutral is profoundly political because it obscures
the political role that science and technology play
in underwriting the existing distribution of power in
society. Ruth Hubbard
My wife: like gales
of wind, less
and less endurable,
with highness and lowness,
eclectic & not clear.
Men, supreme, are
the highest
form, the most
mature, having important
organs & ideas.
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39
Stag Country, No. 1
J. A. Tyler
Kristoffer West Johnson
Stag Country, No. 1
Magpie seeped oil. His shoulders ran. The machinery of
the grind spoke broken coal from black walls. There was
no symmetry. Dovetail slept in the corner, an ooze of white
humming from her skin. There was candle glow, and Magpies
coyote in the dim. Cold hung in the lines between. Magpie
shifted another pelt higher in Dovetails bedding, the baby
only settling deeper towards the foor. Every father in the grind
had a son, every man a coyote. It was peaceful brutality in the
mines and Magpie an uninvited shine
in its darkness. Twice a year the men left the mountains. Twice
a year there was a stirring in these hollows. Twice a year
Magpie and all of the grind men reached down in the valley
and plucked until their hands were raw. The frst was on the
coldest day, when even the grind iced over with doubt, when
the men were at their weakest, when the tally was upended
and there was the next need for the next wave of men, for the
fooding of the mountains
with another blight of semen. On this the coldest day the men
traveled the slopes toward sunrise, afraid of catching ice in
their lungs, or the look of snow on peaks so intimate that it
would stiffen their hearts into forever callouses, unforgiving
knots that grind men cant undo. Everyone knows that this is
how you kill a grind man, to tangle his heart when the sun is
ripe. And down the sides the men would travel, a winter fully
bloomed around
them, heading to the valley, to the trove of women there, to
the knitters of snow and ice, their knitting needles resounding
an avalanche of clicking from the ranges the grind men wore
on their shoulders. The women of the valley would hear them
coming, days in advance, but there was no defense. Once,
they set fre to their village. Once, they stopped their hearts
to pretend death. Once they ran and once they built weapons
and once they all stood naked
on the breach, devastatingly open to the men of the grind.
Nothing changed. The coldest day of the year was a day that
the valley women, the snow-knitters, had to look upon with
their eyes open. The men would arrive at the highest point of
the village, snow-tinged caps and layers of snow beneath, the
women either crying or screaming or running or hiding, each
woman only attempting the impossible: to break a perpetual
cycle of monstrosity and rot, to
balance a keeling ship in steadfast icy waters. And the men
would tear their clothing, and the men would penetrate their
bodies, and the men, with coal hands and blackened chests
would hump and heave and clatter-throw their slickness down
into the valley, into the women, where a boy or girl would
grow, where a coal miner would take room, where either
another snowy daughter would blossom only to be drawn
and quartered, or a man would root, a boy to be born for the
blackest
work, for the stall and grudge of pulling dark from dark, raised
on glinting oil and pitch, the holler of upturned metal and
the sledge of mens voices pounding in the mountaintops.
Only the boys survived, only the sons. The daughters were
always burned, always dropped from the worlds edge, always
strapped to the trees and set upon by the coyotes, until
nothing of daughters were left, until the sons were washed
clean of their sister-forms, until the men of the
grind felt safe again in a nearly womanless world. This was
on the second day. This frst day, when the mountain men
stepped out of the mines and out of the grind and down to the
valley, this was the day of raping this was the coldest day of
the year and the men had only the strength left in their oil-
skinned bodies to hold down beneath them every woman of
the valley until every woman of the valley was brimming with
wet coal, until every
woman had been attacked and held and hollered and spent,
until every woman felt every last drop of womanhood forged
on the inseam of her thighs by the darkness of hands, by the
men of the mountains, by the only danger set upon them in
this forest-world where they knitted snow and ice, where they
drank root tea, where they loved their sister-wives as if the
sun was a star set so close to their faces that snow didnt
matter. And it was on the second day, the second time of the
year, nine months
later, when the grind would once again halt, when the men
of the mountains, of the mines and the coal rubies, would
descend into the valley again to reap what they had sown.
The men would oil up their backs and their broad chests, their
gnarled thighs from perpetually lifted loads, and walk black
down the mountain, stains on the snow, to take from the
women of the valley the brood that they had fathered. Nine
months to the day, from the
coldest of days when the women became unwanted mothers,
and those who gave birth early sometimes fed with the child
and sometimes stuffed their angel wings into the childs
mouth until it gasped and sputtered, until it rang with silence.
And sometimes these early mother-women held their new
babies in their arms and drowned themselves in the river, or
leapt from the seat of the world, their feminine arms spread to
the sky, their snow hair tumbling, their dangling children so
taken by the fight that their breath left them before the
darkness could swallow their baby-faces. And some women,
those who birthed early, they only held their babies in their
arms until the coal-men returned. And then, if the baby was a
girl, it was killed. And then, if the baby was a boy, it was taken
by the men, carried away and into the mountains, to the grind,
to return one day to the valley, to where their fathers frst
pledge of reluctance
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41
raped, and rape again in the low-spots
of this world, where there were only mothers and aunts,
and the great tearing open of clothes. This is in the valley of
always, where every daughter was killed but women always
remained. These snow-knitting women, these women of the
valley, some would kill themselves and some would be burst
during birthing and some simply lost one another in the valley,
in the trees or in the bellies of coyotes, yet on the coldest day
of the year, the day nine months before the men would return
again, there
were always women to scream and fght off their attackers,
to wield fngers as claws and mouths as knives, to be fayed
open on snowy boulders in the valley of this winter, where
new men always came.
Women appeared. It would
be an evening between the
frst and the second day,
the valley women, some
growing boys and some
girls and some as vacant
and blank as paper, and on
the startled treeline a new
woman would appear, or
hundreds of them, from the
deepness of nothing, from the recesses where the women
wanted to hide but never found cover . All these perfect
women, quietly entering the village, watching the valley with
quick eyes, women who seemed to know a secret but then
only picked up the knitting needles set before them and took,
as all the other women of the valley, to knitting snow and ice,
duplicating the individual uniqueness of every longing fake,
to have it pile on their feet and atop the mountains where the
men of coal came from, where their grind constantly rattled,
where they worked
the bodies made of oil, bodies these women had birthed
and those coal-men had raised, stubborn wrongness twisted
into every muscle, every limb, every cell. The new women
would appear and the former women would offer them their
knitting needles and their root tea, would offer their wrists
to the foreheads of these new women, to feel in them the
temperature drop from forest cover to this valley village, the
change from ghosts of women to other kinds
of ghosts of women. And the new women would drink the
offered tea and knit snow, knit ice, see around them the soon
distending bellies of pregnant women, ask of their men and
all the angel-white fngers pointing upwards as if to the sky,
only then towards the mountain, the immaculate conception
of coal-rape, of black lust, of oil-fathers, of men who take and
take, who trudge bone-ice feet back up again to the grind,
leaving behind their children to
stretch bold and large in victims seething insides, waiting out
the second day, nine months later, when they would return to
the child harvest. And the new women, only soaking the story
to their hilts, until they fooded with coal-hate and mountain
fear, snapping eyes at any twig-break on the approach to the
village. The valley and the women and the snow they knitted
falling down in lace. Only Magpie then, inadvertently against
the system, a daughter
named and resting in the
corner of his hovel, the
outside freeze working inward.
Only Magpie, cradling a baby
he named Dovetail, watching
her sleep beneath coyote
pelts, the slight linger of fuel
on her baby lips, the same oil
and pitch that fed all the sons
from all the father-hands. And
Dovetail cooing when she
ate, and Magpie forgetting that a mountain goes upward, and
the valley resides below, and all daughters are for the cliffs or
the coyotes or the drawing and quartering. Only Magpie, not
forgetting, but remembering a mother when he
gripped this babys small bones, her tender frame. Only
Magpie, who said he would take another daughter to another
end, and walking with other men from the grind, other not-
fathers with other not-sons in their oil-clad hands, some
shaking with the anger of failure and some at the promise of
killing, some as tightly fsted as the frst day, when they came
to chase their woman from the crowd, when they caught their
woman and danced her across blades of
their shoulders, then oil heads catching sunrise as they took
a woman back to her tent, as they wrapped black arms over
white skin and rampaged her again and again, hoping to
make a man from her burning cross, longing to be a father, to
bring another son back to the honeycomb hovels of the grind,
the sludge and the slick of always coal from always mines,
the scars of pitted earth collapsing and the scars of black
burned into the landscape, ever covered
in snow and then re-covered in coal dust and the blackened
men of the mines. Magpie walked with these men, attempted
Stag Country, No. 1
to think what they were thinking, but hed committed the sin,
the looking into a daughters eyes, and all was unbalanced.
Fathers have always told sons, fathers and fathers, there is
not ever a reason big enough to look into a daughters eyes,
and it will tangle your heart, and a tangled heart is the death
of you son. Fathers on fathers, and all the noise of the grind
welling underneath
their father and son feet. Only Magpie walking with a then
unnamed babe in his hands, gripping her ankle, holding
her upside down as all men did with all of these daughters,
because ending an upside down world was the same as being
merciful, and these coal men, these black faces atop frozen
hearts, they needed always ever reasons to keep killing this
world. Magpie walked with these men and Magpie talked with
these men and his words like their words were gravel and pits,
the deepness of mines and how these daughters are the rot of
the land. Only Magpies baby, head towards the freezing dirt
and baby lips bluing, Magpies baby was so silent he thought
shed already died, and he was happy for the prospect, the
bitter love for throwing something already dead off the cliffs at
the edge of the world. The other mine-men, their babies were
wailing in sync, a cry of daughter-locusts somehow knowing
that at the edge of the world there wouldnt be clouds and
sun but wind and spite and loss. All but Magpies daughter,
who was silent. The world sometimes how it shifts. Fathers
on fathers said never look in a daughters eyes, sons on sons
knew, but because Magpie was holding the only quiet baby,
because she was silent and the oil of Magpies brain needed
reassurance, because Magpie had a strain of white
snow that had infected his heart, he looked. Magpie looked
into his daughters eyes. In the eyes of Magpies daughter, in
the split world where he did what he shouldnt have, when
Magpie denied the soot and oil of his veins, Magpie saw: a
lone ship with a billowing white sail. It was on the ocean. And
the ocean was beneath the cliffs. And the single ship with its
upright mast was still in the waves, anchored to a static point
though the sails longed to project it into
the horizon, a place where the oil-men had never gone, a
place their coal-history proclaimed dead and sinking. A
ship on those waves in that ocean. And Magpie saw, in
that second of his daughters eyes, himself, on the bow of
that ship, a daughter in his hands, in his arms, and a snow-
cleaned sun in the sky, and what it would be to look up at
those cliffs instead of down from them, how it would be on a
sailed boat, with a living daughter against his chest, standing
on the other side of the
edge of the world. And Magpies heart, at that moment, was a
tangle. Fathers on fathers, sons on sons, and Magpie looking
into a daughters eyes. The men continued walking and
Magpie with them, but there was a difference in the depth of
his coal-covered skin, and he felt what felt like oil tears, and
his face fush with wanting. The men walked and the edge of
the world neared. Magpie had his daughter and the oil men on
his sides and to his front, they all
had theirs and none but Magpie had looked towards their
faces. They held them by the ankles, blue faces pumping
angry air through baby lungs. The sons would be already
back at the mines, out from the freeze-snap of wind, mouths
quieted by the sludge fed to them on fathers fngers, the oil
quieting their throats, baby son fngers opening closing on
oil-daddy bears. The sons would be a soothed pack, coyotes
nestled at their family pairs, father and son, while these
daughters, every daughter from
every women who gave birth to a daughter, they were
screaming in near unison, the worlds edge approaching,
the cliffs smooth face to dark waters beneath like a sky to
their newborn upside-down daughters. The women of the
village, in the valley, they never saw this cliff unless they were
throwing themselves from it, and even then only new women
would appear from the treeline, to pick up their resting knitting
needles, to go back to the making of snow and ice, the raping
by oiled men, and the loss of every son and every daughter.
And the men of the mine too, they did not see the cliffs unless
their rape birthed a child, and the child was a daughter, and
their oil rules and coal heads bade them stand on the cliff,
baby daughter ankles in hand, and hurl them to the rocks
and water below. As Magpie was standing there now, the last
in the row of men who in this year of oil, in this season of
coal rape and nine months brooding, in this instance of mine
mentality,
had made and now were poised to destroy the snow
daughters in hand. One after another, down the line, the
screams of dying sounding exactly as the calls of life, except
that they moved downward, until the water on the shore,
on the rocks below, it ate the existence of every daughter,
of all female form outside of the valley village. Only Magpie
at the end of the line, and no noise coming from where his
daughters upside-down face had been, and no sound left
except for the clatter of waves, and the stillness of burned up
coal men, and Dovetail against a fathers chest.
This is the valley of always,

where every daughter was killed
but women always remained.
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43
1. Madame Graft
Cant you see me as anything
other than compromised
gums & shame? I am more
than Gauloise. I could brush
up on my French but, Ill never be
able to sing like The Sparrow.
2. Betrayer
This Belleville ideal has been
abandoned and you arent
welcome to my lair (not liar).
In other words, yes, fuck off.
3. Monsieur X
Due to our gaze-surprise, say
this time at Le Gerny, the shadow
of desire we glance away from
because the mouth, my mouth
is the most dangerous place.
What wasnt said
Kevin McLellan
zebra
ellen Hughes
What wasnt said
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chapter 1. loomings
Jason Lester
chapter 1. loomings
-- north, east, south, west. Yet unite. Tell, does magnetic virtue
needles compasses those attract thither?
Once. Say, country; lakes. any path please, ten one
carries down dale, leaves pool stream. magic. Let most
absentminded be plunged deepest -- man legs, set feet-
going, he infallibly lead, region. Should ever athirst great
American desert, try experiment, caravan happen supplied
metaphysical professor. Yes, knows, meditation wedded.
artist. desires paint dreamiest, shadiest, quietest,
enchanting bit romantic landscape valley Saco. chief element
employs? trees, each hollow trunk, hermit crucifx within;
sleeps meadow, sleep cattle; cottage goes sleepy smoke.
Deep distant woodlands winds mazy, reaching overlapping
spurs mountains bathed hill-side blue. though picture lies thus
tranced, pine-tree shakes sighs shepherd's head, vain, unless
eye him. visit Prairies June,
when scores wade knee among Tiger-lilies -- charm
wanting? -- drop! Niagara cataract sand, travel thousand?
Why did poor poet Tennessee, suddenly receiving two
handfuls silver, deliberate whether buy coat, sadly needed,
invest pedestrian trip Rockaway Beach? robust healthy boy,
crazy? frst voyage passenger, yourself feel mystical vibration,
told? old Persians hold holy? Greeks give separate deity, own
brother Jove? Surely meaning. deeper story Narcissus, who
because could grasp tormenting, mild image saw fountain,
was drowned. we ourselves rivers oceans. ungraspable
phantom life; key.
am habit going begin grow hazy eyes, conscious lungs,
mean inferred. needs, rag something. Besides, passengers-
sick -- quarrelsome -- don't nights -- enjoy themselves much,
general thing; nor, salt, Commodore, Captain, Cook. abandon
glory distinction offces. abominate honorable respectable
toils, trials, tribulations kind whatsoever. quite care, taking,
barques, brigs, schooners, confess considerable, being sort
offcer-board -- somehow, fancied broiling fowls; broiled,
judiciously buttered, judgmatically salted peppered, speak
respectfully, reverentially, fowl than. Idolatrous dotings
Egyptians ibis roasted river horse, mummies creatures huge
bake-houses pyramids.
simple sailor, mast, plumb forecastle, royal. True, rather
order, make jump spar, grasshopper May. unpleasant enough.
touches one's sense honor, particularly established family,
van Rensselaers, Randolphs, Hardicanutes. putting tar-pot,
been lording schoolmaster, making tallest boys awe. transition
keen, assure, decoction Seneca Stoics enable grin bear. even
wears.
hunks-captain orders broom sweep decks? indignity
amount, weighed, scales New Testament? think archangel
Gabriel thinks anything less, promptly obey instance? aint
slave? Well, however captains -- thump punch, satisfaction
knowing; everybody else served -- either physical point view;
so universal passed, hands rub other's shoulder-blades.
gain, always, paying trouble, whereas pay single penny
heard. contrary. Difference between paid. act perhaps
uncomfortable infiction orchard thieves entailed us. compare?
urbane activity receives really marvellous, considering
earnestly believe root earthly ills, monied enter heaven. Ah!
cheerfully consign perdition!
Finally, wholesome exercise pure deck. prevalent astern
(violate Pythagorean maxim), quarter-deck gets atmosphere
second sailors. breathes; commonalty leaders many things,
suspect. wherefore after repeatedly smelt merchant, whaling;
invisible police offcer Fates, has constant surveillance,
secretly dogs, infuences unaccountable -- answer. doubtless,
formed grand programme Providence drawn. came brief
interlude solo extensive performances. bill run:
Contested Election Presidency United States
'BLOODY BATTLE AFFGHANISTAN'
cannot exactly stage managers, put shabby, others
magnifcent parts tragedies, short easy genteel comedies,
jolly farces -- recall circumstances, springs motives cunningly
presented various disguises, induced performing, cajoling
delusion choice resulting unbiased freewill discriminating
judgment.
overwhelming idea whale. portentous mysterious monster
roused curiosity. wild distant seas rolled island bulk;
undeliverable, nameless perils; attending marvels Patagonian
sights sounds, helped sway wish, inducements; tormented
everlasting itch remote. love forbidden seas, barbarous
coasts. ignoring good, quick perceive horror, social -- since
friendly terms inmates place lodges.
reason, welcome; food-gates wonder-world swung open,
wild conceits swayed purpose, foated inmost, endless
processions, mid, hooded, snow hill.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long
precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing
particular to interest on shore, I thought would sail about a
see the watery part of world. It is way have driving off spleen,
regulating circulation. Whenever fnd myself growing grim
mouth; damp, drizzly November soul; involuntarily pausing
before coffn warehouses, bringing up rear every funeral
meet; especially hypos get such an upper hand, that requires
strong moral principle prevent deliberately stepping into
street, methodically knocking people's hats -- then, account
high time sea as soon can. This substitute for pistol ball. With
philosophical fourish Cato throws himself upon his sword;
quietly take ship. There surprising. If they but knew, almost
all men their degree, other, cherish very nearly same feelings
towards ocean.
now your insular city Manhattoes, belted round by wharves
Indian isles coral reefs -- commerce surrounds her surf. Right
left, streets you waterward. Its extreme down-town battery,
where noble mole washed waves, cooled breezes, which few
hours previous were out sight land. Look at crowds-gazers.

Circumambulate dreamy Sabbath afternoon. from Corlears
Hook Coenties Slip, thence, Whitehall northward. What do?
-- Posted like silent sentinels around town, stand thousands
mortal fxed reveries. leaning against spiles; seated pier-
heads; looking over bulwarks ships China; aloft rigging,
striving still better seaward peep. These are landsmen; week
days pent lath plaster -- tied counters, nailed benches,
clinched desks? Green felds gone? Here?
! come more, pacing straight water, seemingly bound dive.
Strange! will content them extremest limit; loitering under
shady lee yonder not suffce. Must just nigh possibly without
falling. -- miles -- leagues. Inlanders, lanes alleys, avenues,
from Overwhelming Idea Whale
Author note: In Overwhelming Idea Whale, I take Herman
Melville's Moby-Dick one of the most lexicographically diverse
texts in English and excise every instance of every word in the
text after its initial usage. Channeling the single-minded mania
of Ahab, I have indiscriminately hunted the vocabulary of Moby-
Dick to the brink of extinction. By distilling the text to its barest
essence that of its own rich and effusive vocabulary I hope
to reveal how the original text is charged with energy even at the
level of its diction, while simultaneously allowing for a reading
of this canonical text that crackles with new possibilities forged
from chance interactions within the text's own vocabulary.
46
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47
bullshit
phoebe reeves
Id like to reclaim certain words and sing
Leonard Cohen songs as if they were sung by women
and not men who always want to fuck women
in the most romantic or nostalgic manner, to use
poetry like a strap-on and ease their bully way
into it with a wet metaphor. She bells the
rein. They like the way. Just a shrine, a shriven
man at his holy archway, the terrifying
sacrament of the cunt.
bullshit
What do aspens have to tell
you cant fgure out from crying?
Their quizzical pauses and rushes,
a serrated tipsy wave down a gorge.
Sunlight runs through wine
gushing from a split cask. Crisp
and deliberate lines on a map show
where the watershed begins.
You should have slept well in the rain.
Oil spills in the bay
slick black on slushy white.
How many Bicknells thrushes in the park?
How many governors on house arrest?
Maybe we can all have ankle bracelets someday.
These neighborhoods where everyone over 35
has a cancer. Lung cancer in apartment
#92. Leukemia in 88. Makes it hard
to get angry when they take up two spaces,
park in the one we shoveled out.
The schedule of destructionspelunkers
digging for tin in ancient garbage dumps,
black-sealed bags heaved up
past stench intowhat? light? smog?
New headlines, anyway. So transient.
Bugs on water. The Grenville Orogeny.
Big Ice Age. Little Ice Age. Dried grass
Ive kept in a tin box for years.
Pastoral Insomniac Spree
Headlines
asia ward
Flying horse
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49
a handbell choir playing Silver Bells, and into the Rotunda Room featuring the Glasgow Brass
Quintet. The air inside the cave is warmer than Kentucky winter; the cave holds constant at 54
degrees Fahrenheit. I unzip my coat, fll my lungs, and open my mouth.
Trevor Strosnider updated his current city to Idaho Springs, Colorado.
Trevor Strosnider added Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold to his work.
Trevor Strosnider added Roland Deschain and Manfred von Richthofen to his profle.
Pwyll Mar in Blaenavon, Torfaen, South Wales, was opened to visitors in 1980 as project of the
National Museum Wales. A working coal mine from 1860 to 1980, the site is now dedicated to
the preservation of the Welsh heritage of coal mininga prosperous source of family pride from
the Industrial Revolution right up till Margaret Thatcher sank her teeth into Great Britain.
Tom and Becky in the Cave: Chapter 30
At Sunday morning service, the two are nowhere to be found. To everyones horror, the
realization dawns that Tom and Becky must still be in the cave. After a day of searching, the
words BECKY & TOM, scrawled on the cave wall in lantern soot, are the only trace to be
found. Meanwhile, Becky folds up into herself, cries in terrorTom, how could you? How
could you have gotten us so lost just to slake your own taste for adventure?
Leonard Cohen wrote The Sweetest Little Song: You go your way/ Ill go your way too.
The king laments, alone:
But what, indeed, am I to do? I have begun in defeat, repeatedly. My designs proposed in
blue, clean lines, concreteyet all attempts at implementation tumble down as if cursed. Here
I stand, impotent.
1077 22nd Avenue SE, Minneapolis, MN
I rent my frst subterranean room, a summer sublet, in May 2011. A tiny peace lily almost
survives in the sliver of sunlight through my egress window. Its larger than requirements
dictate, a source of pride, but there are no fre alarms on either level of the house. Nothing to
warn us if its time to crawl out and run for our lives.
My brother earns his Bachelor of Science degree in geology at the University of Kentucky.
Before he is done with his last remaining feld camp credit, he has landed an entry-level
geology job at a mine that shares its name with our hometown, where hell earn three times
more than a writer with an MFA can hope to make. He comes home for two days, spends one
with each of our quarreling parents, packs up his stuff and his girl, and drives back west to
make his own. She decorates their bedroom.
The Kings Council, in chorus:
Who, we? We blame the spirit, but
A bastards blood will cure it.
Such a death as retribution
Seems to us a fne solution!

Look, Ruby, says Leo to his trembling little wife, as they step into a pitch black room. He lifts
the lantern and they crane their necks to gaze up at a giant stream of water jetting out of the
rock 145 feet up, falling down right at their feet. Ill name it after you, he promises, honest,
and kisses her true.
My daughter, my daughter, the harvest goddess cries, hands smoothing the pretty girls dusty
hair. Please tell me you didnt eat anything down there?
Those next few days, what could Floyd do, thirsty and hungry, a rock on his shoes? America
tuned in after dinner each night to hear the next installation of the rescue teams progress as
they dug a tunnel toward where he was trapped.
The wise man built his house upon the rock
The wise man built his house upon the rock
Exposure: Notes from the Underworld
Ashley Strosnider
Some caved naked for fear of contaminating the water they mean to study. Joni Tevis
On February 2, 1925, a bundled-up picnicker in Central Kentucky mightve dropped a
sandwich down a hole in the ground to world-renowned cave explorer Floyd Collins, on his
third day stuck in Sand Cave with a rock on his leg. If only shed known that the roof would
cave the next day, rendering all contact but voice impossible, she wouldve made him ffty
sandwiches or more, fung them down like manna from heaven.
Leo Lambert of Tennessee loved Lookout Mountain Cave, loved it so much that he bought
land on the side of the mountain just to drill down into it an easier path so more people could
visit. (So they could pay him to do it, to walk on his steps, so he could buy his wife a nice new
dress). But after just a bit of drilling, a brand new shaft opened up into another chamber no
one had even known was there.
Ive known what a geode is since my younger brother taught me on a weekend camping trip
to the Land Between the Lakes. Dad pulls the boat into a cove, and Im annoyed because
I want to waterski (two parallel planes tied together at the toes to help me stand), and Dad
wants to comb the beach for arrowheads but my brother wont join him. He wants to search
for crystals, while my dad insinuates that he should take me with him then. My brother fnds
specimen after specimen of round crusty rocks. These, he stuffs into socks when we get
home to Henderson, and on the driveway near the azalea bush, we pound them with hammers.
The pieces crumble inside the cotton, and we pull out even halves. Set on their backs like
upturned turtles, their insides sparkle under the sun.
5 August 2010, Mina San Jose, Copiapo, Chile, South America: A rock-fall at the mine, located
in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, traps 33 gold and copper miners 2,300 feet below
ground. Seventeen days later, a drill entered a space accessible to the workers, and came
back to the surface with a note: Estamos bien en el refugio, los 33. We are well in the shelter,
the 33.
We are born out of claustrophobia. I imagine, curled up safe inside our mothers, none of
us wanted to leave. We all cried when she pushed us out; tiny little sinkholes on our bellies
remind us what was lost.
The Song of Snowdon: Or, Merlin Becomes a Man
(A Tale Told in Four Voices)
From deep inside the earth, a voice complains:
These stacks of stones piled upon my back keep falling; thus, the walls remain undone.
The king suspects poor workmanship, but I know the men are trying, and I even hold
my breath. Despite this unrest, I hesitate to shake an honest attempt at progress but I
must, at times, gasp in earnest, forcefully. Something rumbles in my gut which I, for all my
embarrassment, cannot subdue. This guilt gnaws, growing both teeth and claws, to scale.
30th Annual Cave Sing December 6. I take a road trip north from Nashville to meet a couple of
summer camp friends at Mammoth Cave National Park. We link elbows and follow the crowd
into the mouth of the cave, past the old mining operation where gunpowder was made, past
Exposure: Notes from the Underworld
50
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51
my car always sandy. My friends spend their holidays at the seaside. I wake up in his parents
beach house on New Years Day knowing I am barely above sea level, wondering if well sink or
foat.
mine. (pronoun)
1. a form of the possessive case of I used as a predicate adjective: The Cavers Rescue
Spelunkers t-shirt is not mine.
2. something that belongs to me: My mother, my brother, and I all drive white cars. Mine is the
smallest.
3. Archaic. my (used before a word beginning with a vowel or a silent h,
or following a noun): mine own brother.
SEE RUBY FALLS on a dozena hundred?billboards and barn roofs on I-75 in Tennessee
in the 70s, and still so many today. How many times can a single white car drive right by and
remain un-mesmerized?
The Henderson molybdenum mine in Clear Creek County, Colorado, has produced
molybdenum since 1976. The mine was discovered in 1964 and named after a mining
engineer. Incidentally, Freeport-McMoRan, which operates the mine and employs my only
brother, is the largest taxpayer to the Indonesian government.
The frst lesson at Waterski Camp: When you fall, let go of the rope, hold your ski tips up as
high as you can so boats can see you. Lean back, and foat, and wait. Your driver will come
back for you. This is a metaphor for Jesus.
He died of exposure. Floyds remains were left in the cave, a funeral service at the surface.
Two months later, his brother wasnt satisfed, reopened the shaft theyd closed over him. April
26, 1925, Floyd was laid to rest on the family farm. Two years later, his grieving father sold the
family land, the cave along with it.
Rolling Stone magazine called 1964: The Tribute Number One Beatles tribute band on Earth.
When I was ffteen, my dad took me one county over to Owensboro, where my orthodontist
lived, to see their show in a hotel lounge.
Trevor Strosnider ...200 miles of tunnels, 19 levels, 1000 gallons of water per minute. Woooo
working in Moria!
Trevor Strosnider's mine belt and brass tags jingle when he walks...and the sound is not
unlike that of bells on a kitten.
Trevor Strosnider Yeah. My job. My metaphorical collar is white...with blue stripes.
June 13, 1927, the new landowner moved Floyd into a glass-faced coffn, on display in Crystal
Cave for yearsuntil the night of March 18, when someone stole him away. Soon, Floyd came
home, left leg missing. They chained his casket to the ground.
We rode the elevator down, squished together in the corner behind a couple reeking of weed.
As we wandered through, they oohed and ahhed and touched and snickered. Meanwhile
I wondered why no one had made it illegal to bolt name plates to the formations. We
approached Ruby Falls to a soundtrack of timpani crashes, a strobing red light throwing itself
at the water, again, again.
The Fate of Injun Joe: Chapter 33
After Tom and Becky make it back in one piece, the judge seals up the cave door to
prevent anyone elses getting lost inside. When Tom wakes up to the news after a weeks
convalescence, he rushes to tell the judge he locked Injun Joe inside. And hes right. They
fnd Joes body, starved to death, just on the other side.
Merlin continues:
Trapped as they are within this hill, the scope is limited, the contest suspended in incessant
attempts to scar one anothers hidessuch as: to see whose spine, when pinned up against a
mountains insides, can cause a castle to crumble.
The wise man built his house upon the rock
And the rain came tumbling down
The whole earth is concave when mapped onto paper, fat and happy where it bulges in the
middle. If you set a turtle on his back and push him down a slide, he falls off the end and lands
on his back, pedaling the air, slow motion kicking, kicking.
Lady Earth cries:
They comb my tangled hair and from within my sticks and stonesyes, from my bosom, pry a
trusted son, my own, who once inside me writhed as this new mystery now moves. He is heir
unto my truths. His ear draws close up to my lips; I impart slow whispers, mist. He is quiet,
near, as ancient secrets slip like molten tears from my hot heart to his soft hands. We forge a
plan from the fre of my womb. Though sophists minds will claim to know divine truth, demand
death.
While the Chilean government undertook its large-scale rescue mission, involving international
drill-rigs and the US NASA program among others, numerous foreign leaders contacted Chiles
President Pinera to congratulate him. Solidarity fowed in from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia,
Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, South Africa, Poland, the UK, Spain, Ireland, Mexico, and the United
States. Pope Benedict XVI sent a video message of his prayer for the rescues success, in
Spanish.
What must my orthodontist have seen? Calcium deposit stalactites and stalagmites framing the
cavern yawned open on his chair, my palette (which we strove to rapidly expand via a nightly
turn of the key) a pinkish fowstone drapery.
Johnny Cash promises: If you wait your turn, youll see Ruby fall.
He knew he wasnt the only one whod tried and failed, but he had fallen in love with her
nonetheless. He consulted the gods, and all-knowing Zeus gave it to him straight. Youre
going to have to steal her. You know they wont just give her away.
Megan and Matt take me home to Adair County with them on a weekend off from camp. On
Friday night, we meet their former high-school English teacher in a cow pasture down the road.
My hair is wrapped in a bandana, cheap kneepads around my ankles till its time; hes wearing
overalls and a hard-hat. His last name is Relifordno Mr. Hes more than six feet tall and
grinning ear to ear. We climb under a fence, but Megan assures me the farmers given them
permission. They have decent gear, a years worth of college credits in geology and geography
between them, and the farmers relatively confdent they wont have a reason to sue him.
Reliford and I crack jokes about Mark Twain and stick close to our guides.
Floyd had found something big, really biga whole new chamber in Sand Cavebut his lamp
was too low to explore it. Knowing the time he had left to navigate out safely was growing slim,
and so he sped things up. Haste makes mistakes, and he got himself stuck, knocked over his
lamp, dislodged a rock from the ceiling, pinned his leg. But did he curse, or did he cry?
Enter an adolescent orphan:
Forgive my speaking boldly, King, but nothing they have told to you is true. My blood will
not do a thing. It is a war deep within the earth that has halted the birth of your castle. Your
foundation cannot stand upon a land whose immaculate torso heaves so in the labors of war.
But this submerged hostility wrecks your affairs with a blind eye. It is dark down there, and you
are not a thought, forgive my frankness. Sir, underneath her skin crawl dragons I speak the
truth as she herself has told creatures brawling in a whirl of pink. This war of theirs uproots
your bulwarks. But once theyre set free, the serpent white as heavens clouds or your own
beard, if I may, lord! will fall under blows from the blood red claws of the one whose hide
shines scarlet.
When I move to South Carolina, I discover the town is half dirt and half sand, situated right on
the Atlantic Seaboard Fall Line, where the Piedmont Plateau and the Coastal Plain Province
meet. Flip-fops in the muggy summer kick the sand up against my calves, the foorboards in
Exposure: Notes from the Underworld
~
52
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53
cave. (verb)
1. to explore caves, especially as a support or hobby.
2. to fall in or drown, especially from being underminedusually used with in.
3. to cease to resist: submitusually used with in.
The prettiest girl youve ever seen is picking fowersor theyre giving themselves willingly
into her hands, depending on your take on whether or not a pie enjoys being eaten. She pulls
gently and as the roots yield, Hades himself bursts up through a cleft in the earth, wraps his
arms around her waist, a hand across her mouth. He pulls her down.
Leaned back on the couch around midnight, my lover is talking to me and Im mining his
mouth for words he isnt saying. I marvel at his eyes, his lips, his perfect teeth, the slant then
arch toward the roof of his mouth, stretching up into a grand chamber. I tilt my head back and
he examines mine. His fnger tickles. Later, well discuss how I manage to open mine so wide.
The foolish man built his house upon the sand
The foolish man built his house upon the sand
The foolish man built his house upon the sand
And the rain came tumbling down
Merlin proposes a plan:
My lord, the only way to forge ahead is simply to force them out. You need not choose
sides. Their battle will run its course, but they require the sky to decide. Place your bet with
me instead, sir; know I bear the lands own request. Dig deep within her. You will fnd the
serpents. Though your wisest may disagree, their schemings are not justifed, and if I have lied,
then kill me.
After 69 days underground, all 32 Chilean miners and one Bolivian one were brought safely to
the surface over a period of nearly 24 hours, on 13 October 2010. Nineteen days earlier, on
their 50th day, they broke the record for longest length of time spent underground.
There are all sorts of ways to kick off teambuilding activitiesfrom a blind walk where partners
trade bandanas to a team carry-all where no one walks all the way there on his own, no matter
how heavy the brother. Once participants arrive at the low elements course, partners take
turns standing on a big fallen log and take turns pulling each other off and then attempt to pull
the other up. I could drive the tractor, back the boat off the ramp, send participants off a 40
foot high swing without anyone checking to make sure Id put the right clips in the right place,
send them backwards off a cliff face in similar fashion, but the low elements teambuilding
course is the only activity I never got checked off on, so my authority on the log stand may
be shaky. Nevertheless, I believe the moral of the story was this: its infnitely easier to drag
someone down with you than it is to pick her back up again.

Oh, the rain came down
And the foods came up
The rain came down
And the foods came up
The rain came down
And the foods came up
And the wise man's house stood frm.
The king again considers:
These things he claims to understandthat he speaks so well can be no accident. And yet
to save his own life, couldnt any man? I have little at risk but time. So well dig! And no harm
done, even if hes lying. Hes already dying, as things stand.
But surely you jest, king!
Is this a test, king?
Then this: if the boy presents a truer case, resolution earned under his direction, your blood
shall be spilled in his stead. The weight of your counsel will rest on your heads, and its truth
will determine my favor. Each proposition equally ridiculous sacrifces and serpent wars,
both wholly inconceivable.
Humans have a six-thousand year old relationship with Mammoth Cave. Most Native
American mummies present examples of intentional burial, evidence of funerary practice. The
exception: Lost John, a pre-Colombian miner discovered in 1935 beneath a large boulder.
You could see him well into the 1970s, have a look at death square in the face.
He says her name instead of mine. It echoes, echoes, echoes, echoes.
They call the ore muck, and a modifed version of a front end loader brings it up to the surface.
My brother calls it a mucker, some miners call it a bogger. Everyone agrees theyre really
LHDs, short for Load Haul Dump units.
Trevor Strosnider: its fast and its bucket holds ten tons. Splat.
As it goes, so she says:
These conspiring men wedge me open at the seams, this, my baring, shameful fash of pink.
Inside, the white and red roll teeth over tail, I am moaning, shaking, frail; yet by these pains, my
labor proves my son the truest prophet. He is to live.
Pwyll Mar was redeveloped in 2003, still purposefully preserved as an operational attraction.
Big Pit is not a sanitized theme park; the steel bands and props are not decorative, but integral
in holding up the mine roof. Water fowing through the tunnel is real, but it has been redirected
to fow down a channel instead of across tourists feet, like the miners had it. In the gift shop,
I buy my brother a tiny charcoal dragon who lies in my hand and looks up through heavy
eyelasheswide-eyed, docile, submissive.
But the fates have rules, too. She who eats of the underworld is marked. It was a trick, those
seeds, but shell serve a month for each. Down she goes, and the fowers wither.
In 1961, Mammoth Cave National Park purchased Crystal Cave and closed it to public access.
At the Collins familys request, Floyd and his casket were reinterred in Flint Ridge Cemetery on
March 24, 1989. It took a team of ffteen men nearly three days to drag it up.
Exposure: Notes from the Underworld
54
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summer 2012
55
To cross. To double cross. Such are the things taught only to little girls who grow into women
who block out their days crossing and double crossing. Only the double dutch and hopscotch, of
all childish things, are put away. Yet from even these games, womens stitchery takes a silliness and
vanity as exemplifed by the girlhood songs sung on the playgrounds everywhere. Consider:
I know a girl names Sarah Sarah
I know a girl or two
I know a girl names Cindy Cindy
Wish I had their shoes
They strolled on down to Orleans Orleans
To the swamps, strolled down
They strolled on down to Old Man Johnnys
Took that old mans crown
He laughed so hard he keeled straight over
Laughed so hard he died
He laughed so hard to see that party
Girls are king, he cried
While one sees the wisdom in the old mans laughter (and perhaps in his departure from a
world gone so daft), the primary seed within the songs such as these fowers at maturity into
womens obsession with ornamentation from footwear and headdress to empty titles, each to be
giggled over as the needle weaves in and out of linen much like the pointed feet of a girl skipping
two ropes when one should be enough.
There are those who argue that these needlewomen preform a moral task both by keeping their
hands from idleness and by stitching (among embroidered herbs, hearts and homes) verses from
Epistles and Psalms to be hung on walls or slept on as a pillow, ever present reminders of He who
truly maketh and leadeth and restoreth our souls. Again one should consider the rhythms from
which these same women nursed as children:
Hillary put on her pantsuit
Michelle put on her dress
And what they spoke of, nobody knows
But only one was looking her best
Here one sees that words, in womens poorly nourished minds, have no power next to fnery.
The craft of stitchery reduces words and the morals for which they stand to mere ornaments, pretty
charms for petty witches whose spelling is all in vain.
cross stitch samplers
lisa mccool-grime
Cross Stitch Sampler
all texts from
respective speeches made
at 2008 national political conventions
womens stitchery
cross stitch samplers
56
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57
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cross stitch samplers
cindy in buttercup hillary in mango
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It was strong
enough to XX bring hope XXXXXX
to the mother he met worried XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
about her child in Iraq; hope XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
to the man who's unem- XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
ployed, but can't af- XXXXXXXXXXXX
ford gas to find XXXXXXXXXX
a job; hope XXXXXXX
to the XXXX
It' XXs the story of men and women gathered in churches and union XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
halls, in town squares and high school gyms. The military families XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
who say grace each night wit XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXh an empty seat at the table. He never XXXXXXX
stopped smiling and laughing - even whil XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXe struggling to button his
shirt, even whil XXXXXXXe using two canes to get himself across the room to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
give my Mom a kiss. People like Hillary Clinton, who put those 18 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
millio XXXXn cracks i XXn the glas XXXs ceiling, so that our daughters - and sons - XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
can dream a little bigger and aim a little higher XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
That is the thread That is the thread that runs
that connects our hearts through our journey
I come here tonigh XXXXXXXt as a sister, XX
blessed with a brother who is my XXXXXXXXXXXXXXmentor, my XXXprotector
and mXXy lifelong friend. I come here XXXXXXXXas a wife who loves my husband XXXXXXXXXXXXX
and believes he will be an extraordinary president. I come here XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXas a Mom whose girls XXXXXXXX
are the heart of my heart an XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXd the center of my world - they're the first thing I think about when I XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
wake u XXXXp in the morning,Xand the last thing I think about when I go to be XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXd at night. Their future - and XXXXXXXXXXXX
all our children's future - is my stake in this election. And I come here XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXas a daughter raised on the XXXXXXXXX
South Side of Chicago by a father who was a blue collar city XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXworker,Xand a mother who stayed at XXXXXXXX
home with my brother and me. My mother's love has always been XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXa sustaining force for
our family, and one of my greatest joys is seeing her XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX integrity, he XXr com-
passion, and he XXr intelligence reflected i XXXXXXn my own daugh- XXXXX
ters. My Dad was ou XXXXXXXXXXXXr rock. XX
He knows that thread God bless you
that connects us God bless America
And XXXin the end, after all that's happened these past 19 months, the XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Barack Obama I know today is the same man I fell in love with 19 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
years ago. He's the same man XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXwho drove me and our new baby XXXXXXXXXXXX
daughter home XXXXXXXXX from the hospital ten years ago this summer, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX X
inching along at a snail's pace, peering anxiously at us XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX in the
rearview mirror, feeling the whole weight of her future in his XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
hands, determined to give her everything he'd struggled so hard XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
for himself, determined to give her what he never had: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthe
affirming XXXXXX embrace of a father's love. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
student XXXXX working XXXXXX
nights to XXXXXXX pay for her XXXXXXXX
sister's health care, sleeping just XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
a few hours a day. XXXXXXXXXXX And it was
strong enough to bring hope XXXXXXXXX
to people who came out XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
on a cold Iowa night XXXXXXXXXXXXX
and became the XXXXXXXXXX
first voices XXXXXXX
in this XXXX
As the story is told, "When McCain shuffled back from torturous interrogations, he would XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
turn toward Moe's door and flash a grin and thumbs up" - as if to say, "We're going to pull XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
through this." My fellow Americans, that is the kind of man America needs to see us XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
through these next four years. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
It' XXs the journey of an upright and honorable man - the kind of XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX fellow whose name you will find XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
on war memorial XXXXXXXXXXs in small towns across this country, only he was among those who came home. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
To the most powerful office on earth, he XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXwould bring the compassion that comes from having XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
once been powerless ... the wisdom that comes XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX even to the captives, by the grace o XXXXXXXXXf God ... XX
the special confidence of those who have seen evil, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXand seen how XXXXXXevil iXs overcome. A fellow prisoner of XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
war, a man named Tom Moe of Lancaster, Ohio, recalls looking XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthrough a pin-hole in his cell door as XXXXXXXXXXXX
Lieutenant Commander John McCain was led down the hallway, by the guards, day after day. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
There is XXXXXonly one man iXn
this election who has eve XXXXXXXXXXXXXXr
really fought for you ... i XXXXXXXXXXXXXXn
places where winning XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
means survival and defea XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXt
means death ... and that XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
man is John McCain. In XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
our day, politicians have XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
readily shared much XXXXX
lesser tales of adversity XXXXXXXXXXXXX X
than XXXthe nightmare world
in which this man, and XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
others equally brave, XXXXXXXXXXXXX
served and suffered for XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
their country. XXXXXXXX
It's a long way XXXXXXXXXX
fro XXm the fear an XXXXd
pain and squalo XXXXXXXXXr
of XXa six-by-four
cell in Hanoi to XXXXXXXXXX
the Oval Office XXXXXXXXX.
BXut if Senator XXXXXXX X
McCain is XXXXXXX
elected XXXX X
president, that i XXXXs
the journey XXXXXXXhe
will hav XXXXXe made.X
And XXXas the
mother oXf
one o XXXXf
thos XXXe
troops, tha XXXXXXt
is exactl XXXXXy
the kind o XXXXXXf
man XXXI want
as com XXXX-
mander i XXXXXn
chief. I' XXXXXm
just one oXf
man XXXy
mom XXXs
who'll sa XXXXXy
an extr XXXXa
prayer
each nigh XXXXXXt
for ou XXr
sons an XXXXXd
daughter XXXXXs
going int XXXXXo
harm's
way.X
For a season
words
For a lifetime
deeds
God bless
America
cross stitch samplers
michelle in turquoise sarah in oyster
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1. How to belong
This frst point is critical, so if you come away with nothing else pay attention to this:
you can be as crackpot, moonstruck, off-your-head insane as you need to be and get away
with i! if you know what the normals are thinking. It doesn't matter if you disagree as long
as you play by their rules while they're watching you.
Admittedly this is easier in principle than in practice. You can know every intricacy of
the normals' perception but when the urge hits you, and I mean physically hits youwhen
every tendon in your neck pulls taut and your fngers curl into lumps and you get that dense
feeling in your gut like you're a collapsing star about to be sucked inside-out and your belly
button is the event horizon of the black hole you will becomewell, it's tough to hide it.
Now in the literature they'll tell you it's all about tolerating the anxiety until it goes away,
and that's half true. You really do have to tolerate it, ignore the dense feeling and feign
composure as best you can while you're among the normals. The untrue part is the "until it
goes away," because it never really does. It just compresses and comes to rest somewhere
inside you, maybe as a kidney stone or a polyp, and you know after after a decade or so
you're going to be full up.
Perhaps you recall the story of the Spartan boy who stole the fox. The preface to this
fable, remember, is that thievery was encouraged among young Spartansprovided they
could pull it off. To be caught, however, meant a swift beating and a lasting shame. So one
sunny afternoon in Sparta a young boy steals a fox for dinner, slips it into his shirt and heads
home. Along the way the boy bumps into someonea teacher, a solider, a townswoman,
depending on the versionand this person asks the boy what he's up to. While the boy
wheedles, the fox comes to its senses and decides to get the hell out of there. It begins to
dig its way through the boy, clawing into the soft tissue, burrowing between sinews and
gnawing on tangles of ileum. And of course the brave young Spartan never winces, just keeps
on chatting about the weather and fshing on the Eurotas until fnally he drops dead with a
fox-sized hole in his gut.
Typically this narrative is whittled down to a moral, something along the lines of, "If the
Sparta kid could handle that, you can eat the damn spinach." But no one ever questions the
story. For example, who the hell eats fox meat? And what kind of fabric was the Spartan boy
wearing that no one noticed a blood-soaked animal gyrating underneath? It's taken for
granted that the boy's resolve came from the Spartan ethos already so deeply ingrained. But
bear in mind this was a child, not yet capable of subscribing to an abstract concept like
honor. So what really compelled him to endure such agony? Clearly it wasn't threatsif he
could handle a fox chewing on his intestines it seems likely he could absorb a few knocks
upside the head. The confict had to come from that other consequence, the lasting shame.
Worse than bruises is the prospect of never being touched. It seems even a Spartan wants to
belong.
when the problem is you
luke reiter
when the problem is you
2. How to plan your day
The next point is purely practical. In the pantheon of literature dedicated to obsessive compulsive
disorder there are plenty of warnings about how time consuming this life can be,
but the authors do you a disservice in not following these warnings to the practical
conclusion: if you're going to take the time to be crazy, you'll need to revise your schedule.
5 a.m. The alarm goes off. You will lie in bed for another ten minutes to recall your
dreams. Did you fuck anyone? Get fucked? Did you kill someone? Did you watch a loved
one get eaten by bear? You can still appreciate the unreality of these events, but you can't be
sure they don't bely some abhorrent desires. Never forget you are judged on intent.
Even if you don't think of anything, you'll still cycle through the basic poses you could
have assumed while sleepingleft side, back, right side, stomach, moving slowly to avoid
waking your wifeand pray in each position.
5:12 a.m. Pause outside the shower. This will be your last chance to recall dreams that
require specifc attention. (You can't touch the bed after showering because of your aversion
to bodily detritus.) In the shower, turn up the heat until the mirrors fog and let your chin
slump against your chest. No one is waiting. Nothing is expected from you. Wipe the errant
streams of water from your eyes, inhale the steam. This will be your most peaceful moment
of the day.
5:30 a.m. In the closet you ponder how to re-arrange the articles of clothing deemed clean
and safe to wear. There are only so many permutations possible, but buying more clothes
won't fx anything.
5:45 a.m. This is a coffee-making day. You will learn to make enough coffee to last for two
days to limit your time grinding beans and shuffing through flters. The more steps in a
process the more chances there are for your thoughts to derail, so streamlining is essential.
But today is a coffee-making day. As you fll the pot from the faucet you will notice shapes in
the ripples of the waterfragments of circles that end in obscene little points. Stop. Pray
for protection.
5:59 a.m. You sit down at the table with a cup of coffee, a bowl of oatmeal and the
newspaper. In the forty minutes between sitting down and the moment your wife gets up,
you will make it halfway through the front page of the paper. Each page is a gauntlet in
which you must dodge forbidden words, outpace the thoughts that well up as your eyes
weave through letters that fare and bend and thrust like the teeth of a trap. Sometimes
you'll arrive at the bottom of the page and realize you missed the ideas represented by all
those shapes. Start again.
7 a.m. Your wife will be waiting for you. You have been up for two hours and she has been
up for twenty minutes, and now she stands by the door, dangling her purse like a pendulum,
ticking away the minutes you waste. You will stand over your shoes, staring down, praying
for atonement.
3. On the subject of God
Odds are you never spent much time exploring the concept of blasphemy. That's to your
advantage, because you'll need to start from scratch now. Actually, you won't require a
defnition, because incidents will be evaluated case-by-case. Some of your sins will seem
forthright, others will be ambiguous or even dubious, but all will require you to pray for
forgiveness, just to be safe.
You hear people talk about laying their troubles at the feet of Christ and the peace that
passes understanding. These people talk of a God who frets when a sparrow falls to earth,
who guides his followers through tragedies, career changes, realty transactions,
relationships, medical procedures and so ona benefcent God infnitely interested in the
quotidian.
Yours is more of an Old Testament Goda jealous God who burns with rage, who
reveals himself in plagues and decrees that a man who steals should be stoned with his
children, donkeys and cows for good measure. Yours is a God who wants to be feared, a God
of ceremonial cleansing and sacrifce.
You will learn to pray again. Prayer is now a furtive process, one that must be done
almost without you knowing. Otherwise, the corrupted parts of you might insert some
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horrifc request or obscenity into the prayer, and you would be left responsible for the
consequences. How would you be judged if you lost control? More importantly, how many
more prayers would it take to atone?
That's why you'll need a system: a fxed set of words you know better than your name
that you can slip between the gaps of thought. Tapping your index fnger and blinking is a
great way to signal the end of a prayer, since it's impossible to suppress the mental noise
long enough to say amen.
Of course, your system can add its own problems.
Suppose you press your thumb and index fnger together too
frmly and the conformation creates a shape that you associate
with something profane. (Your mind can associate any shape
with something profane) Because you are mid-prayer this is
considered an egregious offense, and requires a new series of
prayers to atone.
Suppose you time your blink poorly, and your eyes focus
on an individual or object as you recite your words. This is
regarded as drawing the object or person into the prayer, and
will require you to pray for the safety of that person or thing
before you return to the initial prayer.
Then there's the matter of location. To leave the place from which you erred before
praying for atonement indicates a lack of contrition, and without contrition how can you be
forgiven?
Say you're walking down the sidewalk and
you see an old woman who makes you think
of your grandmotheryour dear old
grandmother who sits alone in that cavernous
split-level with only a fat red tabby nearly as
ancient as she is to keep her company. You
think of how you never call her, how the little
time you have left with her is precious. You
wonder how her health is; you wonder if she
wer" to pass on and that cavernous split-level
went to market, would your share be enough
to pay off your student loans?
Stop. Go back. Even if every logical fber in
your being dismisses the notion that God would
make this wicked thought come true, you cannot
shake the guilt. If you stopped sharply in front
of someone, or if you notice the panhandler on
the corner watching you, you can pretend you're
going back for a coin on the pavement or to
glance in a window. They won't believe you, but
you'll never see them again and it's a moment of
embarrassment you're resolved to live with.
In some lucid corner of your mind you will
sense that all the tapping, twitching, blinking
and mumbling are only anesthetic. You might wish
for the sort of fulflling faith you hear
others describe, instead of your self-imposed
system of rules and recitations that have no
greater purpose than to grant you an illusory sense
of control in the uncontrollable world in
which you live. But then maybe thats all that
anyones getting out of religionthey just seem to
enjoy it more.
Is doubt a form of blasphemy?
4. On reading the literature
A substantial portion of any given book, pamphlet or online entry will be diagnostic. You
will be reminded that everyone has intrusive thoughts, and it's only considered unusual at a
pronounced level. Your level will be quantifed with scales and inventories that ask you to
rate your mental weltering from 1 to 4, 1 being nothing and 4 varyingly interpreted as
"extreme," "no control," "incapacitating" and "disabling." None of publishers of these
materials seems to recognize that by the time you pick up a pamphlet, you already know the
problem.
Some will include tips for self-management (e.g. wait 15 minutes before giving into your
compulsion, or touch something else when you feel your hands are dirty). Others will
motivate you with mantras: "It's not meit's my OCD!" Many pieces will tell of other
people's eventual relief through therapy, as if you'd want to read that. You've got your own
story and that's plenty.
Then there's the lists of solutions, which are all written by normals who understand the
fssures in your mind the same way people understand that curved wings are hereditary in
fruit fies. You will see phrases such as "generally speaking," or, "early studies have been
promising," or "in some cases showed notable improvement"in some cases. Not in your case.
The booklets the therapists hand out are the worst. The cover designs are indistinct
images cast in cold colors like the drapes in a funeral parlor, the titles no-nonsense
declarations such as, "Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: A Guide." They look like owner's
manuals, but don't bother checking for the return policy. It's been more than 90 days now
anyway.
What you'll fnd instead is advice on electroconvulsive therapy, which is generally
reserved for an obsessive-compulsive person in the throes of extreme depression. ("Some
temporary memory problems and interference with learning may occur with ECT, although
other side effects and complications are uncommon.") Neurosurgery is described as
"dramatically effective" with intractable cases of OCD, helping as much as 80 percent of
patients whose symptoms were resilient to other options. You are assured that surgeons are
so much more precise nowadays that it almost unfair to call the procedure by the betterknown
term "lobotomy."
5. How to let go
You aren't going to like this last part but you need to be aware: not all your relationships
will survive this. You can't fault anyone else, because they don't mean to hurt you. Most of
the time they don't even deliberately disconnect, it's just that they don't know what to say.
Or maybe you break the ties, because you know this person has seen you do the same shit
too many times to pretend it's nothing, and you're too ashamed to tell the truth and too
embarrassed to ignore it.
Maybe you get sick of friends asking why you tap your fngers, why your eyes fickerare
you prone to seizures? You get too many of the tight-lipped, subtle smiles that are supposed
to say I know there's a secretyou can trust me. What they really tell you is I've got you pe$ed,
inside and out. More than anything, you don't want to be pegged.
Maybe you just get sick of friends who don't know saying they're super OCD about
organizing contact lists (or about using this one brand of lip balm, or keeping air fresheners
in the car). You want to tell them you're super OCD about gauche remarks, but then you
think about the last time you joked about not fnding your keys because you're too blind, or
how you must be deaf because you didn't hear someone knocking, or how you can't get up to
answer the phone because you're crippled, and so you don't tell them anything.
Maybe you get sick of the people who do know offering fxes: support groups, self-help
books, vitamin regimens, herbal remedies, psychologists, cognitive behavioral therapy,
when the problem is you
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antidepressants, sedatives, clinical studies, deep brain stimulation, spiritual healing centers,
meditation, prayer (of the conventional variety, not yours), more exercise, more fruits and
vegetables, more Christian music, more sleep, more willpower, less stress, less alcohol, fewer
violent movies.
There is no fx when the problem is you. And no matter how much assurance you
receive, no matter how many pledges of patience and undying love, you know your kind of
crazy has enough rough edges to wear through all bonds in time, and you can be left in the
abyss, cut off from the world outside your head.
It goes like this: one day you and your beloved will go out walking at the lake. It will start
out wellmaybe it will be springtime and the weeping willows will sway with languid
satisfaction and the birds will herald a new season, and you think you'll be different today.
But after a few minutes you'll feel yourself clouding up. The anxiety will begin to accrete in
your gut, and though you scream inside your head and recite nursery rhymes to drown out
all other thoughts, you'll bog down. Stop. Go back. Try again. Stop. Again.
After you walk in your ffteenth, twentieth or fftieth loop you'll look up at your beloved
and know you've reached your limit.
"Come back to me, babe," she'll whisper.
She'll be sweet at frst.
But she can't stand watching you twitch and blink and mumble, and she can't stand
watching the mothers swerving strollers around you and the junior high kids giggling to each
other and the shriveled old Hmong women in headscarfs who stare at you with morbid
curiosity as they pass and glance back over their shoulders as they hurry away. She can't
stand the hold this has over youhow it takes precedence over logic, over your pride, over
her.
"Come on," she'll hiss through clenched teeth.
This time you won't make eye contact, only whimper something about needing one
more second. She'll turn with a huffyou'll hear her shoe grind the concrete as it twists
from you in disgustand then she'll walk away. Your frst instinct will be to try harder, but
your mind is like quicksand and you only sink in. At the moment you realize exactly how
stuck you are you'll look up, just in time to see your beloved crest the hill ahead and vanish
beyond a curtain of willow dendrites.
Push, dammit, push. Maybe you'll take a few steps but it won't be any good and you'll end
up going back. Weak, weak! The by-passers will keep coming, keep gawking, but hating them
is no help to you. Then you feel a new fear, a different kindyour lungs pump but the air
won't come out because on top of everything else you're thinking that when you tap just so
and time the blink just righ! and recite all the words precisely and you feel your soothing
shower of absolution, when at last you break free and follow your beloved over the hill and
past the willows, she might not be there.
Stay positive. Maybe you'll get over that hill and she'll be sitting in grass beside the path,
smiling, puffng at hoary dandelions and telling you she didn't mean to lose her temperI
can't say. But I can promise you that even if she waits like so many times before, that new
pang won't fade. From this day forward, your breath will always catch when you see her go
over the hill, around the corner, past the willows. As long as you remain unchanged, you
could never blame her for walking on alone. There is nothing you can promise her, except
that when you're able, you will follow.
ogre jennifer davis
when the problem is you
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Kate Renee
me as a monster yeti loves bigfoot
me as a monster
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*
Not just for winter the sky
carries off everything in its path
place to place broken off
as if these small stones are sure
the dead will wait for them
though they remember
only distances with no one
to look through the ice
at the birds frozen midair
still expecting your arms
to loosen inch by inch
from among the others.
*
Always more stepping-stones
scented with the slow bend
in a river burning itself out
they tire easily
are lying on the grass
winding things up
though sometime the sound
comes from the small rocks
breaking off for the dead
then left where snow is expected
from your shoulder and hers
there is so little room
and she is just one person
turning back a long time
without anything to lose.
*
You approach from above
expect the sun
at your back, the sink
blinded by spray
the way every stream
is born knowing how
scrapes bottom
till its stones ignite
explode into oceans
then islands broken apart
for the skies still following
a rain thats not here
ntitled youre used to this
the same cracked cup
rinsed till its glaze
cools and its safe
to dry your arms
the foor, the walls.
*
This dirt still mimics sweat
lies down alongside, unsure
your lips would quiet it

though the fnger that is familiar
probably is yours could be enough
has already learned to point
in time it will silence
even your shadow
without pulling it back down

as sunsets passing by
no longer some shoreline
unable to stop for these pebbles

struggling to rise together, take you
by the hand and without a sound
recognize the gesture.
*
With each glove almost the same
You look face to face
For a place to jump
you dont see the bridge
though these weeds
are used to winter
slip from your fngers
the way this sky
no longer has room
and each raindrop
suddenly white, already stone
grown huge :each foe
inscribed and with a single name
warms this hillside
midair, brings these dead
a river that fows again
flled as if its shoreline
is pulling you down, shows you where.
simon perchik
untitled
u
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THERE IS SUCH A THING AS AWESOME
Weve seen what they have to offer.
Its great.
Its beautiful.
And it
is not nearly
enough. (REACH)
Scott F. Parker
such a thing as awesome
Marks in Your Brainstem
There is such a thing as awesome, and Guante isnt going
anywhere till you taste it, till you know from the hair standing
up on your forearm or the breath you forgot to take that a
performance is an opportunity for a rare and profound human
connection. He means to disrupt your life. Other rappers
might settle for your bobbing head, your bent-at-the-elbow
arm raised overhead pumping along to the synthesized 4/4
rhythm, your enjoyment, your respect. But Guante isnt overly
interested in being the soundtrack to your Good Time, and
hes not at all interested in eliciting your smiles; just as the
singer in his ars poetica, REACH, he wants to dig / into the
wet, / gray wilderness / behind them.
And for the past decade thats what hes done. First in
Madison, now in the Twin Cities, Guante has established
himself as a leading fgure in indie hip hop. Hes a two-time
National Poetry Slam champion with St. Pauls Soap-Boxing
team, a City Pages Artist of the Year; hes shared stages
with some of the most respected rappers working, including
Atmosphere, Brother Ali, dead prez, and Talib Kweli; he
has two full-length albums out on his Tru Ruts label (with
another forthcoming this year), not to mention his hard-to-
fnd debut release, Vanishing Points, and a constant stream
of EPs, mixtapes, and free downloads that would spark envy
in anyone this side of Lil Wayne. (Note, though, that quality-
wise, Weezy wants nothing of this vis-a-vis.)
But its not how Guante has succeeded within hip hop
that makes him compelling, its the ways he bucks trends, not
how he fts in but how he doesnt. Working in rap and spoken
wordforms that value a confessional, identity-focused
mode and, in raps case, hyper-masculine posturing as
wellGuantes topical focus on activism, love, and righteous
anger (not to forget the occasional zombie apocalypse) puts
him in the minority. And unlike other rappers, who when they
do go at these themes too often settle for trite platitudes,
Guante pushes beneath the superfcial insight. Best example
here is in contrast with Common, the archetypal conscious
MC, who once rapped with self-satisfaction, In my mind
it occurred / what if God was a her? / Would I treat her the
same? / Would I still be running game? (Faithful), to which
Guante (presumably) responds: fellas, remember this / calling
God a woman does not make you a feminist (Scratching
the Surface with a Sledgehammer). Social awareness and
where this is all headedsocial change are more to Guante
than content for pop songs or poems; rather, he puts his work
as well as himself to the service of challenging systemic, as
well as overt, discrimination and oppression wherever they
manifest. But as admirable as his politics and integrity may be
as he speaks and performs at Occupy MN or at the Trayvon
Martin rally, make no confusion, its only because of how good
Guante is at what he does that this profle has been written.
45 Minutes of Our Lives to Connect
The frst few rows of chairs up front in the Rapsom Hall
auditorium at the University of Minnesota are flled with
anxiously enthusiastic young aspiring poets, but the stadium
seats rising behind them in this lecture hall are mostly empty.
Guante sits alone off to one side reviewing some notes.
Hes sporting his standard getup: black beanie, dark short-
sleeved button-up, forearm tattoos exposed, baggy but not
too baggy jeans, and a barely concealed scowl. Seclusion
comes naturally for GuanteKyle Tran Myhre offstagewho
is uncomfortable with small-talky social situations and tends
to isolate himself from groups. But here there is an air of
respect and awe surrounding Guante, and its this as much
as his severity that keeps the younger poets at a distance.
Everyone in the room knows exactly how good he is. The
student-poets are here because Guante and other poets of
his caliber have sincerely and emphatically inspired them to
emulation, and theres nothing they could say to him in person
that would express their appreciation better than getting
up on stage and delivering a momentous performance. The
slam part of tonights event will feature six undergraduate
students competing to represent the UM at college nationals,
where last year they fnished third. They are boisterous and
theatrical, these young poets, hugging, shouting, and more
than anything performing away their nervous anticipation.
Notice me, notice something in me, they scream over one
another. Meanwhile, Guante, the evenings headliner, sits
silently, waiting.
When the performance commences it quickly becomes
clear that some of the UM students, such as Michael Lee,
are good and some are not; Guante pays them rapt attention
regardless. About his concentration, he says, Some spoken
word is so bad that it literally makes me feel ill, but sometimes
you can tell that a writer is just starting out and is still in the
process of fnding his or her own voice, and that can be fun
to watch. You get to see someone bloom in real time. You can
learn something from everyone. I think its important to listen
to other artists, especially those who arent much like you.
Theres plenty of opportunity for learning when Guante
takes the stage. He begins by offering advice, urging these
kids not to be intimidated, to recognize that the small
audience doesnt matter. What matters is, were sharing
our art with one another. And then, more practically,
he emphasizes the distinction between recitation and
performance. Performance is the reason spoken word tends
not to hold up on the page: its not meant to; its meant to be
performed, and a performance, one gathers, goes like this
and Guante launches into REACH, Family Business, and
a few others from his repertoire. He is fully present, and his
presence is large. The poet in his performance is unbounded.
At some lines he jumps up and down with excitement; at
others he darts sideways and then swoops stage-forward in a
decelerating curve that highlights by understatement some of
his most climactic linesthese are cocky postures, of course,
and part of Guantes performance (a carryover from rap,
perhaps) involves boastfully calling attention to that cockiness
at the same time as he fat-out earns the right to it. You can
hear the confdence in his voice, which he modulates tonally
and volumely at facile will, returning periodically to a reliable
growl that reaches right up to the rear wall and echoes back
down converging on each pair of ears as if from everywhere.
Michele Bachmann of the game / Get on the mic, spit
somethin insane
Is there an origin story for a force like Guante? Where does
he come from? Wisconsin, it turns out. Kyle moved around
the state as a kid before matriculating at the University
of Wisconsin. It was in Madison that he got his start in
rap and spoken word. Its kind of clich, he says, but
I didnt choose it; it chose me. Kyle had long been a hip
hop head when he was randomly assigned a rap producer
for a college roommate. From there, it was a natural,
organic transition from writing poetry, to messing around
with rapping, to seriously rapping. I had a long way to go,
but I got the fundamentals (rhythm, multi-syllable rhyme,
punchline techniques, etc.) naturally. And when youre good
at something, and happen to have a supportive community
around you, its hard to not want to do that.
Almost immediately (probably too quickly, he thinks, in
retrospect), under the infuence of Lauryn Hill, Saul Williams,
Outkast, Bruce Springsteen, and most of all Goodie Mobs
Cee-Lo, and with the support of his roommate and other
friends, Kyle began performing under his stage name El
Guante [El later dropped].
The move into spoken word was coincident. A creative
writing major at UW, he was uninspired by the lit mag scene:
I saw the path that was before me: write, submit to journals,
try to get published, get rejected, get published so that
other people who are trying to get published can read your
work. That did not appeal to me. If he was going to really
reach people as a poet, spoken word was the way to do it.
The revolutionary thing about the modern incarnation of
spoken word is that it brings poetry to people who dont
already have a relationship with poetryI perform in high
schools and colleges and rallies and community centers and
rap shows and all over, and the value of that should not be
underestimated.
The two forms quickly diverged for Guante. Writing rap
according to its formal rulesmeter, sixteen-bar structure,
etc.has had the effect of pushing Guantes spoken word
pieces in the opposite direction: monologue-style free verse.
The respective form and context also shape his content.
Rapping is usually done in a loud club, with music blaring,
people talking, things happening all around, whereas spoken
word is usually done in a quieter space like a theater, jazz
club, or coffee shop, with the audiences undivided attention.
Playing to each forms strengths, Guante sticks his more
complex material in poems, and is more literal in his raps. Its
nice to have both forms to play with, he says, Its like being
ambidextrous.
In 2008, when he left Madison for the deeper waters
of the Twin Citiesone of the countrys top spots for
independent hip hop and spoken wordGuantes stage
persona was a fully realized artistic creation. Hes comfortable
on stage, relaxed (like he knows he deserves the attention)
but edgy too (looking sometimes like he can barely contain
the arrogance lurking beneath his surface, a charged disdain
toward the audience, which seems borne out of a frustration
that they might give him anything less than his due). Its a
potent mixture, and his intensity in holding these two aspects
of himself in balance is palpable. Thats not what youd
expect from the reticent, unassuming, slightly nerdy guy he
is in person, but something happens when Guante takes the
stage. The artist just explodes into being. He likens it (and its
worth mentioning here that all of Guantes communiques for
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such a thing as awesome
I think of art as communication,

not as the mystical channeling

of some inner force.

this piece came over email) to method acting: You have to

fully embody the character that youre portraying, even if that
character is you. I think thats why Ive had more success
than some poets who are objectively better poets than I
am. I dont always hit the mark, but thats the goal: to really
connect with a hundred people.
Given his offstage demeanor, there might be a temptation
here to read Guantes artistic privileging of meaningful human
connection through art as a lack of same in his personal
life, like he channels all of his pent-up need for intimacy into
these passionate and transformative bursts of like radiant
soul touching, as if his persona emerges from a profound
psychological need. And up to a point hell support this
reading: I think its less about two different people than
tapping into another part of my own identity. Im a really
shy, introverted person. And when Im on stage, its not that
Guante takes over; its more like I allow myself to unleash the
bottled-up energy that comes with being shy and introverted.
And when performing specifc pieces about specifc subjects,
I try to tap into parts of my own history and memory that will
allow me to access those emotions.
So it isnt that Guante doesnt come out of Kyles psyche
but that Guantes raison detre is not primarily cathartic.
Its a matter of emphasis. His art is always for the audience
more than its for him. Consistent with this reading, his
work is short on autobiography and issues of his personal
identity, despite these being standard tropes of his genres.
His mixed racial identity isnt a secret, but its not something
he talks much about. I think part of it comes from wanting
to mess with peopleAmericans especiallywho are so
curious about race, like they need to know what you are
or they just cant be comfortable. So leaving it ambiguous
is nice, if only out of spite for those people. It also depends
on the audience. If Im performing in front of a group of
Asian people, or mixed people, or whatever, I may talk more
about my identity and my journey, whereas if Im talking to a
group of mostly white people, I dont want to appear like Im
trying to cash in on my exoticism, or distance myself from
my whiteness. But yeah, its complex. When Guante does
invoke race, as in Confessions of a White Rapper, its never
as personal complaint but as a starting point to tell a story
with universal reach. Stakes is high, see. Guante is up there
for only one simple reason: to save the fucking world.
fuck the revolution, join a union
. . . what we say is more important than how we say it
And what we do is more important than what we say
And what we build is more important than what we do
So what you gonna build today? (Deathbed)
If a song is just a song youre doing it wrong, Guante
raps on Just a Song, a track from A Loud Heart, his
acoustic hip hop EP with Claire Taubenhaus. This is but one
of countless Guante lines that can be quoted as his defning
ethos. His work is almost fractal, so neatly do his content
and artistic motivations scale hierarchically. This is not to
suggest, however, that Guantes output is merely an internally
consistent and coherent imaginative product that can be
admired for its creativity and originality. No, the content itself
is so politically and socially urgent, so decidedly of this world,
that Guantes corpus reveals a fully integrated artist, one who
succeeds by raps standards of valuation by embodying and
living and rapping according to his own valuations. Guante,
to invoke an antiquated phrase, keeps it real, and does so
by refusing to be conscripted by someone elses conception
of what it means to be a hip hop artist. But you see that his
realness runs deeper than a simple alignment of content and
persona when you stop to notice how outwardly directed
that content is. He writes poems about janitors who have
their self-direction co-opted by the powerful who manipulate
them like pawns. He writes songs about reliance on external
salvation being a path to dependency and ultimately death.
(This is not a movie for us, trying to one take life / Dont look
for the sequel, look for the steeple / Ring every bell as though
God had fallen and was fertilized in hell.) The way Guante
has defned his project, with political activism so central to his
content, he cant succeed by record sales or fame alone. His
success depends, in part, on the effectiveness of his work frst
to reach you, then to change you, and then, by extension, to
change everything.
Ask Guante what he does and he wont stop at rapper
and poet but will add activist and educator and sometimes
more. He is the founder and curator of the Hip Hop Against
Homophobia concert series. He is the founder of MN Activit,
a network for connecting people trying to get involved in
various movements for progressive social change with
organizations already doing good (meaning progressive) work.
Tatyana Benson of The Canvas Teen Arts Center in St. Paul,
where Kyle worked for two years and continues to lead a
weekly writing circle, describes Kyle as being great with the
students. He is always ready to give advice to help progress
their skills. Former student Aimee Renaud agrees: He really
excelled at facilitating thoughtful discussion. His contributions
are thoughtful and forward-moving, which just adds to the
feeling of mutual respect. I've never heard him talk down to
a young person or a new poet. It makes sense that teaching
would be important to Guante. There is no art qua art in his
approach, only art qua human connection. I think of art
as communication, not as the mystical channeling of some
inner force. So when I write I often start with the idea I want
to express, and then build a concrete framework around that
idea, and then add the details.
The dangers for this kind of art are apparent. Putting his
message up front risks both alienating large swaths of his
potential fans and precluding the transcendent possibilities
for his art in the name of advancing ideology. Its a fne line
the artist walks between rallying cry and pedanticismand
Guantes greatest weakness as an artist is that his convictions
sometimes get the better of him. Not that in Guantes view this
is necessarily a weakness; arts accessibility is subservient to
its point, he says. An artists work, he declares in REACH,
is one part entertainment / and one part revelation. . . . we
are all foot soldiers in the war / between giving the people
what they want / and giving the people something they dont
yet know they want. Some with certain aesthetic dispositions
might object to this kind of earnestness and self-importance,
they might go
so far as to
say this isnt
art at all, just
sophisticated
propaganda.
But no one
who puts as
much thought
into crafting
his words as Guante does could possibly think art is reducible
to its message. From his point of view, even if moments of
transcendence are what propel artistic achievement, the
intangible qualia of an encounter with artistic genius are
always personal, contingent upon particular material and
social circumstances with particular political foundations. If art
is going to change your life, the question is how.
I consider my art communication, more than anything
elseone person standing on a stage saying something to
a group of people. So with that in mind, I often ask myself
What do you want to say to these people? A lot of my work
is about the importance of organizing. . . . When things have
improved in this country, theyve improved because everyday
people got together and organized. The other main thrust of
my work, I think, has been about rejecting mediocrity and
reaching for something bigger, about making the most of your
potential.
Humility is overrated
Tonight Guante is performing with See More Perspectives
and Heidi Barton Stink, two of his Tru Ruts labelmates. The
show is a fundraiser for the UM chapter of Students for a
Democratic Society, so this also an opportunity for Guante to
combine his art and activism.
Stink has lots of respect for Guante, calling him an incredible
writer, who is a notch above the other stuff coming out of the
Twin Cities. As a rapper he incorporates so much of what he
knows from spoken word. He knows how to tell a story with
his cadence and his body. She has worked with him, too,
most notably on Summertime Hip Hop BBQ Jam for the
World, a track on which she hilariously mocks his unfriendly
tendencies. She describes the process like this: Hes tough
to work with. Weve collaborated, but he doesnt work with
people. He goes away and does his part and comes back with
it fnished. That really bothered me at frst, but you have to
accept thats how Kyle works.
Theres a couch or chair spot for everyone when Stink
begins her frst song. The audience sits in a circle to watch
and listen. Its not clear at this point how many funds will be
raised. Neither is it clear how people got here or why. Five are
SDS, two are rappers, fve are MFS, one is a writer, and there
are maybe three others. Regardless, the space is transformed
when the lights are dimmed. Because it isnt crowded,
because this is a sober space, and
because were only a few feet from
the performer, and because no one is
here who isnt interested in the music,
this is the rare rap show where almost
every lyric is decipherable. This effect
produces an immediate intimacy with
Stink that doesnt dissipate even when
she fubs a couple of lines. Its like
somehow were in this together.
Both See More and Stink are very capable rappers, but when
Guante spits you feel like a voice youve been waiting for is
talking directly to the part of you thats been waiting. This is
made evident by Guantes performance tonight, informal as
it is. He proposes a discussion-based format with the crowd,
and encourages feedback between songs and poems. Before
MN Nice, a new poem on the difference between the Twin
Cities you read about and the Twin Cities he lives in, he says,
Im not from here, but Im never gonna leave. After the
poem, hes asked about the lines There are days / I want to
roll through downtown / in a tank, specifcally what he would
blow up. He hesitates before naming Uptown, the ready
counterpoint to the poems central claim that the things we
make invisible dont disappear. Its in the hesitation, though,
that we hear the essence of his project: this isnt about getting
even; its about love through criticism, its about caring for
people you disagree with, its about believing in your own
convictionstypical of Guante, its about a lot of things.
After the set, Guante hangs around and answers
questions, listens to young people who are compelled to tell
him about their interests in hopes that hell write something
supporting their causes. He listens respectfully to whatever
they bring to him and hands out free sampler CDs, and
encourages people to come to his upcoming events. Hes still
in the spotlight, but as the mingling rolls on his ember begins
to fade and he begins the transition into Kyle mode, his
answers growing increasingly monosyllabic, his eye contact
moving from intermittent to nonexistent, his anxiety evident
you cant but root for his escape.
Not talent, not hard work, not education. Ambition.
With someone as uniquely and confdently himself as Guante,
its not easy to see right away where he fts into his traditions.
they might go
so far as to
say this isnt
art at all, just
sophi st i cat ed
pr opaganda.
But no one
who puts as
much thought
i nt o cr af t i ng
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bear
jennifer davis
such a thing as awesome
But given the nature of his work, its not surprising to hear
him say that with the artists I respect and enjoy, I tend to
value ambition over anything. Id rather something be a noble,
interesting failure than be yet another B+ song or poem or
movie that does the same thing that people have been doing
for years. So for my own work, I want to add something new
to the conversation.
Theres no talking about Guante, fnally, without explicitly
addressing his ambition. At the time of this writing he is at
work on two albums, two books, one one-man play; hes
plotting a graphic novel version of his greatest hits; and most
importantly, he says, Im using my community connections
and whatever local fame I can cultivate to help infuence
policy. Thats the main goal of everything I do.
Guante expects all of his work to be tremendous, and
he wants all of it to be heard. I think far too many people
focus on one or the othertheyre either basement geniuses
making mind-blowing art for a select group of people in the
know, or theyre world-conquering superstars who are better
at promoting themselves than they are at actually making
good art. For me, one without the other is failure.
Nothing about Guante is understated. Hes going for it.
And youre invited.
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The Unclassifable Love Stories
of Jenny Boully:
An Interview
by Victoria Scher and Scott F. Parker
stories of jenny boully
As much attention as your work gets for being formally
inventive/challenging, the content seems to be equally
complex. Can you talk about your interest in the said
and unsaid in books like The Body and The Book of
Beginnings and Endings?
Both The Body and The Book of Beginnings and Endings
center on themes of abandonment, failed love affairs,
displacement, and searching. I think that these states of
being, in themselves, are chaotic, shifting, move between
extremities of happiness and despair. Additionally, they give
way to wondering, sense making. Therefore, the subject is
often masked and transformed. I think every great act, and
being is an act, is a balancing act between the seen and the
unseen, the said and the unsaid. I think a lot of what's unsaid
is hinted at in form and tangential or digressive impulses in
a text. I have always been interested in metaphor, intuitive
meanings, symbols, and suggestion in both life and literature.
The missing texts of The Body and The Book of Beginnings
and Endings operate similarly in that they ask the reader to
participate in meaning making, losing, and wondering.

So how would you describe your use of form in The
Book of Beginnings and Endings to bring the reader into
participation with the content?
I think "disruptive" is a good word for the relationship there.
Disruptive, broken, unhinged. And it's all about a relationship
in the end. I mean, a failed love affair, which seems to be the
nexus and impetus of so much of my work. In love affairs,
we remember so vibrantly the beginnings, and the endings
we try to make sense of for a long, long time and eventually
just give up. We linger over the beginnings, savor them, relive
them, dream them. The endings feel like ghosts, haunted
and unclear, something we live through but cannot quite fully
understand, assimilate, or believe. And I think that the form of
the bookthe beginnings that end abruptly and the endings
that begin abruptlymirror that experience.
And yet the readerand this is also true about [one love
affair]*, your most explicitly love-focused bookisnt left
with a way of understanding endings or love as much as a
way of experiencing or approaching them.
Exactly. I think that the impression of experience is more
important than drawing conclusions about that experience.
The conclusions can be wrong, but the experience was
something lived through. I think that pausing, marveling,
suspending are the joys of experiencing a work of art. I
don't like to leave things too tidy. After all, I want someone
to be able to look at the evidence and wonder what might
have transpired. Love as a crime scene, the book as a crime
scenehow can we piece together the evidence; that is: how
can we make sense of what the author has given us? In the
same way, as a writer, in [one love affair]*, I was trying to make
sense of what a lover had given me, what the universe had
given me, and in the end there was hardly any sense-making
to be had. It is that same impetus that drives so much art: to
make manifest that private experience and give it a life outside
of one's self.
Your books are notoriously diffcult to classify by genre.
What draws you to play with so many different forms?
I love the notion of playfulness, but I also love the notion of
the book, of the page. There is a long tradition of writers,
who, in the act of writing, are playfully aware that their
pronouncements are being written in a book, on the page. The
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Lawrence
Sterne is my favorite example of this. My forays into this
awareness often result in work that doesn't neatly ft into the
literary categories of our day. I think that when you write, you
should only be concerned with your writinglet others work
on the genre problem or think about it later after the work is
fnished.

Your most recent book, Not Merely Because of
the Unknown that Was Stalking Toward Them, is a
reinterpretation of Peter and Wendy. What drew you to the
Peter Pan story?
There are many elements of enchantment at play in J. M.
Barrie's novel Peter and Wendy. Peter Pan, through his
make-believe and his insistence on the make-believe, is the
origin of much of the enchantment that takes place in the
novel. I'm attracted to his ability to so fully believe in make-
believe that, for example, the boys on his island could go
days eating pretend meals instead of real ones. His inability to
separate real and pretend and how this inability leads to real
danger, real fright, is at the core of my fascination with him.
But, of course, I'm always interested in a love story gone bad,
and Peter and Wendy is nothing but a love story gone bad.
He is the lover who refuses to ft perfectly, refuses to commit,
refuses to choose. Love and make-believe lead to fascinating
and dreadful results. It's a dangerous combination that Peter
Pan possesses.
Why did you decide to write from Wendys point of view?
Wendy Darling, despite her upbringing as a middle-class
Victorian girl, lingers and relishes the dangerous, the
subversive, the naughty. She leaves her mother, who misses
and loves her, in order to pursue a love affair with Peter,
who cannot love her fullythat is, Peter will never make a
wife of her. Wendy's story, I suppose, was also my story for
a long while, and I related to her efforts at domesticity, her
attempts to keep Peter happy, and her desire to mother and
care despite the signs of Peter's infdelity and high-jinks away
from home. What pierces me the most about Wendy is her
total willingness to become fully immersed in Peter's make
believe that she comes to believe it completely; she wants it
completely. It's Peter who dispels the illusion; it's Peter, who,
as a result, breaks her heart.
John DAgata calls you the future of nonfction. What
nonfction excites you these days?
Well, John D'Agata is very generous. I'm humbled by that
pronouncement. I think a lot of exciting things are happening
in nonfction today, especially where the genre intersects with
other genres or media. I love to think of things in terms of
being essayistic. That excites me. It is not so much the writing
but also the theorizing about essaying that really interests me.
I love nonfction writing, however, that teaches me something
that I never knew before. I love the accumulation of arresting
and quirky facts. I love the incorporation of theory and
scholarship. Conversely, I love mediation when it adds to my
life or helps me to position myself in some new way, that is,
when it challenges my sense of being.
Can you say more about having your sense of being
challenged? Is that something that happens more for you
in nonfction than in other genres?
I think what I mean by having my "sense of being" challenged
is undergoing some metaphysical change, a change that
illuminates the unseen or non-empirical world. Does a work
of art, in other words, change how I relate to the human
experience or my being in the world. The human experience,
in my mind, is a rather tragic one, and, no matter one's lot
in life, we have to die. That is tragic to me. So does a work
of art show me something about living and about dying? For
example, I recently watched Terrence Malicks Tree of Life,
which works to give impressions of a life rather than make
any sense in terms of plot or narrative. In this way, in how it
strives to explain the experience and mystery of being alive, it
is an essayistic flm. It illuminates the wonder and the mystery
without any overt aims of unraveling or understanding or
coming to terms with that mystery. Seeing how a life can be
seen through this lens and how tender and fragile that life is
and what death and life *might* be is an example of having
being challenged. I think this challenge happens in all genres,
and it happens better in some works than others. I experience
it in painting, photographs, flm, novels, poems, and essays,
and sometimes I experience it in the everyday, and that is
usually occasion to write.
So what are you working on now?
Now, I'm primarily working on my daughter, who was born
in January of 2011. She's quite young, and I feel as if every
day is full of her. There is little time left over, and that time is
devoted to my job and teaching duties, keeping house, and
my relationships with family. Of course, I'm always working
on something, if even mentally or piece-meal. Right now,
I'm "working" on a essay about a mourning suit and another
about gray hair. I have also been "working" on mini-essays,
which are very prose-poemy. I'm supposed to also be culling
some of my poems into a book that is forthcoming from
Coconut Books. I tend to work in quick spurts followed by
months of non-creative work. I hope that the next "spurt"
will come sooner rather than later so I can actually fnish
something. I'm excited to fnd out what this something might
be.
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My double wears a white gown like a debutante, a nurse, a dead poet, a bride, a mental
patient all at once. She wears it to woo me when she fnds me. How she fnds and fnds
me. Shes a photo negative. She clings like a dumb moon. Here she grinning is, craving
me like a refection or a shadow. Ive hidden from my double, given bad directions, jumped
ship. I thought to slit her throat, but she isnt the mortal one of us, and so I must do more:
separate her body from her head. Her gauzy body will stand as a surrender fag billowing
outside my cave. But her head travels with me. It must stay with me because its mine. Its
awful and its mine.
Even in my ruined cave I am not an either/or. Anybody can recognize over-simplicity, the
duality in the rubble. Inside I am/can make everything. Spiritual primordial invisible a golem,
I revel. For outside the cave, I was issued only two faces: Mother. Predator. But the same
day I exploded my co-opted cave, I pulled the eyeteeth from one outside face and snuffed
the kindness from the other. Who issues such literal visages? Who agrees to walk around
with two broken faces?
If there are 51 U.S. cities named Eureka,
each a threadless distance from crow and lineament
and all the phone lines down, then I have walked
the tracks since the frst Sunday of the world.
Each a threadless distance from crow and lineament.
A century of graffti has collected in the boxcars.
Walk the tracks since the frst Sunday of the world.
Precede train smoke. The dust is full of thieves.
A century of graffti has collected in the boxcars.
I must stop rehearsing my surprised face
which preceded train smoke. The dust is full of thieves.
If there is something, anything, left to discover
I must stop rehearsing my surprised face.
A revelation should not look planned.
If there is something, anything, left to discover --
like Eurekas! Eurekas everywhere! How amazed
we once wereHand me a pair of boots, a shovel.
All the phone lines down and I have walked
enough. I shall guffaw shall brandish my gold tooth
if there are 51 U.S. cities named Eureka.
EMPTY NEXT SYNDROME
MY DOUBLE
Paula Cisewski
FLAT LAND PANTOUM
with Allison Titus
MY DOUBLE
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Naturally, we leapt at the opportunity to interview the
renowned documentary journalist Philip Gourevitch, who was
in town to give the keynote lecture at My Letter to the World:
Narrating Human Rights, a conference co-sponsored by the
University of Minnesotas Human Rights and Creative Writing
programs. Gourevitch is perhaps best known as the author
of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed
With Our Families, a book of intensive documentary reportage
from Rwanda in the years shortly following the genocide.
His other book-length works include A Cold Case, which
recounts a real-life, decades-long detective story set in New
York City, and most recently, Standard Operating Procedures,
in which he employs techniques of his trademark aftermath
journalism to take another, more critical look at the events of
Abu Ghraib. He is also a staff writer for The New Yorker, and
served as the editor of The Paris Review from 2005 to 2010.
Currently, he is at work on a second book about Rwanda.
We were glad to speak with him about several topics that are
relevant to this issues theme of erase/disclose on which he
is particularly qualifed to speak. These include the writers
choice to insert or efface his or her own presence in a story,
the effect of publishing realities on what a journalist is able
to cover, and the role of national narratives on how people
act during moments of crisis and understand their own lives
afterwards. Gourevitch is a formidable interviewee, thinking
not so much in paragraphs as in essays. We hope you enjoy.
During your lecture last night, you mentioned that the
individual is often fetishized in nonfction writing, and
stressed the need to place the individual in a system.
Could you elaborate on that?
Stories tell of people and events, right? So, for a writer, there
are two basic ways in: you have a defning event or situation
or a defning person. And when I said last night that theres a
kind of fetishization of the individual, what I meant is not that
we shouldnt get very close and very deep and very immersed
in our characters in documentary writing. By the way, I hate
the term nonfction, because it describes what the writing isnt
rather than what it is. But my point was not that we shouldnt
dig deep into character when were writing, but simply that
the individualthe individual consciousnessdoes not and
cannot exist in and of itself, in isolation. An individual has to
be situatedsocially, politically, economically, etc. The idea of
privileging the individual subjective perspective at the expense
of a broader context composed of other perspectives, which
situate and encompass that individual, is diffcult, or really
impossiblebecause what is a character except a set of
reactions to surroundings? Reacting is what people do. Our
subjective interiorities are reactions to all sorts of exteriorities,
so its just not illuminating, or even interesting, for writing
to consist of a person just saying I-I-I-I-I, a person who is
only thinking about themself. Im interested, instead, in a
person who speaks in a way that refects some kind of larger
situation, a larger conditionhumanity or whatever. And that
isnt strictly a question of using or not using an I.
Of course, this pertains only to writing about characters
outside of oneselfas opposed to writing in the frst person.
I think a lot about the use and abuse of the frst person. I
often use a frst person of a sort, but I dont really say much
about myself. The frst person that I use is a voice rather than
a characterits an I, not a me. And there are also times
when I fnd that to connect with the reader I use the second
personI use direct address; I speak straight to you. Im
drawn to this especially with deep, dark, even repellent
materialwhen I want to be able to pop into a readers head
in a conversational voice, before disappearing again for long
passages.
The third person quasi-omniscient style voice is a fantastic,
underutilized tool and there is too much of a tendency in
reported writing these days for the writer to hold everything
together by saying fat out: I went here, I went there, I did
this, I saw so-and-so, he said to me, and so on: I, me, I,
me, I, I, I, I. If you really look at it, and you ask, well what
difference does it make that that persons there, too often the
answer is: its just lazy. There was a while, 25, 30 years ago,
when this was considered bold, and called New Journalism
to bring in a frst person voice where the idea had always
been to hide the frst person voice. But now its become
conventional, so I guess its time for a counter-reaction.
That said, there is one place where the I can be really useful
in writing, and thats when you want to be able to account
for why you know something, or why something happened,
and the reason is simply that you went somewhere, and you
encountered something. Then you say, I saw this, or, this
was told to me. But thats not really the frst person, because
the writer isnt the subject. Thats how I like to use the frst
personthe I is a guide, a companion to guide you through
the story without creating a distraction.
Even granted that the frst person has to some extent
become clich since the New Journalists popularized it,
though, isnt it useful in terms of reminding the reader
of the complexity of the information and opinions youve
gathered? Or would you generally cut it out?
Im not hyper-conscious of it, to tell you the truth. Ive
sometimes tried to see how long I could go without the frst
person, just out of sheer formal curiosity, in order to see:
is this a crutch? Am I using this lazily? Am I just using it
unthinkingly? The frst person is a great tool. I just think that it
shouldnt be an automatic or an absolute rule. A writer has to
resist being dominated by it.
Yes, it can be valuable to show how a piece of writing was
madeto build in a bit of documentary of the making of what
youre reading: I went here. I went there. This is a chronicle
of my experiences. Hunter Thomson is the extreme version.
Norman Mailer building
up himself as a kind of
character is a different
version. Then theres Joan
Didion creating herself as
a frail persona who sort
of quivers at the edges of
things, although at the same
time she writes like she is
made of steel. So there are
different styles of using the
frst person that way, but none of them are really about the
accurate representation of the author as a person. Theyre
literary devices created around the device of a persona.
And, at times, the frst person allows you tremendous
effciency. If youre not always using it, but then you jump
in now and then as I, and make a declarationannounce
a question, or express an opinion, responding to your own
material in a way that heightens and shifts itthat can be very
strong. So Im really against having rules about these things,
because as soon as you have a rule about it you are denying
yourself the possibility of a really useful tool. My one absolute
rule is that you should be aware of refexive writing habits that
make you stop thinking about what you are doing.
Regarding voice, what is your opinion on the sincere
voice that seems dominant right now, this idea that as
long as one is sincere, whatever one says or writes will be
OK? Is this laziness, too, or does it have any merit?
It depends on what you say! No! The merit of what you say is
not whether its sincere, but whether it is interesting, valuable,
persuasive, convincing, needs saying! I think weve become
kind of slack about demanding those qualities from writing.
Anyway, its too easy for sincerity to be a rhetorical device. Its
too easy to make the sound of sincerity.
What does sincerity mean? Does it mean that youve laid
yourself a little bit bare? That you mean what you say?
That youre earnest? So what? A lot of people are earnest
and boring, or worse, earnest and wrong. Some people are
earnest and stupid, or misguided, or malign. You knowevil
people are earnest, too. People you disagree with totally are
earnest and the fact that they are being earnest or sincere
shouldnt make you feel in some way obliged to concede to
them, and shelve your resistance or objection.
One space that the insertion of the self can be taken up in
a productive way is to remind the reader of the implication
of the writer, and by proxy the reader in the situation
youre describing. I dont know if thats something youre
conscious of in your writing
Oh, defnitelythere are times. I wrote a piece in Cambodia in
98, when Pol Pot had just died following his purge from the
Khmer Rouge after an interior party trial. I went up to Pol Pots
old turf, and watched reintegration of the last battalions of the
Khmer Rouge into the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. The
idea was that this very long war was fnally pretty much over,
and I was writing about
what it meant for people
to live with the legacy of
Pol Pot time, when the
entire country had been
devastated. Well, one day
Im in the car with the driver
and the photographer I was
working with, my friend
Gilles Peress, and were
driving down a main street
in Phnom Penh, and as we come to a big intersection, we see
a white van moving bumpily across our path, and then we see
motorcycles chasing after it, and there are cops on the bikes
shooting at the car, so we say, whoa, whats this? and we
chase after the cops.
We dont have to follow them far before theyve shot off the
tires and the van stops. They pull out the driver, and they beat
him to death. Right there, in front of us, they beat him to death
in two, maybe three minutes. A huge crowd had gathered in
no time out of nowhere, and I was sitting next to my driver,
a man named Sok Sin, who had told me earlier that during
the Pol Pot years he had lost all track of time, but now at the
moment they pull the man out of the car, Sok Sin says, Oh,
he stopped now. Oh, they beat him now. Oh, he unconscious
now. Oh, he dead now. He knew exactly what a body could
take. It was all there, it was just a minute, and that was almost
the most striking thing about that whole scene. I mean, it was
weird enough already. You couldnt see much, because there
was a cluster of people, but you saw this body get sucked
down into this cluster of people, and then arms and legs
going down, and then Sok Sins narration took over. It was his
precise, instantaneous recognition of what we were seeing
that was most striking.
We dont have to follow them far
before theyve shot off the
tires and the van stops.
Interview with Philip Gourevitch
Aaron Apps and Kathleen Johnston

Interview with Philip Gourevitch
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Now in that situation, when I came to write about it, of
course I used the frst person. Its not something somebody
told meits something I saw. Its a complete fuke that I
saw it, and its highly partial in the sense that literally, its my
perspective from which I saw it. I happened to see it from
this angle of vision, with this soundtrack. It represented an
intense brutality, and a relationship with power, and a kind
of cruelty and also crudity of police methods, to say the
least. It represented all of these different things in this very
short moment, but above all it represented the sense that
the people around me in Cambodia carried a kind of terrible
knowledge that none of us on the outside have. So that
momentof course thats a frst person anecdote.
But its interesting. At another time I might paraphrase an
equally intense story in third person narration because I
dont have any direct experience of the story and I want to
emphasize that distance and make you feel it.
Later, when we went up to Anlong Veng, which was the old
Pol Pot hangout, we few up on this military helicopter with a
bunch of dignitaries and press to see a ceremony to mark the
integration of the two armies. When we landed, they put us
on these huge two-ton trucks to move us around, and again
there was this little moment: Im on a truck, and Im standing
next to this Chinese general whos in perfect uniform like hes
in some reviewing stand in Beijing, and were sort of jostling
around the back of this truck, and he says, You been here
before? And I say, No, you? And he says Yeah, a bunch of
times. Now the Chinese were supporting the Khmer Rouge
all that time, but they werent normally talking about it before.
That was something to me that again, it wasnt an interview
with this guy, it was just a funny moment where reminding
people of my physical presence jouncing along next to him
kind of anchors the scene.
But it doesnt tell anything in either case about me, right? I
dont tell you what I felt about the killing. I dont go into my
reactions. Because, who cares?
Its just the most compelling point of narration.
Right, Im exactly what I dont want you to think about at that
point. I want you to be looking right through my eyes. I want
you to see and hearenter me maybe, or enter the scene
through me, but you can have your own reaction. I dont want
to tell you what I thought or what I think is interesting to think
about, as if it were mine.
The multiple angles from which you enter into scenes
in your documentary writing remind me of your talk
last night, in which you named Melville as an important
infuence. It brings to mind Moby Dick, in which very
distinct chapters offer fragmented perspectives within
the scope of the books trajectory. I was thinking about
his relationship to audience
Well, he didnt have onehe didnt have an audience for
Moby Dickuntil hed been dead for many years.
But with Moby Dick, he felt he created something of
import that people should have latched onto, and of
course he didnt get that within his lifetime. Your project is
different to a degree from the outsetyoure writing about
things that have important resonance politically in the
present.
Well, weirdly, so did Moby Dick. Its the great novel about the
energy industry in the 20th century. Its about the oil trade.
Thats what whaling was. Thats what ran New England
for a couple of important decades. And its also about the
exploration of the Pacifc. All that stuff is braided in there. But
its a mystical book ultimatelyon a completely different level
than reportage: its an epic.
It raises existential issues
But he also has the most amazing voice in there, I mean the
frst person voice, and these kind of Shakespearian fights
of language. Theres somebody whos tweeting all of Moby
Dick right now, slowly but surely, so Im following it. Its great
because in 140 characters you can barely ever get a full
sentence of Melvilles. So its almost pure language. You just
have these incredible phrases almost every day, which means
every line.
But I do know what you mean about multiple perspectives.
Thats very important and interesting to me, and so is the
bouncing back and forth between the very concrete, often
political reality of a situation and the very strange, often
surreal, somewhat mystical nature of human beings and their
lives.
OK, heres another exampleI was in Sri Lanka after the
tsunami in 2005 and the whole east coast of the island had
just washed away up to a mile or two in, and the country had
been divided a long time by the war with the Tamil Tigers.
When the wave hit the country had been on its way back to
war, and now suddenly because of the wave it was all sort of,
Oh, it killed us all equally; its a reminder that were all one
nation, and the Tigers opened up their territory for the frst
time in a really long time, partly for humanitarian aid, since
they wanted to get in on the stuff that was coming in.
So I was able to go to Mullaitivu, the little coastal town where
Prabhakaran, head of the Tamil Tigers, had the Sea Tigers
and his own base. That place was kind of the heart of the
heart of the thing, and you were suddenly allowed to get in
there. I had very weird interviews with these Tiger-politico
military commissars the night before and then I went out to the
beach and youre in this place where you can sort of see what
the grid of the streets was, but its just gone, swept away.
Over theres a fight of stairs going up into the air, over here is
a wall standing. There was a very big cathedral that was kind
of wrecked, so it looked like a ruin, which if you think about
it, in Italy youd just say oh, its a ruined cathedral, what a
nice sight, as opposed to this strange context where it was
completely surreal.
It was this empty beach, and there are these guys in church
garb going into that cathedral, and then this total madman,
the village idiot really, came up to me and started getting
really close and making these honking noises, and he kept
trying to touch my hair. Various people tried to explain it in
various ways, and it wasnt clear, you know, was this a guy
in total trauma because hed lost his family a week before or
was this a guy whod been the village idiot for 30 years? There
was something about that as a scene and as an encounter,
that in between these encounters with the commissars, who
represented the hardest kind of reality, this utter lunatic was
almost hyper-real.
So you bring some detail like that in there without necessarily
trying to over-explain it, and it allows the story to breathe and
to open up. Its a simple way to complicate reality, which is to
say to humanize the drama. I think that matters a lot, which is
why at the beginning of the Rwanda book I have a prologue
in which I say, This is a book about imagination. That might
seem an odd thing to say at the beginning of a documentary
book. But in order to report and to describe reality, we have
to constantly imagine reality. If Im asking you about your
experience, I have to keep imagining, well what does it really
mean that that happened to you, in order for me to get you to
tell me more about it, and in order for me to understand it as
fully as possible. My work is always an attempt to understand
something that I didnt experience directly. Thats what all
reportage is to some extent.
To me, its impossible to tell a story without also addressing
the question of how we tell stories to and about ourselves.
And thats a lot of what that books about, because its about
how identities are both imaginative and real constructs. How
being Hutu or Tutsi is an artifcial construction, and at the
same time it acquires tons of reality once its been artifcially
constructed. So simply to say oh look, its artifcial, is not
very useful. Yes, its essential to understand how that artifcial
construction of identity functioned to understand some of
the violence, but on the other hand to lean on that too much
is to ignore how the violence made that construct real. So
one is forced constantly to examine the ways that what we
call imaginary and what we call real collide to form what we
experience as reality.
Were putting out an issue with the theme erase/
discloseone way weve interpreted that theme is
considering what writers and artists decide to omit
or highlight in a given work. So Im interested in what
limitations you face as a writer when it comes to
publishing realities. Where do you fnd yourself in tension
with what stories you can follow and how?
Well, reporting a story is a big investmentof time and of
money. Sometimes, writers who are just starting out will ask
what kind of stories they should write to get published. The
answer is: the stories that youre most interested in. Because
thats what youre going to do best. You have to know what
you want to do and why, and then you try to convince the
people who can help you do it. Because you always have
to remember that even though it doesnt feel that way when
youre starting, publishers are looking for writers as much as
writers are looking to get published.
Writing for The New Yorker, I dont have to do stories that
I dont want to do, but that doesnt mean that I get to do
everything that I want to do. Thats a big distinction, and
even if youre happy with what you have been able to do,
every once in a while you still wonder, what if I had done
those other stories instead? At the same time, I dont want
to repeat myself, or get pigeonholed, so Ive always tried to
have a broad range. What gets left out, then? Thats a really
tough question because theres no pattern to it, and quite
often you fnd a way to come back to what doesnt ft in one
project and make it work in another.
When I wrote A Cold Case, the murder book, I had written
a magazine piece of it, and I had a bunch more material,
and I wanted to expand it. I ended up doubling itand its
still not a long book, but it seemed like the right form. Still,
I remember thinking as I was working on it, well, maybe I
should sort of blow it open here or there and go out to a
bigger meditation or exploration on police work, or telescope
out and look at fugitives more comprehensively, or the nature
of crime narratives, or build the story more directly around
this or that moral issue. I remember taking a walk every
afternoon, when my head was full of these possibilities, and
I would just chant to myself as I trudged along: dont-do-it-
dont-do-it-dont-do-it-keep-it-clean-keep-it-pure. Because
it was a perfect story by itself; even if I elaborated it really
successfully I would risk encumbering it. Its my sparest
piece of long narrative, but it felt as if it was delivered to me
by the story gods in perfect form, and I just thought that if I
kept adding on, maybe Id write as good or in its own way a
better book, but Id lose this book in it, and this book is the
one I wanted to write.
So was that an act of omission? No, it was a decision to
protect the story from my own dubious urges. Sometimes
you go and you do a lot of reporting and in the end you just
dont want or need to use any of it. For instance, Im working
on this piece right now about President Sarkozy in France,
and at frst I did a ton of reporting about French involvement
in the Libya war. But I think thats hardly even going to go
into the piece. The war is kind of over, and meanwhile there
have been some scandals that have erupted in France that
have been more interesting in a certain way, and theyre more
narratively interesting, and what they tell us about France is
in some ways deeper and also more unfamiliar to American
readers. And, anyway, I cant just put everything in the piece.
There isnt room. Im not writing a book, and I wouldnt want
to. So, with something like that Ill work on it for a long time,
and whole chunks of my effort just fall away. But omitted
makes it sound like something is hidden. Thats not right. My
rule is, what matters is that everything in the piece is good
not that everything good is in the piece.
If you spend weeks covering something, youre going to
meet characters that really dont ft the story but were a part
of the story for you, and theyre fantastic, but you dont want
to just wedge them in there just so you didnt leave them out.
Interview with Philip Gourevitch
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That would be a disservice to the piece, to the characters,
and to the readers. When I wrote my frst Rwanda piece for
The New Yorker, I turned it in way too long, at something like
30,000 words, and it was received with a long, long silence
from the magazine. Then I was suddenly given 24 hours to
cut the piece in half so that somebody would read it, or else
it would die. So, I cut it in half really quickly. And one of the
things that I took out right away was a chunk of maybe 5,000
words that worked as an essay unto itself. And I think even
before my New Yorker piece had run, I had sold that cut to
another magazine as a follow-up piece. So, again, it wasnt
that it was being omitted. In a way to me it was being saved.
I could have tried to boil that down, or crunch it, but then it
would be just this tracing of what was thereand in the end
that material I cut became central to the book I wrote.
Youre going back to Rwanda now to write another book.
Even the frst time you wrote about Rwanda it was aftermath
r e p o r t i n g y o u
were coming into
Rwanda after you
felt the situation
had been forgotten
in terms of the
normal news cycle
or public attention.
I wonder, when you
sustain that kind of
attention for a long
period of time, over
a decade now, is it a
sense of responsibility that brings you back because youve
taken on this story, or is it a matter of obsession, or what?
No, its just interest, its just fascination. I had no desire to go
back for a long time. I mean, I had a lingering I will go back
some day desire, but I really wanted to do other things, and
I did other things. I didnt stay overly connected to all of it.
Frankly, I needed to get it out of my system for a while. And
then in 2009, after about eight years away, I went back right
at New Years to do one piece for The New Yorker. But I also
went back because I had been hearing that people were living
together better than I would have foreseen as possible, and
I was curious what that was like. Not that they were living
together wonderfully, but better. And then suddenly all of
these issues and all of the old interests were there. I thought
there are astonishing stories here, different stories than Ive
told beforeor different phases of stories that Ive toldand
I have a history with the place that allowed me to see the
stories depths very quickly and how to animate them. So I
was completely absorbed.
Having talked about the frst book in different contexts for
about ten years by then, there was almost a set of oral essays
in my head, responses to peoples responses, and responses
to the ways some of those issues have refracted over time,
and then there I was seeing all of those responses suddenly
reanimated by contact with the material I was reporting. Thats
when I thought I would like to do a different book about what
it means to live with it and what it means to build a society
out of wreckage, and how there really arent any really clean
solutions at allhow a lot of things that are very, very hard to
accept have to be accepted.
Aftermath writing seems to be able to avoid some of the
pitfalls of on-the-ground-in-the-present reportage that
are prevalent in a newspaper or television news cycle.
Does the hindsight that characterizes this kind of long-
form, refective journalism allow your work to carry some
sort of forward-directed, prophetic potential regarding the
future?
You mean, do I think I know where the things going? No. I
have no idea. Less now than before. Because when I went
to do the frst Rwanda book, on the one hand I was doing
aftermath, but on the other hand I was doing very much
present-time, because it was sort of an immediate frst
chapter of aftermath that I was there for. Rwanda was ringed
with refugee camps flled
with a million and a half or so
people who had fed, some of
them guilty of the genocide,
some of them the entourage
of the people who were guilty
of the genocide, and some
of them just people who had
been swept up in the whole
thing. It was a highly charged
militarized scene where you
had a quarter of the country
in exile ringing the border and
in their midst was a sizable army committed to coming back
and resuming the genocide. So it was pretty clear from the
beginning that there was going to be another war. And how
that war went down, where that war went down, and when
that war went downall of that was hanging over everything.
And of course everybody was trying to pretend everything
was all right, or trying to prevent a war happening by
maneuver, but the fact was that there was a chapter that had
to happen. This couldnt go on forever. At some point these
camps had to be disbanded, and it was looking worse and
worse from the beginning.
So I always knew that was basically my time frame. When
I decided to do the book after my frst long time there, I
thought, Ill report on the genocide and its aftermath until
these camps are gone. And then every once in a while Id
have these moments where Id think, wait, I hope this doesnt
take fve years, or ten years. But it happened relatively quickly.
It happened at the end of 1996 in the war that became the
frst Congo war. And some of that reportage was very present-
time and observed. And, of course, aftermath reporting is its
own present. The point is that youre looking at the present
in its relationship to some cataclysmic event or some kind of
massive realignment of history and you look at people in the
after-wash of that.
But now, I wrote this piece about the Rwandan bicycling
team last summer, and among its preoccupations is the fact
that you now have a generation in Rwanda that has no direct
memory of the genocide or were really little kids at the time.
In this case they are basically in their early twenties, so they
were really little kids at the time. They were old enough to be
traumatized by things they directly saw. And its one thing to
think of the genocide of those hundred days, which was a
period of extreme convulsion, but then for many of them for
a year or two afterwards there would have been total social
upheaval, and sometimes violent upheaval, and displacement,
and chaos and parents dying and disappearing and that sort
of thing. So they were very much affected, but their memories
of childhood are childrens memories, and more importantly,
they have none of the baggage of accountability, suspicion,
personal victimization, or blame at the same level as the older
generation. It was an affair of their elders, you know? And they
often speak that way, almost bitterly, saying, Man, did the
grownups mess things up around here? you know, or That
older generation destroyed their country.
This younger generation has grown up inside what can often
look like a kind of propagandistically simplistic national myth
of the post-genocide government, the idea that we are all
Rwandans now and Hutu and Tutsi identities are no longer
meaningful. But again, that is the kind of construction that
starts to acquire a kind of reality if it serves youif it is a
rewarding response to some of what was most punishing
about the previous reality. Its got its major shortcomings
and problemsa lot of things are swept under the rug, as is
often true when creating a national unifying narrative thats
habitable. But these young Rwandans are in a very different
place. They exist in a different realm of possibility than, say,
their uncle whos just come back from Congo having spent
ffteen years in the bush fghting with the genocidal army
there, and is now surrendered, and is being reintegrated; or
the Tutsi survivor who is still in this trauma of having lost the
entire family because again, that is different for the kid than
it is for the parent.
And then theres how all of these things feed together, how
all this reintegration of the society works, and also what it
means for leadership to grapple with it. How do you try to
sew all of this back together, and how do you encourage
a kind of forgiveness that you may not even believe in as a
politician, because if it works for the people, it works? Youll
talk to political leaders in charge of making people work
together, you know, of implementing the policies dealing with
cohabitation, and theyll say, A lot of these people, they
have these religious things where they fall down weeping
and washing each others feet and forgiving each other and
I cant understand it at all, but if it works, Ill take it. So its
really trying to understand how complex some of these things
are, and also how fragile, because then some little thing
goes wrong or some rumor or signal is given off at the wrong
wavelength and the whole place trembles.
So just now you were describing this simplistic national
narrative that is binding people in Rwanda together in a
vaguely positive way, but then last night in your lecture
you talked about our national narrative after 9/11 and
how that had very negative effects, and Im wondering if
you have any thoughts on the distinction between those
two narrativeswhen does a simplistic narrative help and
when does it harm?
My thought is that leadership matters. And its an important
thing to remember when writing about stories. I mean it
almost goes back toif we want to knit this up in a perfect
structureit goes back to the question about the individual
versus the larger system. If we look at the Abu Ghraib story,
some of those people were way, way, way out of line, and
some of them got into the abuse, and some of them had
criminal inclinations, but none of that stuff would have
happened if it werent licensed, encouraged and rewarded
from the top down. And thats true in Rwanda too, right?
The country is full of killers, and yet they are not dangerous
at present because where a license was once created, a
prohibition has instead been imposed.
When I was frst in Rwanda, I was astonished to discover that
the governments policy was to take soldiers whod fought
for the genocidal regime and reboot them, retrain them,
give them a uniform and reintegrate them into the national
army. It wasnt just that they werent punished. They were
redeployed, but on the opposite side of the fght. I said, do
you really believe that a person whos spent years fghting in
the cause of genocide can just be turned around like that?
And I remember, Paul Kagame, the general who later became
president, told me: Yeah. He said, people can be made bad
and they can be taught to be good. And I thought, thats either
the most hopeful or the most cynical and sinister thing Ive
ever heard, because he was saying people are malleable.
Ultimately what I think isI suppose its a political belief, but
its also a literary belief that I come away with from all these
storiesthat none of us know how well behave in such
extreme circumstances. Everybody wants to identify with
the good guys, or at least with the victims rather than the
perpetrators. Everybody wants to think that they will be the
hero of conscience. And thats where I think theres some false
consciousness in the sort of mass marketing of the human
rights brand to everybody these days. Everybodys now a
human-rights-this and a human-rights-that. But, you know, if
you look at statistics, in societies that have gone off the rails,
the majority of people behave badly; they dont behave well.
And I dont think that suddenly everybody is being so fortifed
by righteous human rights doctrine that they will behave well.
Most of us dont know who we are, because weve never
been tested in an ultimate way. Its interesting to me as a
writer to look at places where people have been tested,
but its obvious that all of political energy and life should be
dedicated towards living in a society where ideally nobodys
tested. Which is kind of an awkward thought, right? What
makes America a largely very habitable place, wherever one
sits on the political spectrum, is that for the most part, were
not tested in that way, and we wouldnt want to be, and you
can get along a lot better with your neighbors and everybody
else if youre removed from that. That is what political and civil
life ought to be organized to spare one.
You mean, do I think I know where
the things going?
No. I have no idea.
Less now than before.

Interview with Philip Gourevitch
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Paul Cunningham is the
author of two e-chapbooks
of poetry: Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer (Pangur Ban Party,
2010) and foamghast (NAP
Literary Magazine, 2012).
He is the managing editor
of Radioactive Moat Press
and his writing has appeared
in publications like Esque,
DIAGRAM, Shampoo, H_
NGM_N, Red Lightbulbs, and
Dark Sky Magazine.
Paul Cunningham
ana garcia bergua
toshiya kamei
jason lester
erin lyndal martin
lisa mccool-grime
erin murphy
Ana Garcia Bergua was born
in Mexico City in 1960. She
is the author of the novels
El umbral (1993), Prpura
(1999), Rosas negras (2004),
and Isla de bobos (2007),
as well as the short story
collections El imaginador
(1996), La confanza en
los extraos (2002), Otra
oportunidad para el seor
Balmand (2004), and Edifcio
(2009).

Lisa mccool-grime loves
Sappho, wallfower women
and collaborations. Her
wallfower women are
or will be appearing in
DIAGRAM, Painted Bride
Quarterly, Verse Wisconsin
and elsewhere. Poemeleon,
PANK, and elimae are some
of the journals that have
published her collaborative
work. Tupelo Press awarded
one of her poems frst place
in their Fragments of Sappho
contest.
kathleen mcgookeys
work has appeared in forty
journals and ten anthologies.
Her books are Whatever
Shines (White Pine Press),
and October Again (Burnside
Review Press). She also
translated French poet
Georges Godeaus fourteenth
book of prose poems, Well
See (Parlor Press). She lives
with her family in Middleville,
Michigan.

I belong to the school prison
like I do every day and the only
real light is the library option
during eighth period study hall.
Most Likely to Write for
Harlequin
Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA
in Literary Translation from
the University of Arkansas.
His translations include
Liliana Blum's The Curse of
Eve and Other Stories (2008),
Naoko Awa's The Fox's
Window and Other Stories
(2010), and Espido Freire's
Irlanda (2011).
Jason Lester is the
incoming managing editor
at Web Del Sol Review
of Books, and has new
and forthcoming work in
elimae, otoliths, and Poetry
International.
Guildenstern: Death is the
ultimate negative. Not-being.
You can't not be on a boat."
Rosencrantz: "I've frequently
not been on boats."
Erin Lyndal Martin is a
poet, fction writer, music
journalist, and critical prose
writer based in Madison, WI.
Most Likely to Become a
Mermaid

kathleen mcgookey
"Spell Check is my Guardian
Angle."

Erin murphys fourth book
of poems is Word Problems
(Word Press, 2011). She is
co-editor of Making Poems
(SUNY Press, 2010). Her
works have been published
in numerous journals and
anthologies and featured on
Garrison Keillors The Writers
Almanac. She is associate
professor of English at Penn
State Altoona. Website: erin-
murphy.com
Photo not
available
Paula Cisewski's second
collection, Ghost Fargo, was
selected by Franz Wright for
the Nightboat Poetry Prize.
She is also the author of
Upon Arrival (Black Ocean),
and of three chapbooks.
Paula Cisewski
Most Likely to Have a Bitchin
Summer!
writers
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contributer notes
88
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89
Scott F. Parker
Simon Perchik
phoebe reeves
Pheobe reeves teaches
at Clermont College,
in Southern Ohio. Her
chapbook, The Lobes and
Petals of the Inanimate,
was published by Pecan
Grove Press in 2010, and
her poems have recently
appeared in Rosebud,
DIAGRAM, The American
Poetry Journal, The Los
Angeles Review, and
Quarterly West.
chris taylor lives in
Madison, Wisconsin where
she writes for various
amounts of money and is
occasionally mistaken for
politicians of the same name.
Her poems have appeared
in the Madison Review,
decomP, New Wave Vomit,
elimae, Verse Wisconsin, and
others.
Most Likely to Overdose on
Ice Cream
Scott F. Parker's books
include Running After
Prefontaine: A Memoir,
Revisited: Notes on Bob
Dylan, and Coffee
Philosophy for Everyone:
Grounds for Debate.
Best Legs
Simon Perchik is an
attorney whose poems
have appeared in Partisan
Review, The Nation, The New
Yorker, and elsewhere. For
more information, including
free e-books, photo, his
essay titled Magic, Illusion
and Other Realities and
a complete bibliography,
please visit his website at
www.simonperchik.com.
luke reiter
kevin shea
ashley strosnider
Luke Reiter works as an
editor at a weekly newspaper
and writes mostly about
municipal bonds and people
shoplifting at Kmart. He lives
in St. Paul with his wife,
Ashley, and their greyhound,
Lola.
Most Risk-Averse
Kevin Shea lives in Brooklyn,
NY and is a graduate of
the MFA program at The
New School. He works
as an editor of computer
programming publications.
His poetry has previously
appeared in Forklift Ohio,
Unshod Quills, Asinine
Poetry, and The Equalizer.
I don't see how Henry, pried
/ open for all the world to see,
survived."
Ashley Strosnider's poetry
appears in Fifth Wednesday,
Word Riot, and Unsplendid,
and her prose appears in
DOGZPLOT and decomP.
She holds and MFA in poetry
from the University of South
Carolina, where she served
as Editor of Yemassee. She
currently lives in Charleston,
SC, where works in the
publishing industry making
other people's books.
Most Likely to Secede
Dennis James Sweeney
chris taylor
I have measured out my life
in coffee spoons.
Dennis James Sweeney lives
in Kathmandu. His work is
upcoming in DIAGRAM, Mid-
American Review, PANK, and
elsewhere. He is, like, totally
psyched to be in this issue of
dislocate! He likes countries,
and trails, and never endng
plates of dal and rice, and...
well, he likes you! Have a
great year! LYL!
Most Likely to Have a Good
Summer
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kevin mclellan
Most Likely to Be Obsessive
kevin mclellan is the author
of the chapbook Round Trip
(Seven Kitchens, 2010), a
collaborative series of poems
with numerous women poets.
He has recent or forthcoming
poems in journals including:
Barrow Street, Colorado
Review, failbetter, Horse
Less Review,Kenyon Review
Online, Western Humanities
Review, Witness and
numerous others.
contributer notes
Most Likely to Contract Sun
Poisoning
I absolutely always wanted to be
have the chance to do a senior
quote, my high school didn't do it.
Now you are and I can't think of
anything. I guess you can put that
in if you want.
Most Likely to Be Somewhere
Else
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Kristoffer West Johnson
earned his BFA from
Minnesota State University
in Mankato. Shortly after,
he began work as a studio
artist, exhibiting and selling
original paintings and
drawings as modern day folk
and fne art in the Midwest.
Embracing a wide variety of
infuences from the classical
to modern day freak folk
and punk art, Kristoffer has
developed a unique style that
now transcends into a variety
of mediums.
Is something art because
you hang it on a wall?
"If you want to follow a man
you frst need to fnd his
shadow on the ground...."
ivan de monbrison was
born in Paris in 1969. He
is currently a painter and
sculptor in Paris, France.
His work has been exhibited
in Europe and the USA,
and has appeared in many
publications. It can be seen
online on his blog: http://
artmajeur.com/blackowl
jennifer davis
Ellen hughes
kristoffer west johnson
ellen hughes is a
Graphic Design and Art
undergraduate student
(still) at the University of
Minnesota. Hire me? Inspired
by a mash up of psychedilia
and natural elements, heavy
on the mind manifestation...
no really, hire me. Please.
ivan de monbrison
kate renee
asia ward
Asia Ward is a Program
Specialist and Artist in
Residence for the Learning
Technologies Center at
the Science Museum of
Minnesota, where she
prototypes and develops
hands-on activities for all
ages, which are then tested
in the classroom and on
the exhibit foor. Her work
as an artist ranges from
animatronic creatures to
large-scale metal sculptures. Most Likely to be a Master
Exaggerater
Kate Renee is a professional
artist who lives and works
in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
She graduated from the
University of Minnesota
with a BA in fne arts and
art history, and has worked
with various galleries in the
Twin Cities. Kate is building
a national and international
reputation with exhibitions
throughout the United States
and in Japan. You can see
her latest work at www.
katerenee.com or follow her
blog at www.thesuctioncup.
com.
Most likely to be Wearing
Custom Painted Shoes at Art
Openings
Erica Williams is a freelance
illustrator from Colorado
Springs currently working
in Minneapolis. Her work
seeks to combine illustration,
design, and fne art through
meticulous line work, color,
light, pattern, and fgure.
She incorporates elements
of folklore, fantasy, myth,
philosophy, and psychology.
She is often infuenced by
album and book covers,
poster art, and photography. Most Likely to Hoarde Cats
Lets get a round of applause
for ballpoint pens!
erica williams
j.a. tyler
Most Likely to Creatively
Purge Several Times a Year
J. A. Tyler is the author
of A Man of Glass & All the
Ways We Have Failed and No
One Told Me I Was Going to
Disappear, co-authored with
John Dermot Woods. His
work has appeared
in Redivider, Diagram, and
New York Tyrant among
others. For more: www.
chokeonthesewords.com.
Some nights, I wish that my
lips could build a castle.
Jennifer Davis has lived all
her life in Minnesota (b. 1975).
She discovered her passion
for painting and drawing at
the University of Minnesota
and graduated with a Bachelor
of Fine Arts degree in 1998.
Her portraits of people and
animals have a surreal candy-
land exterior full of innocent
charm, which only hint at an
undercurrent of darker truths.
Jennifers paintings have been
widely exhibited throughout
the United States, Canada
and also in the UK. For more
information please visit http://
www.jenniferdavisart.com
Most Likely to Steal Cats from
Another Hoarder
Allison Titus' book of
poems, Sum of every lost
ship, was published by
Cleveland State University
Poetry Center in 2010.
allison titus
artists
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contributer notes
92
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Photo not
available
Kerry samarasighe
kristin ftzsimmons
aaron apps
kate johnston
christine friedlander
feng sun chen
jennifer fossenbell
nasir sakandar
ellen hughes
Poetry Editor Art Editor Managing Editor
Assistant Editor Web Editor Layout Design
Prose Editor Assistant Editor Editor-in-Chief
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faculty
cover art
liberation
jennifer davis
FEATURING
writing by
Ana Bergua Garca
Paula Cisewski
Paul Cunningham
Jason Lester
Erin Lyndale Martin
Kevin McLellan
Lisa McCool-Grime
Kathleen McGookey
Erin Murphy
Scott F. Parker
Simon Perchik
Phoebe Reeves
Luke Reiter
Kevin Shea
Ashley Strosnider
Dennis James Sweeney
Chris Taylor
Allison Titus
J.A. Tyler
artwork by
Jennifer Davis
Ivan de Monbrison
Ellen Hughes
Kristoffer West Johnson
Kate Renee
Asia Ward
Erica Williams
plus
a profle of spoken word / hip-hop
artist Guante
interviews with Jenny Boully and
Philip Gourevitch