On relationships - Nicholas Cook
Someone made a life out of convincing me that love was something needing replacement.
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Nicholas Cook lives in New York.
On cats - William Burroughs
As for humanity, most of them is only good to feed cats.
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William S. Burroughs is the author of several novels, including Naked Lunch and Junkie.
On the sacrosanct - Ken Baumann
What is holiest: speed of delivery.
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Ken Baumann is. This aphorism is taken from his newly completed manuscript, Solip.
On the good life - Jon Cotner
The Good Life is a combination of household management and canine sensuality.
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Jon Cotner is the author, with Andy Fitch, of Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
On capitalism - Dawn West
Look at him. Just beautiful. Cotton and linen skin, polyvinyl chloride acetate teeth, Italian silk lips puffed thick from corn syrup injections. I just love the way he walks, all manic, twirling his six tongues around a Cuban cigar. He could go down on me for days. He is voraciously bisexual, an equal opportunity lay, but prefers American company. He knows where he’s wanted. I prepare for him, slathering blind faith on my thighs and desperation on my neck. I know his favorite scents. I always preferred bad men, and boy is he bad, just fucking villainous. I wait in the doorway while he finishes devouring another congressman’s dick. Blood boils in my cheeks and I’m soaked, my lust forming a tell-tale puddle on his hardwood floor. He tilts his head back and spits the congressman’s cock ring into the humid air. I dab a tissue under each armpit and adjust my dress. I walk up to him, drop to my knees. “Please,” I say. “I need you.” He asks, “Tell me why.” I raise my head. I know he wants me naked, so I proceed. “I don’t know,” I plead. “That’s just what I’ve been told.” He nods. “I know.” He shoves me hard, down on my back. I open my legs and let him bite my clammy thighs. While chewing on an artery, he smiles sweetly. He looks like he’s dying, but I still want him inside me. He’s all I’ve ever known.
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Dawn West (b. 1987) lives, writes, and has a dirty mouth in Ohio. Her work has appeared in The Molotov Cocktail, Camroc Press Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and others.
On one hand waving goodbye to the other - Tom Kendall
The intent of an act may be integral to the fact of that act’s existence but it tells us little about the operations of its existence in a world that renders each of us soluble. Each act or work effervescing towards an overcast sky of blended froth so that it is only as things leave, happen in a terminal recession from source and move towards their own expiry that we might briefly know what they were truly composed of and what they may come to mean in their strange eruptions and dilutions of reality. The little in fact we can know emerging through the near imperceptible wash of their disappearance within an emptiness. Disappearance here as a kind of carbonation of emptiness, space.
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Tom Kendall’s stories have appeared in the anthology ‘Userlands: new fiction from the blogging underground’ and online at lies/isle. He has work forthcoming in Some Ways to Disappear issue 2. He sort of blogs here.
On patterns - Rochelle Duford
Patterns, categories, taxonomies. The pattern-finder categorizes the patterns, this cup, that bird, this tree, that woman. Woman, am I one of that? Of course I’m not, I am not woman. I am pattern-finding; the Pattern-Making without pattern. What is closest cannot be patterned—for after what, as what could the Pattern-Making be patterned as? There’s not a before of pattern—only a patternless Patterning prior to the self-patterning of the Patterning. Suddenly I am woman, yes, I am woman among women; there is no longer an identity—I disappear into woman.
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Rochelle DuFord is a Philosophy PhD student at Binghamton University. She spends most of her time thinking about how we talk to each other, and reading things that dead German men have written.
On the mirror - Joseph Scapellato
“How can people—people like that!—look themselves in the mirror?” we say, while looking or not looking for ourselves in each others’ eyes, as though the mirror reflects—better than any device, art, or inquiry—who you are, why you are, how you think, what you feel, and who the whom is that others see when you aren’t around to look at.
The mirror is one more wall.
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Joseph Scapellato was born in the suburbs of Chicago and earned his MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University. Currently he teaches English/Creative Writing as an adjunct professor at Susquehanna University and Bucknell University. His work appears/is forthcoming in Post Road, Unsaid, Gulf Coast, the Collagist, SmokeLong Quarterly, and others.
On taking place - Dennis Mahagin
In all-night diners, alleys, arroyos, and ICU’s: Street fighters palm their shiners over steam and worse: the bad dreams of intubation tube. Waitress and nurse, their ho ho’s and dough boy bandage, bottomless cup. Morphine drip, TV trees; suspended IV’s, a carousel of cakes. By God a sliver o’ moon on gooey shale! The coyotes and corpsmen, running out of room. In panes of glass shimmer pale steetlight, with face. Flatlines bleeping in concert with Muzak and sirens at the scalded roof of the mouth of the world. It takes place. It takes place.
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Dennis Mahagin’s poems and stories appear in Exquisite Corpse, 42opus, Juked, Stirring, Pank, decomP, and Night Train. His blog is here.
On misogyny - Gina Abelkop
The late great lesbian-feminist writer Bertha Harris, in an interview with June Arnold, another lesbian-feminist genius, said, “The girl— the virgin— and the monster are a configuration of power. And it’s the girl’s last stand— both in literature and in life, too.” If, in this essay, I re-make myself as both the monster and the virgin, then who was the conjurer of big bad feelings? Must be what Harris called “getting phallicly socialized.” Which means getting fucked. I got fucked a lot and I liked it a great deal. Sometimes I loved it. But I don’t like it when I’m on my back and I look up and the face glaring down at me appears to want to throw me in a dumpster after its cut my head off, boiled my brains down to nothing and sliced up the bottom of my feet so my corpse can’t even crawl away to escape the stench. I do not want the choice of sex to mean the choice of death. Getting over my big bad feelings meant separating the two, for real this time. No more sex death. No more conceptualizing my own murder as a basis for pleasure. I am talking about real murder this time. I am talking about misogyny.
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Gina Abelkop lives in San Francisco, where she writes poems about time travel and new wave women. She is also a Pisces. Read about her big feelings at themoonstop.blogspot.com.
