Asides

Thomas Terceira

hand-cut collages on pages from The Venetian Painters by Berenson

Source & Method

Hand-cut collages on pages from The Venetian Painters by Bernard Berenson. Rubber stamp designed by Nick Bantock.

Thomas Terceira lives in Cranston, Rhode Island. He earned a BS in Crafts Design from FSU 1n 1977 and a Certificate in Print Design from RISD in 2006. He works in collage, jewelry and plays world percussion instruments. His collages have appeared in Rattle, Glassworks, and other literary Journals. He has exhibited his art works both nationally and internationally.

Issue 24

Remi Seamon

Two erasure/collage poems
of The Hardy Boys: The Great Airport Mystery

boysboysboys

Fightin’ On The Street

Source & Method

I erase using a combination of acrylic paint and collage; while I call it erasure, it’s really more like erosion as I whittle away at the text until all that’s left are the phrases that constitute the poem. I then go in and add images or illustration where appropriate.

Remi Seamon is a 6th Form student in Cambridge, England. She was commended in Foyle Young Poet’s of the Year and considers her greatest muse to be Max, her labradoodle.

Issue 24

F.J. Bergmann

The Hydrologic Cycle,
Long Before the Invention of Meteorology

At first, they say, the earth was surrounded by moisture.
—Aristotle, Meteorology

The snow had come suddenly a few hours ago. The silence meant someone was coming. The night skies were filled with warnings, although the human did not know what to do with the information (their reckoning of time is also incorrect). Curse them both!

He stared at the cat, struggling for words. That seemed to please the animal even further. Their gazes locked for a long moment, and instead of fire coming from their mouths, they uttered harsh words toward one another. From even the lowliest beast comes wisdom. They would soon have to part forever.

A third of the pure water turned deadly. The ocean itself was becoming tinged with an unnatural, bloody hue, clearly alarmed at the situation. A huge swell arose. Fire lit up the sky. The flames subsided, and glowed with only natural radiance once again.

He watched the water that housed darker things fall slowly down on him. The darkness parted to reveal the light. He splashed and pranced, yelping now and then with what was clearly frustration. Though I am named after the fiercest of beasts, I cannot cast him into the abyss. It began, again, to snow.

 

Source & Method

“The Hydrologic Cycle” is a a cento taken from a bargain-bin fantasy novel whose title and author I can’t remember, since lost and not online.

F.J. Bergmann edits poetry for Mobius: The Journal of Social Change and again, temporarily, is editing Star*Line. She imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. Work appears irregularly in places that should have known better.

Issue 24

Scott Brown

Pappy

Franklin County rolls across green hills and bluegrass, nestling the secrets
of an American spirit, proven, spiced with heavy oak, and untouched by human hands.

Pappy was a charred man with a manner that oozed bourbon, not in odor but in a velvety directness that could burn the back of your throat and still leave you with the friendship of warm caramel.

Offering kindness and demanding respect, he spoke with a slow ease that lulled a man into a drowsy Kentucky afternoon or dropped him to his knees like a sermon at Buck Run Baptist Church.

His presence was best sipped, in a rocking chair by a fire or on an evening porch swing
where vanilla sugar hung in the air like morning mist over wheated fields.

 

Source & Method

This poem is drawn from the back label of a bottle of Pappy van Winkle bourbon (15 year).

Scott Brown is a psychologist and a poet. He uses poetry with his patients and students, as means of self-discovery and expression. Scott lives and practices near Kansas City, Missouri. He has published previous work in The Avalon Literary Review, Down in the Dirt Publications, The Small Farmer’s Journal, and Inside the Box.

Issue 24

photo by Sandra Agricola*

I s s u e   2 4

n e v e r   t o o   l a t e

Sandra Agricola

It’s Never Too Late to Have a Happy Childhood
(cover photo)

Scott Brown

Pappy

F.J. Bergmann

The Hydrologic Cycle, Long Before the Invention of Meteorology

Remi Seamon

Two erasure/collage poems
of The Hardy Boys: The Great Airport Mystery

Thomas Terceira 

Three collages on art history text

H. C. Phillips

I am born in this

Lauren Paredes

weather report no.1

Shloka Shankar

seep (v.)

C. B. Auder

United States of Millennia

Matthew Schultz

A Strange Voyage

April Garcia

John

Jacsun Shah

To-Do List

Michael Brockley

A Gratitude Cento

Emmeline Solomon

Society Must Be Defended

kerry rawlinson

Two erasures

Anhvu Buchanan

Ears

Barbara Sabol

After Ruin

 

*Sandra Agricola is a yoga teacher and writer living in Birmingham, Alabama. Object found on a wall in Cedar Key, Florida

Issue 24

Sarah Koenig

Of Natural Things

I.

insects understand
the poetry of the grown up world
the severity of a house’s needs –

our mysterious winters
figure prominently in their telling
they keep looking back

with marvelous facility –
gingerly they walk the length of our sidewalks
seeing boulders in its sediments

 

II.

horseshoe crabs aren’t really horseshoes
and they definitely aren’t crabs
they shed their old names as they get bigger

soft but firm to the touch like wet fingernails
small ones are the size of a spider
they remind people of quarters

if you pick up a quarter
it will kick its tiny legs
tickling your palm

 

III.

the survival of the tree
depends on the jay’s ability to think ahead
though they are shy and retiring

they will carry the abandoned acorns
far from the tree shadow
then bury them out of reach

it’s a risky strategy –
the jay has effectively planted them
and may not remember what they will become

Source & Method

Each section of this poem takes language from a different book. I combed through the books to find interesting phrases, rearranged the phrases into short poems, then combined the poems.

Sources:
Section I: The Virgin Homeowner, by Janice Papolos
Section II: Cabinet of Curiosities, by Gordon Grice
Section III: The Nature Book, by Marianne Taylor

Sarah Koenig lives in Seattle, WA. Her poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, PANK, Forklift Ohio, the Bellevue Literary Review, Bellingham Review and Cutbank, among several other journals. Her work has also appeared in Washington 129, an anthology of Washington state poets.

 

Issue 23

David R. Bublitz

3 Visual Pieces

Beating

Echoes

Two Thousand Yards (After Thomas Lea)

Source & Method

This series of found poems came from the U.S. Army Combat and Operational Stress Control Manual for Leaders and Soldiers (FM 6-22.5). I created all of the artwork using Adobe Photoshop (primarily the pen tool). Artwork for the poem “Two Thousand Yards (After Thomas Lea)” is an homage to “That Two Thousand Yard Stare” by artist and illustrator Thomas Lea.

David R. Bublitz is the son of a veteran. He completed an MFA at the Oklahoma City University Red Earth program, and his first full collection of poems, Combat Pay, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in March 2020.

 

Issue 23

Growing Time

a cento

 

Source & Method

From, in order: Jennifer Grotz, Medbh McGuckian, Mary Oliver, Evie Shockley, Lucille Clifton, Sarah Kay, Janice N. Harrington, Amy Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Helene Johnson, Hilda Morley, Laura Tohe, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Maggie Smith, January Gill O’Neil, Lynda Hull, Jennifer O’Grady, Margaret Atwood, Gail Mazur, Brenda Hillman, Audre Lorde, Anne Spencer, June Jordan, and Moya Cannon.

Taryn Ocko Beato is a poet, mixed media artist, and audiobook producer. Her art is inspired by nature and focuses largely on combining disparate materials and text to create something new. Taryn’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in eris & eros, Plants & Poetry, and Rue Scribe. She lives in New York with her husband, son, and sweet rescue dog, Darby.

 

Issue 23

Crystal Bowden

History & Hate

Source & Method

Magazine images and found text from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Crystal Bowden is a poet, collagist, and writing coach living outside Atlanta. She prefers to hide away in the woods, chugging coffee, covered in cats.

 

Issue 23

Bob Lucky

Climate

climate is music that leads to a lake
a lake is a looking-glass

the resemblance should be measured
should be big enough so that there is shade

this is awkward and strange and yet
all the time it rests where it is
in excellent and slanting light

Source & Method

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Claire Marie 1914); blackout/grayout.

Bob Lucky is the author of Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019), and the e-chapbook What I Say to You (proletaria.org, 2020).

 

Issue 23

Genevieve Betts

Silence, I Discover, is Something You Can Actually Hear

Listen, every object’s in flux—
the whole universe is like some big FedEx box

searching for something, the breath of the dead,
the whispers of people who don’t exist.

Prince sings on, like some mollusk in your head,
carving the words in a deep blue tattoo. Just listen.

Imagine you’re a clam speaking a common language,
the afternoon quietly reeling into twilight.

Words are asleep in a corner of time. The metaphors
transform and I’m on the border of this world,

a maze of eddies. In truth, all sensation is memory.
You’ll live forever in your own private library.

 

Source & Method:  All lines taken from Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore.

Genevieve Betts is the author of the poetry collection An Unwalled City (Prolific Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Hotel Amerika, The Tishman Review, New Mexico Review, The Literary Review, and in other journals and anthologies. She teaches creative writing for Arcadia University’s low-residency MFA program and lives in Santa Fe.

Issue 23

Chidambar Navalgund

2 Collages

Remarks

a new course

Source & Method

1. Remarks: A collage using magazine images and phrases from ‘Time’ and ‘Bloomberg’ magazines. 2. a new course: Digital artwork and cut-up from page 111 of ‘Miracles of Sai Baba,’ published by Dheeraj Pocket Books.

Chidambar Navalgund, from Belagavi, India, is a graduate in Criminology and is presently pursuing his Masters in Sociology from IGNOU. He has recently started dabbling in visual and found poetry, especially collage.

 

Issue 23

Andrew McIver

End of the Empire

 

Source & Method

Source Text: Franz Joseph Land: The Meaning of North by David Quammen (National Geographic, August 2014).

Photos: Corey Richards. Constructed using cut-ups and collage, pasting words and phrases on top of images from the source text.

Andrew McIver is the author What the River Was, a collection of original and found poetry forthcoming December 12, 2020. You can find his work online at andrew-mciver.com or @andrewmciver_ on Instagram.

 

Issue 23

Thomas Terceira

4 Collages

 

 

 

 

 

 









Source & Method

Two digitally created collages. Found and scanned images combined in Photoshop and two hand-cut analog collages made from vintage ephemera, illustrations, and tissue paper.

Thomas Terceira born in Providence RI in 1953. He received a BS in Crafts Design from FSU in 1977. Thomas is a professional craftsman and designer. His creative endeavors include collage, decoupage, graphic design, theater, and music His collages appeared in Rattle, Drowning Gull, Foliate Oak, and other literary journals.

Issue 23

An Erasure Fable About Eating 75
and Surpassing 1000 Career Hot Dogs and Bun

(from the 2020 Nathan’s July 4th Hot Dog Eating Contest introduction for Joey Chestnut, by George Shea, MC and Co-Founder of Major League Eating

MORAL: “whoever can eat the most of my hot dogs is the most American” – Nathan Handwerker, contest founder

Source & Method

Derived from transcriptions of sports announcers I typed up while watching events. For the hot dog poem, the Moral is a quote attributed to the founder of Nathans by a number of sources, including Smithsonian magazine and George Shea himself. The fable format is one I’ve been playing with as a way to tease out the moralistic implications made by sports culture.
Alex Wells Shapiro (he/him) is a poet and artist from the Hudson Valley, living in Chicago. He reads submissions for Another Chicago Magazine and Frontier Poetry, and is a co-founder of Exhibit B: A Reading Series presented by The Guild Literary Complex. His work is recently published or forthcoming in Blood Tree Literature, Boudin, Pangyrus, and Digging Through the Fat. More of his work may be found at www.alexwellsshapiro.com.
Issue 24

Joan Caska

This Year Will Take From Me

What is it like there, right now?
The cool flash of what serious is—
the ice has begun to unclench.

What will happen. All this leaving. And meetings, yes. But death
falling on each of us, the departed and the leaving.

The dead man looked like this. No, that.

The landscape usually contains the solution to what’s lost.
Out the window I can see dead leaves ticking over the flatland.
The few birds at my feeder watch the window.
It is as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass.

The eyes of a thin woman sixty-three years old search the shadows.
Vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters.
Invisible, our ghosts starve, while the rest of the world keeps on eating.

To the one who sets a second place at the table anyway:
Come and carry me there
Let us poem a place where you cannot erase us into white space.

 

Source & Method

This piece, including title, consists of one or more lines sourced from each of the following poems (in alphabetical order by poet’s name): Anne Carson’s “Three and The Glass Essay”; Renee Gladman’s “Proportion Surviving”; Eliza Griswold’s “Ruins”; Mark Halliday’s “The Missing Poem”; Susan Kinsolving’s “Trust”; Judy Loest’s “Faith”; Varsha Madhulika’s “Oh The Stealing Steps…”; Dionisio D. Martínez’s “Flood: Years of Solitude”; Jean Valentine’s “Sanctuary”; Tanaya Winder’s “Missing More than a Word.”

 

Joan Caska works as a digital marketing specialist, editor and creative writer. She primarily writes literary flash fiction and prose poetry, and has a passion for experimental writing and literary criticism. She enjoys helping others achieve their writing goals in workshops and writing groups throughout upstate NY.

 

 

Issue 23

Cooper Dart

Many Days

How many days until my guinea pig’s
first birthday? Until our vernissage? Until the Feast
of Our Lady of Guadalupe?
I am calculating days until I have
seven years sober. Until redundancy.
Until I no longer have chlamydia. Until I turn 30,
run out of time, and gain possession of the proverbial farm.
——
Why am I here? To test the accuracy
of a program I am writing that calculates
when a parent is twice the age of the child?
To find the days until human extinction occurs?  (2485)
To see if this is real? The apartment lease is up.
This is good — I see my dad.
This is good, thank you.
This is good.

Source & Method

This is composed of public comments made on the “Keisan Online How many days until ~ Calculator” website. I went through them all and organized by topic/theme, then sorted into the order we have here!

 

Cooper Dart grew up in Hailey, Idaho. He is currently a senior at Bowdoin College on the coast of Maine studying natural resource management, anthropology, and creative writing. He can usually be found at the nearest rope swing.

 

 

Issue 23