Visual Art

Floe
Address
Words Beyond
Vermont
United Acetates – Reenie Charrière

Poetry

“Dear Knife, Dear Body”
“Gifts from the 7-11” – Rosalie Moffett

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(Floe, dimensions variable, fused and stitched packaging materials, sound, 2012)

Reenie Charrière – Artist website

Artist statement:

“I am invested in everyday moments.  My practice is triggered by expeditions along everyday paths, and sidewalks, including public waterways and shorelines.

I investigate by walking, driving and even waiting in traffic, and I am captivated by what accumulates in the environment. Detritus is a menacing punctuation. It comes in all colors and forms. The synthetic bright colors of plastic haunt me as they interrupt and accent the natural topography.   I am also drawn to these colors, and their forms as well as the juxtaposition between organic and synthetic matter.

My current work starts with photographing this relationship. Going beyond documentation, I spotlight the situation by fabricating sculptural installations out of discarded packaging materials, particularly  plastic, fabric, paper, and cardboard. By sewing, cutting, fusing, reshaping, dangling, and weaving, I transform the material into atmospheric and surprisingly organic-like structures. Many of my installations are integrated with video, projections, and or sound.  My choice of materials reflects a collision of clumsiness, and grace and questions how consumerism drives the world.”

Dear knife in the shape of a mermaid, dear blood
work, dear ambiguous graph. Dear disembodied
odometer, dear thumb-knuckle, dear cervix.

Dear four-chambered thumper, dear peach, dear murmuring
fruit, peach pit, stone fruit, bloodstone. Dear weight.
Dear innocuousness, body like a metal

mermaid, dear fist and first and wrist. Dear body
in the shape of a flea market find, dear sharp
hip-bone, blade of shoulder. Dear desire

to cut, desire to hold.
Dear hold, full-up with dark limbless organs,
dear cavity, corn syrup, dear chamber—

I’ve been trying to call, dear body and knife, I have
lost the number, lost
without you, dear tangible, governable flesh.

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Rosalie Moffett is the winner of a 2012 Discovery / Boston Review poetry prize. Her work has appeared in The Believer, FIELD, Tin House, AGNI and the anthology Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets. She recently received her MFA from Purdue University and is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Dental insurance is important, I tell myself.
Just last night there was a man. He stood in a parking-lot
with his arms full of divinity—

Ben and Jerry’s. His teeth were a little ruined
from telling the future and knowing god,
etc. He was black

and my Dixie grandmother told me once
that when they get a little money,
what they do is buy gold.

All our cooks had gold teeth,
she said. I want to tell her how I found myself
outside a 7-11

after midnight, hands frozen
to two pints of ice cream. Him saying
The freezer’s broken. Help yourself, take it all.

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Rosalie Moffett is the winner of a 2012 Discovery / Boston Review poetry prize. Her work has appeared in The Believer, FIELD, Tin House, AGNI and the anthology Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets. She recently received her MFA from Purdue University and is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Let’s say beauty can be calculated
like the weight of air or the ink in pens.
If the dictator marks his face at night,
an indication that he’s grown
into his moustache, then he will
fail at becoming a lumberjack—
will subsequently apply for compensation.

Let’s say beauty equals the thump
of your coffee-colored heart. You need
milk and sugar now more than ever.
You need the cut-off shorts, tan arms,
skinny legs, a marginally expensive pet—
your green-tailed sunbird, matched
to your grand grand marquis.

Let’s say you hardly made the deadline
to get your braces removed,
you waited all these years to pawn
those frosty whites for oranges.
You need them now, more than ever,
nitrate-free batwings to cover your eyes—
your thick, black fuel encrusted eyes.

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Elena T Tomorowitz is associate editor of the Mississippi Review and graphic designer for Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction. She has poems appearing in Guernica, Used Furniture Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, ILK, Blue Earth Review, Barn Owl Review, and others. She spends her time between Boise, Idaho and Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

I’ve gotten a lot
of mileage out
of the luxuries
of slaughter. I
swerved to hit
a collapsed bird
on the road today;
I’m not sure if it
was already dead
or not, but it certainly
couldn’t fly. It was
a puddle of a bird.
Meanwhile, several
police officers
stood outside of an indoor
soccer field staring off
into the distance
with their guns pointed
at a coyote. One of them
shot at it but it didn’t
move; the damn thing
was frozen. They shot
more at it. It continued
to wag its tail
mockingly. I don’t know anything
about my family history,
but I have a card
that says
I’m 25% Cherokee so I
get upset sometimes.
Eventually
the youngest officer
got sent over
to the animal and discovered
it was a scarecrow
with a couple of bullet holes
in its ass. Today
the news said
that 50 terrorist attacks
were prevented through
the surveillance of hundreds
of thousands of Americans.
I heard that
on the news in a restaurant
while I was eating
lunch. Today’s Featured Picture
on Wikipedia is
an Albatross. I admire
the brazen irony
of secrets. A few
of the officers
had missed and put
thumb-sized holes
in the dirt, so
there were ants scurrying
about confusedly, which
come to think of it
is pretty much how ants
always seem to get around.
I bet
they have a better plan
than they get credit for.
We’ve all got a little
torture in our blood,
but it’s a matter of
what side
our ancestors were on.
I never got
any money from the government
for being Cherokee
but that’s the first thing
people ask me
when they find out. It
was so cold
in the airconditioned
restaurant that I felt
uncomfortable, but then
it was so hot
outside that I didn’t want
to be there,
either. I don’t
look NDN.
I don’t look like
much of anything.
I can’t remember the last
time I looked
in the mirror. I hate having
my picture
taken. Most of us
have mercy every now
and again,
too. I wonder if it’s
too late to get some
of that money, though I
don’t really know whom I’d ask. I hope that bird wasn’t going to make it.

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Franklin K.R. Cline‘s work has been published in Beechers, The Chariton Review, and The Wide Net. He lives in Kalamazoo, MI, with his fiancee, author Rachel Kincaid.

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(Address, 96 x 40, fused and cut plastic packaging material, 2013)

Reenie Charrière – Artist website

Artist statement:

“I am invested in everyday moments.  My practice is triggered by expeditions along everyday paths, and sidewalks, including public waterways and shorelines.

I investigate by walking, driving and even waiting in traffic, and I am captivated by what accumulates in the environment. Detritus is a menacing punctuation. It comes in all colors and forms. The synthetic bright colors of plastic haunt me as they interrupt and accent the natural topography.   I am also drawn to these colors, and their forms as well as the juxtaposition between organic and synthetic matter.

My current work starts with photographing this relationship. Going beyond documentation, I spotlight the situation by fabricating sculptural installations out of discarded packaging materials, particularly  plastic, fabric, paper, and cardboard. By sewing, cutting, fusing, reshaping, dangling, and weaving, I transform the material into atmospheric and surprisingly organic-like structures. Many of my installations are integrated with video, projections, and or sound.  My choice of materials reflects a collision of clumsiness, and grace and questions how consumerism drives the world.”

A Democrat’s safeword is, “Beagle!”
A Republican’s safeword is, “Beagle!”
A Libertarian’s safeword is, “Ayn Rand!”
The President’s safeword is, “Drone strike!”
Sarah Palin’s safeword is, “This is what our troops are fighting for!”

A Presbyterian’s safeword is, “Picnic!”
A Catholic’s safeword is, “Sorry!”
A Jew’s safeword is, “Yom Kippur!”
A Buddhist safeword is, “What if this pain is an illusion?”

A common lesbian safeword is, “Patriarchy!”
or, occasionally, “Audre Lorde!”

Gay men have had the same safeword since
the late seventies, looking back on its origins
with a sense of camp nostalgia: “Mustache!”

Except of course for closeted gay men,
who seek discreet sexual partners by using Craigslist.
Their safeword is, “Bro, what the hell? I said I don’t kiss!”

Allen Ginsberg’s safeword was, “Peyote!”
Amiri Baraka’s safeword is, “Crackers!”
Walt Whitman’s safeword was, “Hubris!”
Stephen King’s safeword is predictable.

The first recorded use of a safeword
dates back to ancient Babylon,
when King Nebuchadnezzar told one of his concubines,
“Stop… Stop… Guards!”

The state safeword of California is, “Fake tan!”
The state safeword of Texas is, “Immigrants!”
The national safeword of England is, “That’ll be all, thanks!”

That woman from your neighborhood, the one
who always wears t-shirts with wolves, dolphins,
or Tweety Bird on them? She has no safeword
because she can take it.

Sometimes you’re most afraid
of using your safeword, so you just say,
“I do.”

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Evan J. Peterson is the author of the chapbooks Skin Job and The Midnight Channel, as well as volume editor of Gay City 5: Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam. His poetry, fiction, journalism, and criticism have appeared in Weird Tales, The Stranger, The Rumpus, Court Green, and Aim for the Head: An Anthology of Zombie Poetry, from which his poetry was excerpted in The New York Times. Evanjpeterson.com

Caught my attention because of the noise, something descending, then gaining altitude outside my closed windows.

Something drawing its sentence to an end, then assiduously writing each word of itself back toward
its beginning—slow work, letters large and childlike.

The local newspaper’s headline: two helicopters will be flying in tandem over the city, sent by
the Department of Homeland Security to measure natural radiation—

as a benchmark for future comparisons.

Louder than the usual ones dispatched for traffic slow-ups, police surveillance.

In lieu of talking to itself, a little knee-jerk excitement can sometimes just put on a clean shirt, and resist its normal incentives.

On any day, in any weather, a messenger might be outside, marking my front door with the color
of water,

which could be misinterpreted as the color of smoke.

On my shelf, black plastic binoculars wrapped in their shiny neck-cord stand at attention
on dark lenses.

Helicopter vibrations mimic the rumble under thought, where thought-objects originate—

though very few actually surface as utterance, where exchange would define their value.

From my kitchen window, two helicopters in full view: only the innocence of that narrow space
between them

clarifies as something to watch.

“Only” is a trick to keep logic busy, as the restlessness of intuition slips in or out.

The ambiguity of direction can sometimes be held up to the face like a cool, damp cloth to soothe
what observation can’t.

A messenger might slide a blank piece of folded paper under my back door, meaningless, whether
or not I open it.

A wily un-identical thought can nest in any dense network of expectations, protecting itself
from disclosure.

A messenger might keep readjusting her position so that the obvious is always obstructing
my view of her.

Exhaustion was intentionally inserted into the news report—

which is not the same as placing in the middle of the living room a couch that everyone must
walk around before sitting down,

but seems like it.

As a child, I’d imagine myself sitting just a little deeper, a little farther into one particular wooden
pew in our neighborhood church,

and never being found again, except by sunlight from my favorite stained-glass window at the right hour of day, and by moonlight at night.

While the church empties of people and fills and empties again, while the helicopters drone on.

As a child, I could have re-read the news report enough times for its messenger to condense, and the need for a message to disappear.

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Rusty Morrison‘s –Beyond the Chainlink- (Ahsahta) will be published in January 2014. Her book -After Urgency- won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize. -Book of the Given–is available from Noemi Press. -the true keeps calm biding its story- won Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, Northern California Book Award, and DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America. –Whethering-won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She has received the Bogin, Hemley, Winner, and DiCastagnola Awards from PSA. Her poems and/or essays have appeared in A Pubic Space, American Poetry Review, Aufgabe, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Her poems were anthologized in the Norton Postmodern American Poetry 2nd Edition, The Arcadia Project: Postmodern Pastoral, Beauty is a Verb, and elsewhere. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn.