The Indelible Kitchen

Visit the New Indelible Kitchen

2007-10-19T12:56:00.001-05:00

The best thing I have ever read on craigslist

2007-08-27T16:17:00.000-05:00

I was looking for a couch on Craig's List but got side-tracked and started looking at everything. The interesting thing about looking at furniture on Craig's List is that you get these haphazard photos that allow you to see onto someone's life. So, I was engaging in this home-furnishing voyeurism when I saw this ad:

Laminate kitchen table, 4 legs included - $23

Date: 2007-07-26, 8:42PM EDT

This is an adequate speckled laminate kitchen table. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not the kind of table that will make your life complete. Or maybe it is. We're not getting rid of it because we're moving or because we bought a new table. We simply stopped eating so we no longer have a need for it.

It's 3' x 4'- a surface area of 12 square feet. The table surface is 30.5" above the ground, supported by 4 legs, black, made of wood of unknown origin. At one time there was a leaf that could be inserted in the middle of the table to extend it to an indescribable length, but it can't currently be located. I think a dingo stole it.

The legs are easy to attach and remove via a revolutionary wing nut attachment mechanism. Even if you don't need a kitchen table, removing and reattaching the legs would make for hours of enjoyment. Oh - and it's been tested outside its intended kitchen environment. This fine specimen has been used as a desk and to hawk wares at a garage sale just this past spring.

The table is currently wasting the days and nights away in our garage. You can verify this in the picture below. A giant poster of Jules Winnfield (as played by Samuel L. Jackson) from the movie Pulp Fiction is watching over it. The poster's for sale too.

The Dirty Border, Chapter 12 by Melanie Lamaga

2007-08-27T16:03:00.001-05:00

In which Pooh falls in with a bad crowd and learns about interspecies dating, the Aztec calendar and to never ever to drink tequila with Jesus-Fondling-His-Likeness

"Premeditated Mooning" by Jay Snodgrass

2007-08-16T15:06:00.001-05:00

At the end of fifth grade, on the very last day,

I drew a smiley face on my butt in order to moon

Mrs. Stringer the math teacher, who had been

My homeroom teacher the year before.

She’d grabbed me by the head one day for my insolence

And left an orbit of half moon gouges

Around the top of my cranium, a crown of bad behavior.

I knew I had to do something to get her back

So when my friend Barry suggested I moon her I

Thought that was a great idea, but I couldn’t just

Moon her because where’s the originality, where’s the

Punishment, the return scold. No I had

To come up with a pretty good way to amplify it

If I wanted it to go down as one of the greats.

So that morning I snuck my mothers mirror and a tube

Of burgundy lipstick which I threw away

After applying through the magic of the Fovea which

Is that nerve in the back of your eye

That takes the upside down image your eye gets and

Turns it right side up for the brain to process

I drew two big dark, sad, sorrowful eyes and one long

Jagged mouth across the longitude of my

Ass crack. All that day I was heady with anticipation

Not only was it the last day of school,

But I was going to paste it right out of the park with

My painted little wiggler. I had nerves up

All right, and as I saw Mrs. Stringer standing in the doorway

Of her classroom, waiving to all the good

Little ones, the ones whose company I would forsake

In the wake of my revelation, if you will,

I knew my opportunity was at hand. I seized upon the reins

And let fall the buckle shouting to get her

Attention before I bowed to the opposite of her, waving it

Back and forth like a ship to ship signal.

A few hours after I got home, my father stormed into the

House and demanded to know what I had done.

The only thing at all about this story that keeps me in a

Straight face is the fact that a few years later Mrs. Stringer

went mad and was institutionalized. I could claim credit

for that, but on the whole, it just makes me feel bad.

Installment #2 of "Shutdown" by Jeff Crouch

2007-08-15T18:08:00.000-05:00

This is part of an ongoing story. Click here to read the first installment.

John Largent was going to have a busy night, and he walked over to one of his favorite doctors and asked for a prescription to help him with his diet.

Dr. Johnson was the doctor John Largent would go to first, if only he could find him, but the doctor he found was Dr. Zemackis.

Dr. Zemackis was busy doing his job, trying to get water to his patients and reassure them about their well being. It was sure to be a stressful evening.

John Largent would have to wait to get his prescription; Dr. Zemackis had a no-nonsense look in his eyes.

Meanwhile, Dr. Johnson was still in his office trying to figure out the best way to keep his secrets guarded.

A patient, dismissed earlier that afternoon, had begun to go door to door in her apartment building, quizzing people about their experiences at the hospital. Incredibly, she found that one out of three people she talked to had been to the hospital.

The information she got was alarming, not because people had much bad to say about the hospital, not overwhelmingly anyway, but because the information she got was altogether contradictory.

Susan James had just begun her adventure in the disconcerting.

Dr. Johnson knew better than to let the shutdown worry him. His favorite movies had always been about prison escape, and he had always had a neurotic fascination with such TV shows as Gilligan's Island and Hogan's Heroes.

A car in the parking lot burst into flames, and the flash against the window momentarily drew Dr. Johnson away from his paperwork.

Down the hall, Dr. Ward realized that his car had exploded. His trunk was full of oxygen tanks, and the blaze was miraculous. It immediately ignited the two cars next to his corvette.

Dr. Johnson signed the piece of paper he was looking at and put it in his case. The analysis made for the patient was, indeed, completely bogus, and he knew it. He had initiated another irrelevant treatment plan with suppressed glee, but he refrained from finalizing the case on the computer.

Dr. Zemackis had asked John Largent to collect water for the patients, and John Largent knew he had a clean water facility available in the hidden hospital, but he was as yet unwilling to expose the secret facility.

Instead, John Largent got on the phone to Becky Crown.

"Becky," he said, "the doctors are worried about provisions for the patients. The reporters are here or will be soon. I need you to start issuing requests for bottled water, food, blankets, and whatnot. Be sure to tell people where to bring them. Tell them Jim's Hardware has already donated $500 worth of inflatable mattresses."

Becky paused for a moment and said, "But that's only about six mattresses, John."

"Actually, it’s nine," said John.

Becky checked her messages and began to make herself ready for a long night at work.

Tim Irons, the IT Director, had managed to keep the computer system on line, but something seemed to him terribly wrong.

Dr. Ivory had approached Dr. Johnson twenty-five years ago about running a hospital where people were consistently misdiagnosed and treated for maladies they never had, and Dr. Johnson had been more than willing to cooperate.

In the inner circles of management, Dr. Ivory was known as the Recruiter, and her dedication to her work was nothing short of absolute.

During the shutdown, Dr. Ivory should have been in Cozumel enjoying a bonus package from a pharmaceutical company, but she had greater secrets to guard than Dr. Johnson.

Even before she had heard Dr. Johnson was a fan of Hogan's Heroes, Dr. Ivory made her presence known on the hospital's racquetball courts.

Shortly after Dr. Johnson began his work at the hospital, his first wife, Dr. June, had run off with her tennis instructor. He was never sure why, but then, he never really understood the workings of management.

"Wash In" by Jenny Tondera

2007-08-07T22:20:00.001-05:00

"Big Mouth of the Missouri River Swallowed Anna Whole" by Rebecca Prashner

2007-08-07T15:21:00.001-05:00

She had gone down to the bank to catch crawfish. The water was strangely clear that day. From the light of the clear grey sky, Anna could see all the objects that floated by. She saw a skeleton key in the current and pocketed it. Anna waded in further. Cold black mud anchored her toes to the bottom. On a day like this, she knew there were more things to find than crawfish.

Anna pocketed a lot: shiny and tarnished pennies, a shoelace, an old fishing hook, a locket. She was soon weighed down in the cold, clear water. It occurred to her that she was in the middle of the river now, with a strong current. It carried her on as she grabbed for more trinkets. She thought she saw a hippo, but those only belonged in the Nile. A grey sky casts illusions like that. Anna went rushing down the river like this. What she didn't know was that everything was turning to water in her pockets.

"empty bucket" by Rebecca Prashner

2007-08-07T15:12:00.000-05:00

I've got a bucket

keep it out at night

I might

be thirsty

in the morning

by then

it's all

dried up

the nights

are too

hot

& fast

"Film " by Rebecca Prashner

2007-08-07T15:09:00.001-05:00

There's nothing blank

On a page

Missing words

Beneath a window

With blue light

Poor reading skills predict death

2007-07-30T13:28:00.000-05:00

A new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine concludes:

"Inadequate health literacy, as measured by reading fluency, independently predicts all-cause mortality and cardiovascular death among community-dwelling elderly persons. Reading fluency is a more powerful variable than education for examining the association between socioeconomic status and health. " (Arch Intern Med. 2007;167:1503-1509)

http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/167/14/1503

"The Dirty Border - Chapter 3" by Melanie Lamaga

2007-07-25T20:29:00.000-05:00

“This is the first installment in a series of photos from the Tijuana border crossing, a timeless universe where cars are furniture and kitch is religion.”

"Little Teatimes" by Jay Snodgrass

2007-07-24T15:16:00.000-05:00

Once after a brunch of needles, pastry brown blood

Stains and fennel, you brandished

The length of hair at the caller knocking at the door,

Mocking birds scrabbling to fill

Up the morning with noise. Once after a breaking

Of limbs you leaned from the broken

Car window and pawed at the ground around my feet

Like a dog after a crime.

Once after the rain came to you like a blanket

Of clover, like a shawl of empty

Shoulders, you proclaimed that the future of wood

Was an axe. We embellished

Your waxing fever with polish and the electric

Wood sander for Christmas. Then

Once you learned to walk again, the lengths of tendon

Reworked into banisters of clean light

You stole a thimble of milk and every other tick

Of seconds from the clock. The refrigerator

Heaved a stony thrumming, compressing air

In gasps. One floor tile at a time

From the alternating patterns of worn browning cream

And burgundy scuffs, got up and marched

To the basement in regiments. Once you parted

The gift of a mirror into two rooms at once

The devil rang the door bell and you scuttled. Once

In a romance of broken rocks and asphalt

You went after the redness in a robin with the left over

Steak knives shivering in the drawer.

HEY! LOOK! A poem that actually responds to our monthly theme: “Murder, Mayhem and Miniature Golf” by Tabitha Dial

2007-07-24T11:41:00.000-05:00

She used to always be ready

for miniature golf

or croquet –

any excuse to hit a ball

around a lawn

She used to always be ready

for a little murder

at the drop of a second –

any excuse to kick

around a father figure

She used to always be ready

for a bit of mayhem

or minor chaos –

any excuse to fix

over-frayed nerves

She used to be ready.

Now she cannot be bothered

to leave the house.

"Between" by Nathan Alling Long

2007-07-23T23:53:00.000-05:00

For ten smoky, stainless steel minutes once a month I got to talk to my father.

The minutes started out deadly long, like a session under a dentist’s drill, then seemed to end as quick as breath: the two blue-clothed guards taking him away, a hand on each elbow, the man who had just convinced me, one more time, to call him Dad.

Before the next month was up, I would forget his face, forget almost that he was really my father. What I always remembered, though, were the three vertical metal bars that ran from the ceiling to the counter between us.

They were painted with a thick gray paint, nicked and flaking. From where I sat, Dad’s face fit just between the outer two bars, with one single bar between, so that if I wanted to look at both of his eyes, he had no nose, and if I wanted to see his nose, he lost one eye.

No matter how long I sat there looking at him, there was always something missing.

I was young—seven, then eight, then nine, then ten—and I barely knew what to say to him, how to tell him about my life in less time than it took for Mom and I to drive out to that place from home.

Once, to end an uncomfortable silence, I asked him why he was called a convict. I had heard two kids say the word on the playground the week before, and I knew they were talking about my father.

“You know why they call us that, don’t you?” he said, his eyes shiny beneath his yellowed skin. “They call us that ‘cause we have convictions,” he said.

Dad’s voice was naturally deep, gravelly, but he tried to smile it up for me, so it was never quite serious, never quite his own. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

I looked at both his eyes, then shifted in my seat and looked at the center of his face. His left eye disappeared, then his right.

“We believe in something,” he said in his half-raised voice. The guards appeared at his chair then, about to take him away again.

He stood up, as straight as he could. “I believe,” he said. Then disappeared.

This story originally appeared in Indiana Review.

"Columbia" by Roy Scholten

2007-07-23T23:37:00.001-05:00

600 x 600 black and white digital illustration made in GraphicConverter

"Metalla" by Roy Scholten

2007-07-23T22:09:00.000-05:00

600 x 600 black and white digital illustrations made in Graphic Converter

Dick Cheney's Man Sized Safe by Jay Snodgrass

2007-07-10T14:53:00.001-05:00

1. Obscene

Check the box behind the door. The case lingers, violence

Like bars of chocolate. Not so secret.

Reach back. Reach back to find the throat in the dark.

The straw, wet straw. I’m drinking from this.

Hide the behaviors of the secret camps. My big blue bleeding. Contiguous synthesis.

I love this channel. What will it do tomorrow.

The desert is one after the other. Arc of names.

What he said. Let’s do it again.

This street needs covering. Its secret is exposed. You drive down to my house and burn it down. The director is giving away his books.

Lick a card. Any card. Feel the redness

Living in the night, with my sacred credit cards.

Out of the braidal perilously crocking.

Specter of the worst. Clear metal bar. Swing into the casket.

Turf! by Clay Blancett

2007-07-08T20:13:00.001-05:00

Turf, Water, Red Ball

Hole 3 Par 2

Hole 9 Par 2

Treacherous Stones

Like the Terraces of the Inca

Ultimates by Jay Snodgrass

2007-07-02T14:52:00.001-05:00

Here is what you think:

I said everything:

Notice the blowing, full bore,

Nightly endured

Production, still, out of bounds.

Nobody said you would make

A flywheel of ground dinosaur teeth;

–A sewage system of forgettable –

A canonic undertow of unwavering vanity,

All, reigned in to the heart-thump.

I SAID: you may

Northern. The sanctity, cowling doomsday,

The great ones wave banners.

Their gloved fist at the sky. Superhero

Dilettantes, the total crimson cut

Of cosmic declaration, a super-cision.

While the superfluous over bite, fiend to crinkle,

Listens to the over-sound: here comes

The report: Dupe. Acquittal. Spectral

Fade.

Three More Water, That's All, by Clay Blancett

2007-06-28T06:13:00.001-05:00

Let's call them all "Flood!"

"And still it goes on" by Tabitha Dial

2007-06-26T23:27:00.001-05:00

And it still goes on

This time it happened in the car

after dinner—former husband and wife

taking out social mores again,

still hoping to screw one another over.

~~~

She probably smelled—

again—of that beautiful black,

almost the deepest brown,

wood and mud and sin-smacking lips

but never like sunshine.

Never like sunshine—

How could he resist her?

~~~

It lasted

long enough

for their signals

to reach across the pond

again and again,

playing leap frog

all last summer.

All last summer

they tried to sweeten things.

They scraped their front teeth

against the empty rind for any shred of sweetness

She put her unbroken mouth

over his, reached for his hands—

but the sky still draped

itself in black that night.

It would’ve been perfect

if there had been stars.

A New One by Gentry Hoffman

2007-06-24T23:27:00.000-05:00

"The Mating Patterns and Courtship Rituals of Local Campus Rock Doves (you might know them as pigeons)"

"Bobbin Threader By Nature"

"The State-Job-Space-Time

-Continuum”

by Gentry Hoffman

I deftly walk the hallway, glancing at faces. They glance at me, sure, and smile reflexively. That's muscle syntax for "I am harmless." I wonder if the hair’s-width chronology of these encounters add up. I wonder if, added together, any of these nano-smiles I pass intuit where I came from, who I've been. Do they read a casual, physical confidence, or do they just see the reciprocating muscles contract to stretch the lips into an eighth-moon, concave-up geometry? Or, do they see harmless? I find this interesting.

These people I know. I see them day after fuckless day. I can tell you names. I can tell you three names: Rebeccah. Robert. The redhead...god, I forget her name. Met her once, not long ago at a show I never in a million would have thought she'd be at. This, after years of "meeting" her around here. That's how it's worked, it's the pattern of local space-time (my physics teacher would push me over an event horizon for breaking those two up). Around here at least.

For the past seven years I've worked for the state, and the patterns are obvious at this point. I've accepted them, which is probably the meat and potatoes paradox of the "state job" continuum. The patterns are thus:

You get a "better" job, meaning more pay, benefits, stability, structure and less happiness (also known as a "real job").
You learn your job, meet the locals, form inorganic work relationships and romantic ones with people you greatly don't identify with, and you violently resist becoming one of them without realizing it.
You master your job to the point of supreme boredom; meanwhile people come and go (see: Turnover) and you hope it's not the cool ones.
You begin to loathe your job. Meanwhile, you begin to procrastinate and the quality of your work beings to decline, while ironically your performance evaluations get better and better.
They consummate the soul-job transaction by consistently giving you marginal cost-of-living raises, and the random yet slightly larger ones for those great evaluations you've been getting recently.
You think to yourself often how you really need to get away from this place.
See bullets four and five above. Repeat. Reflect.
You become one of them without realizing it.

Ok, so we were at the part of the pattern of seeing people every day for years without meeting them. Right. And so then one day a meeting is facilitated by the gods of chance and random number theory. You meet, you exchange names and so you are now not just a smile. This is nice, this is personal. The pattern is strange: the flirty smiles were always there, but so was the plexiglass wall that always aligned at an angle perpendicular to the line between our smiles. Mathematically, two points in the plexiglass could be used to define our smiles, with a basis vectors at the origin of the tower where we both work. Why did we never speak before? How many smile lines were defined before finally our chance meeting? I find this interesting.

The emotional epaulet "desperate" is fastened by a passant to her right shoulder (looking at her, on my left). It's hard for me to keep from staring at it during our conversation. I can't decide if it's this, or the banality of it all that is disappointingly familiar, but I am not one to hide my stripes either (emotional bobbin threader by nature), and so this makes for an awkward conversation. Little meaningless collisions of nothing. It's like when a feather slams into a feather. As opposed to matter v. antimatter. I'm still waiting do discover the dark stuff. I find this interesting.

At lunch there are animals to deal with. I say "deal with" and not "look at" or "enjoy" because they are very familiar with our patterns. They are urban fauna. Street smart rock doves (you might know them as pigeons), they push and hustle and huckster their way around campus, jostling their way to scraps and bun seeds and the occasional errant french fry. The grackles are ubiquitous and nasty with their audacity. They will swoop/snatch/perch their way from meal to meal. The whole exercise reminds me of Oliver Twist.

Romantically, pigeons and students are inseparable to me at this point. Their mating patters share not only a cadence but a sweetness and a dirtiness. The male student/pigeon is tenacious from the instant of any signal recognition. They are on it, and they can't be stopped. They are young and energized and in it to win it. Little factories of hormones drive-chain the machinery and presto-bango, love! The posturing, the ruffling and preening, the puffing. These are the performance arts of hormone love. The courtship ritual is a dirty-feet street ballet. They workshop these courtships for future performances. They learn their blocking, beat. They learn their faces, beat. They practice their lines, scene.

More Water by Clay Blancett

2007-06-23T13:37:00.001-05:00

"I Have the Stones"

"Marineland of Florida"

"The Wreck of Tug 945"

Discuss amongst yourselves.

OK-Water it is, Then by Clay Blancett

2007-06-21T07:00:00.001-05:00

"Gilley's Creek"

"Out Nine Mile Rd."

"The James Under 95"

My Interstice by Jay Snodgrass

2007-06-20T14:55:00.000-05:00

My life is a white zeppelin over a sporting event.

So up there, I’m all gosh and serrations.

I wish there were another, a dark zeppelin

that would come and do aerial combat with the first.

I would have Ollie North narrate for the History

channel. What a struggle. No one will ever again

notice the athletes murdering their wives.

& every explosion will be a shower of perfectly salted

peanuts, & with the crack of each shell

each person in the stadium will get three more years

to live & go shopping for antique ottomans.

It is the dark zeppelin of my youth, & it is winning,

volleying canon shot after laser beam. & the evil zeppelin

of my life is falling now in to the stadium which

languishes like a woman. Cut to Freud commercial.

Now back to the collapsing evil zeppelin ablaze now

all skeleton, striking mid field the Dolphin’s home game.

O weeping humanity, I need a slushy over here, my life

is so on display. The ribs of the dead zeppelin are my own

window blinds & the neighbors are tearing away from televisions

which means they’re breaking off their own faces

to look in at me, my weeping secrets inferno-ed

& the clouds are trollop heavy, candy soft & what I’m amazed

at is how perfectly gleaming is my black, black zeppelin.

:::

Drums of Chemical Waste by Jay Snodgrass

2007-06-19T14:44:00.000-05:00

Under the sledge,

Drums of waste, fruitful waste cavorting

to the transom. Weak wet-kneed belligerence

tinder in the forest dream. Soon this too

will be on fire.

Drums of casket ashes

Drums of wedding vows

stinging waves

cover their barnacled wrists

to hide the shame of it. Ensues

the vacating, the renter’s paradigm.

Meet out the measure of time, one saw

draws across the hope, perilous hope

of clearing the contaminants.

The other, the exhaling saw-stroke,

watches TV on the broken-in couch.

nothing is too sacred.

Exhale to drum

bleat, ash to drum,

steam light & fume-

watch, the wisdom of the drum.

Down in the fish-well the drum, ribbed

luminous monument, forever left of tide

smears its front with dribble, waxes

to the ride.

Soon, even this will be on fire.

"Poemophone: Optima" A Sound Sculpture by Tracey Cockrell

2007-06-19T12:47:00.000-05:00

7" x 13" x 12"
typewriter, steel, cherry

The act of typing sets this sound sculpture in motion. "Poemophone: Optima" was used to generate a series of collaborative performances with artists, writers and musicians. "Optima" is the first of an edition of eight similarly altered typewriters--each based on the musical instrument, the mbira. Each altered typewriter has a unique tuning system or voice. Each of these eight "Poemophones" will be sent to one of eight writers who will spend several months developing written compositions for use in performance and recordings.

Detail from "Poemophone" by Tracey Cockrell

2007-06-19T12:44:00.001-05:00

"Television" by Ira Joel Haber

2007-06-12T23:05:00.001-05:00

"Falling" by Emily Anderson

2007-06-12T22:59:00.000-05:00

Following our harrowing escape from the orphanage, we stumbled upon a big empty house on top of a great big cliff overlooking a small circle of the great big sea; seals and baby seals brayed on the beach below.

There was no furniture in that house, only empty rooms made of hard pink granite and soft golden sandstone, sometimes in stripes. The windows had no glass in them at all which caused some of us to wonder whether or not they really were windows, or if they were just holes. Initially I supported the former theory, that the windows were windows, since they were clearly part of a structure that had been designed to be a house, and in fact themselves supported the house’s houseness, by providing vistas like that of the sea for in front of the sink while washing supper dishes, and like by letting in white moths and moonlight, and of giving yellow squares to the stone floor for standing in and jumping through all day long, all of which are things that never happened at the orphanage and supposedly happen in houses, the way mommies and daddies and pets and cows and policemen happen in at or around houses. But events have now led me to the opposite conclusion: that what I believed were windows were simply holes.

At night, through the spaces where the moths and moonlight come, we hear along down the beach the seals’ barking and the baby seals’ squeaking, the waves that we know from daylight to be white crashing against the rocks that are black day or night, and at last, the tear and snag of a motor. Then a pop of light.

That white pop, dipping and jumping, seizing and slumping, apprehends all of us: the seals barking on the beach, our pink and gold house leaning across the black with white sky, the pallid children with wrists sticking from outgrown cuffs leaning so very far out. The only thing that light can never catch is the cliff, so black white light will not see it.

There were as many as twenty-six of us when we left the orphanage during its moment of distraction (while the bathtubs were developing hair and gin and growing grandfathers who were not our grandfathers, while the dark closets were sprouting orphans on cords and rats on vines, while the silk kimonos were unearthing women, steaming laundry, and sweet purply smoke) but now there are not so many of us. Not so many now but also so many then that I have lost count.

The white grows until it is stretched across the beach like a white windowshade. The motor glugs and when it stops the sea is loud and lapping black against the beach. We see men. Men who are not afraid of getting wet up to their knees with black water and men who are not afraid of getting white sand stuck to their wet boots. Men who whisper and work quick. Seals with rolls. Seals with flips.

The white windowshade rolls up with a motor sound. All of us orphans squeeze so close to lean out it’s like there’s only one of us, instead of twenty-six or twenty-five or -four. We watch the shade roll up black. It lets go the streaks of blood and sealshadow on the white beach. Blinks away the pink and gold house and its stretch into sky. Lets go the orphans’ leaning eyes and outgrown clothes: it lets all of us go, but lets one of us go most.

The last day I spent at the house, before I left to meet your mother and make her my wife, I ate a good orphan breakfast, oatmeal, from a big kettle. Even though I was almost grown-up I got caught up again in the old argument, of whether the house’s windows were windows or really holes. Even then I insisted they were windows. I became so angry with the argument that I bit through the oatmeal into my tongue, and tasted some of my own blood. But there was no one to feel sorry for me because by then only I was left.

Presidents by Ira Joel Haber

2007-06-09T23:22:00.000-05:00

The Third World in the First Person by Alyssa Kelly

2007-06-09T22:54:00.000-05:00

I am tired of myself.

Taking up too much space in the grocery store on an afternoon bruised with stress.

Where is the priest with the bullet in his bathrobe on the lawn of San Salvador morning?

Not on the cereal aisle. Not in my car. Not on the ballot. Not without struggle.

I do not know myself.

Choices are made, milk is drunk, rent was due.

Who am I but a reflection of you? And you and you and you.

Trust the billboard that reminds us to pay attention.

I am trying to listen.

Almost Cheating by Alyssa Kelly

2007-06-09T22:51:00.000-05:00

Almost cheating is that almost car wreck

You could see coming, but avoided in

The last second. Except this accident

Is one you sped towards, pressing down the

Gas pedal and unbuckling your seatbelt—

Coming close enough to see the bristles

Of a two-day beard, to hear uneven breath,

To breathe a deepness of his for your own.

But, you averted the kiss that would have

Tasted like Spanish wine and cigarettes,

A harvest of sad-song regret, and the

Unimaginable consequence of

Skin and muscle scraping against asphalt

At seventy-five miles per hour.

Your Basic Love Poem that Can Be Read at Any Wedding by M. C. Boyes

2007-06-05T22:14:00.000-05:00

Boyes sent this to us to post because people are always contacting the author asking for recommendations on a poem that can be read at weddings. Boyes noted that people want something accessible and lyrical--nothing too tough. After searching far and wide and coming up empty-handed (well, not really empty-handed--there are a lot of great love poems out there but the accessible ones are over-used), Boyes decided to write the poem that appears below.

Feel free to use it at your wedding. If you do, leave a comment here so Boyes can feel gratified. Boyes has also requested that you send interesting wedding photos to The Indelible Kitchen. We promise to publish the really good ones.

Your Basic Love Poem that Can Be Read at Any Wedding

Things in their most basic form

are the hardest to put words around:

the winged tail of a shrimp.

a freshly washed pillow case,

growing crisp in the autumn air.

The late winter sun

quenching itself on a bowlful

of snow. The half moon

resting, always,

in your right thumbnail.

What I mean is this—

after the long ride home

when the grass is wet, and the dishes

have been dried, and the wrinkles

have begun to set themselves

in lines more broad

than fine, there will be you—

asleep. Your head in its infinite state

of undress. Each hair

set upon another

wrestling against the grains,

that by some unwritten rule,

must form in your blue eyes.

There will be you, again.

You.

Alight, aloft, adrift,

in my arms alone.

There will be you

and me

and we will be

at home.

-M. C. Boyes

Call Me Crazy by James Robert Daniels

2007-06-04T14:55:00.000-05:00

PORT TOWNSEND, WASHINGTON, USA, 2006—Our local newspaper conducts a poll. This is the question: “How should we respond to the problem of homelessness in Jefferson County?”

A quarter of the people think that we should “urge the creation of affordable housing.” However, only 2% favor subsidized rent. This is in a county where many working persons search for two, three or four low-wage jobs to pay the rent. This is at a time when the minimum wage in our country is $5.15 per hour. Twenty-five percent of the working families in the United States of America don’t earn enough to rent a two-bedroom apartment.

This American small-town paper suggests the choice of allowing tent cities in public parks. Less than 6% of the citizens like that idea. We know about the tent city that Seattle has had for years. It began secretly in the woods in the middle of the city. Those people have been moved around constantly, ever since the city cracked down and bulldozed the encampment. The latest site is a clean and quiet church parking lot—surrounded by a worried neighborhood—in the suburbs.

There’s another option for us: crack down on illegal camps and prosecute offenders. Seattle has responded to people with nowhere to go. They’ve passed a law against sitting on the sidewalk. Another recent proposal there is to cut down the trees and remove the benches in public parks. Apparently the parks won’t be so attractive (to the homeless) then. New York City responds, as well. The homeless move on when prodded by police or they face arrest. How an unemployed, destitute, homeless person who has been prosecuted is supposed to pay the fine remains a mystery. A quarter of our home town’s survey respondents are all for “cracking down.” Just like the big cities, we would love to kick homeless people out. Let them go to the next neighborhood, the next town, city, county or state.

No word on how the individuals, the families, the elderly and the children we throw out will travel. Where they will go is not our concern.

Nobody seems to know who these people are—these people with no homes and no money, these people we want to fine.

Elaine was one of them, once. She quit her job and moved in order to be with her daughter who, pregnant with twins, was in a car accident. Elaine’s sister kindly opened her home to Elaine and her three children until Elaine could find work. Because of the car accident, Elaine’s daughter gave birth 12 weeks early to twin girls. Less than three weeks later, with those two babies still fighting for their lives, her sister’s house burned down. They were, all of them, suddenly homeless.

Carol had been out of work for three years and was still looking for a job, any job, when her unemployment compensation ran out. Katherine, a stranger, helped Casrol out until she found work. Then Katherine’s employer (perhaps the largest retailer in the world) fired her because of her disability (in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, incidentally).

Elsewhere in the land, Madeline, her husband and their five children found out the hard way that a water pipe under their house had been leaking. They suddenly got an unbelievable water bill from the City of Baltimore. They fixed the pipe and paid extra on their utility bill for months. That wasn’t good enough. The city sent them a notice that the land under their paid-off home would be seized and sold at auction for the balance they still owed: $310.09.

These folks are the lucky ones. With a little help from family, friends and strangers; with perseverance and hard work, in time, they’ve all got back to living from one paycheck to the next. The thing is, this can happen to anyone.

Elaine and Carol and Katherine and Madeline were not homeless. They have faced houselessness. Jessica, on the other hand, was homeless at age 20. She was completely alone in Union Square in New York City, with nothing but a few clothes and a tin cup. Someone cared enough to give her shelter for five days, until she could get herself into a place to live and a new, self-sufficient life. Jessica collected $2.68 in her tin cup on that day. She used it to help another stranger, a mother of three children, pay her rent.

I’ve been houseless in the past. I have not yet been homeless. Houselessness is not something to be feared, however awful you may think that would be for you. Like poverty, being without a place to live is just another obstacle. Sure, it can be overwhelming. When you are poor in America, everything is a struggle. If you have to give blood to get gas money to look for work, to make enough to go somewhere and apply for a “permanent job,” you are afraid of failure. When you wonder whether you’ll run out of gas at the end of the day and end up at the side of the road, with no way to even get back to your temporary “home,” you know fear.

But that is not the meaning of “homelessness.” Homeless means that you have nobody to turn to. It means that you have not only no shelter, but that you have no community, no family, not a single person in the world who will take you in. This very real fear rules the lives of many Americans today.

A survey conducted recently by Woman’s Day Magazine asks, “If you were laid off from work today, what could you afford to buy?” The overwhelming response, at 68% across the land, is this: “A pack of tissues to sob into.”

So what about that survey in our town? Here is the overwhelming, number-one response. The question: “How should we respond to the problem of homelessness in Jefferson County? Our answer: Focus on social programs that deal with mental health and substance abuse.”

Well, such programs may be a good idea for all of us. There are crazy people on our streets and drug addicts in our parks. Just as there are crazy people and drug addicts in our towns, cities, suburbs, offices and, yes, even in our capitol. But I thought the question was about homelessness. Call me crazy.

This essay originally appeared in Spring Hill Review, June 2005.

Soup Delirium

2007-05-29T15:55:00.000-05:00

Overweight in the prime of stretching

I cave onto your bacon. Spans of roomy

deprivation. Scores of searing pan edges

marking my extremities. One arm

for breakfast. One arm for snake.

Try to dislodge the Alligator from the Python.

Meet the convex of city streets wherein

none of nature’s mastications are performed.

& suddenly it’s raining so hard, & there’s no where

to go. The sewer’s filling. The water’s up

to my knees. I’m sweating a little too, which

contributes. My clothes are pressing in on me

marking my skin with red pictures of hunting

animals and barcodes: a menu of simmering.

Black Rhino

2007-05-28T20:53:00.001-05:00

Fig.1-Worm Drive

Memorial Day

2007-05-28T13:56:00.001-05:00

Shambling Darkness Project

An Excerpt from “Adman” by Corey Mesler

2007-05-25T12:15:00.000-05:00

“So we say there’s no caffeine in our toothpaste.”

“That’s right.”

“There is no caffeine in toothpaste.”

“Right. We say that.”

“But there’s never been caffeine in our toothpaste.”

“That’s the pitch. ‘Always caffeine free’.”

“There’s never been—“

“Right.”

“And people will think…”

“That other toothpastes maybe, just might, perhaps have just a little caffeine.”

“Which they don’t want.”

“Not in their toothpaste.”

-“Adman” originally appeared in Heat City Review.

Notice by Louise Weinberg

2007-05-24T09:41:00.000-05:00

“Notice” by Louise Weinberg. Photo collage with thread, ink, French bereavement envelope and vellum, 2006.

The Movement of High Waters by Louise Weinberg

2007-05-24T09:34:00.000-05:00

"The Movement of High Waters," by Louise Weinberg. Photo collage print, 2005.

Sanguinistas! by Jay Snodgrass

2007-05-22T14:44:00.000-05:00

I’m through bringing you these little vials.

In your vestment armor I envision a cleansing of the meat board.

Still no hammer can straighten the victory loom.

Saddle your viewfinder with the trembling of weaving.

You ought not prune your Hydrangea with the broadsword of Lo-angrick!

Swing me to the myriad. I have enlargened the hoop straddle

with ingots of Thule.

Gorge wedded to the throng toggle, I, steeple grouched the heathens,

but with flowers, sweet purple Pansies, Goth-weaver.

I’m journeying to the Mall of your choice in order

a pretty compliment to the broken tooth,

also the queenly crown, her smooth crash:

Nordrun the cruise liner wishes to bury you.

Alex Podesta: Not Just Giant Rabbits

2007-05-21T11:51:00.000-05:00

Alex Podesta, known for his giant man/rabbit sculptures, also makes other things. Here are some of them, plus a giant man/rabbit sculpture thrown in for good measure.

Podesta will be exhibiting his work at a show opening July 3 at Andrechsgalerie in Innsbruck, Austria and one opening August 4 at the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center.

Donations in Honor of Jonny Z/Jonathan Zanin

2007-05-21T11:40:00.000-05:00

This is a repeat of an older post. We have posted this again as Jonny Z was a friedn to Popular Ink and we hope to get the word out so that people who want to donate to his causes can.

If you wish to send a donation to honor the late musician, activist and artist Jonny Z you can send a check to Chop Suey Books . You can support the nonprofit group dedicated to feeding the hungry, Food Not Bombs, or you can contribute to the Nonesuch Fund to help pay rent on the store that will be in serious straits because of Jonny Z's death.

Chop Suey Books

1317 West Cary Street

Richmond, VA 23220

(804) 497-4705

info@chopsueybooks.com

(To post a memory, a link or other info or to read memories of Jonny Z or view links relating to Jonny, see the entry “Jonathan Zanin: A Kiss for Jonny Z”)

A New Story by Zack Wilson

2007-05-17T12:52:00.001-05:00

MY LAST CRUSH

By Zack Wilson

My last crush occurred when I was 29 and still a schoolteacher. I suppose my age and workplace are relevant. She taught foreign languages and her name was Rachel.

She was a beautiful woman without realising it. About five years younger than me. Her hair was chestnut brown, like her eyes. She had big hands and her skin was ivory—white and soft. I thought I loved her.

I hung about with her most of the time at work. We always sat together in the staffroom. I took her shopping in the Christmas sales. We even went on holiday together for a few days in Edinburgh with some mutual friends. I really thought she liked me. Maybe I thought that if I just hung around with her long enough then we would become a couple.

She had a long-term boyfriend whom she left. I felt like I had a chance. I didn’t. She got back together with him when he got drunk and lay on her mother’s sofa calling her name into a bucket.

Just before the whole thing completely broke my heart and contributed to an alcoholic breakdown, I sat behind her at the Year 11 Awards Evening. This event was a load of self-serving toss dreamt up by the headteacher because of difficulties with Ofsted. It was also an event marked by the speech of a self-declared ‘Motivator’.

This bleached haired twat had been invited into the school as part of what was called ‘The Unstoppable Teen’ programme. This involved vast numbers of children of average ability being taken out of GCSE lessons to go and see this dickhead, who told them that they weren’t average but were brilliant and that they could all achieve great grades. Quite how not being in GCSE lessons would help this, I wasn’t sure. I am sure his fee came directly out of the school’s annual budget.

Anyway, I attended this event because I had to and sat behind Rachel. I’d smoked some dodgy hash to help get me through it and this probably made me a little solipsistic. I think she had a dress on and some kind of cream coloured woollen jumper. Her hair looked darker than usual and had had its style changed indeterminately and subtly in a way that took my breath away. She never looked like she wore makeup. Sitting behind her I could see the way her eyes shone in the twilit hall when she turned to one side.

The evening progressed without incident. There were some speeches and some prizes were handed out. I noticed one of Rachel’s dark brown hairs trailing across her cream shoulder as we stood to applaud deserving geographers or Special Needs scientists. Rachel applauded and smiled with the enthusiasm of a girl who’s been given a pony for Christmas. I couldn’t take my eyes off the trailing hair.

The headteacher made a speech. I can’t recall the details. The Motivator came on.

He told us about himself. About how he’d been a professional footballer as a youth, but had had a bad injury. He’d been hopeless and thought his career, even his life, was over. Rachel looked sympathetic and beautiful in the light reflecting from the stage.

But he’d picked himself up and gone to America. In America, he’d found a way to work, and a way to make money. I lost interest here, but Rachel didn’t. He went on to say something about how he’d found out he had a gift for public speaking. We all have a gift, he said, his blonde hair trembling in the spotlight. I

I noticed a tiny black insect crawling along, parallel to the dark strand of hair on Rachel’s shoulder. I wanted to tell her. I wanted to move it, catch it, hunt it down for her.

Her head was gazing at the trembling blonde thing in the spotlight. He was telling random Year 11s that they were “the best” and pointing into the audience. I forget what had led him to it. I tried to whisper “Rach” twice or three times. She deliberately ignored me.

The grey haired woman next to her smiled sympathetically at me. I grinned back. I tried to remove the insect discreetly with my index finger and thumb, but Rachel lifted her shoulders suddenly and moved slightly forward. She was besotted with the stage.

My hand slapped her on the shoulder, smudging the insect. She leaned forward, away from my offending hands. I could tell that she wasn’t grateful. I tried to stutter an explanation. She dismissed me with an underarm wave and I saw withheld tears reddening her eyes as the speech on stage finished and we all stood to applaud.

I didn’t speak to her again that evening.

I can’t remember speaking to her ever again, actually, and I wish there was some way now that I could tell what I lost.

___________________

Jorn Ake on Ryszard Kapuscinski

2007-05-15T21:54:00.000-05:00

I have a reading and a show of photographs coming up in June in Warsaw, Poland, so I thought to get into a traveling Polish mood I would read some of the work of Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist who had the tremendous good fortune and indeed, a tremendous amount of guts, to be given the opportunity to travel outside of Poland during the Communist era (basically from 1950 to the fall, and then to the present - he is still living) and write back about world events he experienced. The book of his that I am reading is called The Shadow of the Sun, a book which demonstrates all over again that Africa is not a sudden occurrence but a cycle of increasingly depressing intersecting spirals of Colonialism, tribalism, environment, poverty, corruption and famine. On the other hand, the respect with which he writes about the people he meets is sympathetic but not patronizing, nor is he unwilling to point out hypocrisy, bad people and absolutely bad ideas. He is not perfect - some passages are a bit dated - but he is good and fair. Here are a few quotes:

(from his introductory remarks) "This is therefore not a book about Africa, but rather about some people from there - about encounters with them, and time spent together. The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa.' In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist."

(on the Ethiopian famine in 1975) "A human being always dies alone; the moment of death is the loneliest moment of his life. 'Mass death' means that, somewhere, a man is dying alone; but at the same time, another man, also alone, is dying as well, and, equally alone, another one still. It means that by coincidence - most frequently against his will - each of them, experiencing in solitude his own, singular death, finds himself in proximity to many others experiencing the same thing."

(upon visiting an African colleague's village home) "The yard's second focal point, besides the ancestral grave, is the kitchen. This consists of a hole in the ground surrounded on three sides by clay walls, and in it lie three blackened stones arranged in a triangle. You place the pot on top of them, and light a wood fire beneath. It is the simplest of appliances, invented during neolithic times but still useful."

(on wizards and witchcraft) "Our contemporary suspicion of and antipathy for the Other, the Stranger, goes back to the fear our tribal ancestors felt toward the Outsider, seeing him as the carrier of evil, the source of misfortune. Pain, fire, disease, drought, and hunger did not come from nowhere. Someone must have brought them, inflicted them, disseminated them. But who? Not my people, not those closest to me - they are good. Life is possible only among good people, and I am alive, after all. The guilty are therefore the Others, the Strangers. That is why, seeking retribution for our injuries and setbacks, we quarrel with them, enter into conflicts, conduct wars. In a word, if unhappiness has befallen us, its source is not within us, but elsewhere, outside, beyond us and our community, far away, in Others."

J Ake

Overheard in an Airport by Jorn Ake

2007-05-15T12:35:00.000-05:00

Several years ago, while I was living in Prague, I found myself sitting in the Milan airport waiting for the final leg of a horrible flight back home. Seated behind me was a group of Blackwater-types on their way to Iraq, jawing back and forth at each other. Lots of testosterone. At one point, one of the guys said, "Nothing metaphoric about getting blown up." I thought, great line and wrote it down. The recent shots by James Nachtwey at 401 Projects gave me the rest.

Overheard in an Airport

Nothing metaphoric about getting blown up.
The air explodes like a motherfucker,
then there are pieces of bodies
all over you, someone’s brains and guts
and your blood on the ground.
Then if you’re lucky, they come right away,
put you in an ambulance
and take you to a hospital
where they cut off your clothes,
start swabbing you down and sewing you up.
Someone pulls a finger out of your pants,
so they count yours
8, 9, 10
twice
8, 9, 10
then throw it away.

c. J Ake 2007

The Oculist Witness by Jay Snodgrass

2007-05-14T14:41:00.001-05:00

--As with everything, this is self indulgent

The clinic at the DMV has me in the “Squinters” category

I look like a copse of lavender, with my one eye

Pirate-covered by the little paddle. I see a Z,

A memory of candlelight fading as I close my eyes.

The mind is a marching out of feelers, world replicators.

I’m not afraid to fail, I write a poem at you

Because it has teeth, not daisies. It’s a rage

Not from me, but from the not me.

These imitators can vary the length of a wave of light

Salmon-y, the hand of the optometrist rests heavy

On my shoulder. She smells like your apartment

In that gray I was drunk through. Your portrait

A calm hospital blanket over the jagged buzz

Of Picasso or the nerds lined up to fix your

Computer. Next letter I see is Omega, a listing

For apartments in tiny newspaper print.

It heaves with the functional body, bare ass to the breeze.

She puts the paddle over my right eye and I think

Of how to answer next, L, 5, Gamma. Inside here

Where the test burns me, in the thinking,

A certain descent to the bottom of the swimming pool.

I’m discovering ways to be a new man, a chemist

Or a lunger. Next time I’m in daylight, I’ll strut

With the awarenss of confession. “I can’t make it out.”

Open up to the redness, crinoline chemical on the gaze.

My eyelashes come together like the teeth

Of some tiny machine grinding chocolate. It’s late

Into the vapors, if I faint, it will be into snow

Mellow and loose, the crumpled undertow invents an Alpha.

Or the tumble of ice and waves, a cocktail:

Soft ice, the new glass of teeth. Soft teeth:

The new teeth of glass. In the waiting room

Marked in red pepper, saying goodnight Ms, closing time,

I fill in the bar marked Other with the word

“Breather." I close both my eyes and cave to the failure.

All my life it’s been a struggle to use indifference

As a guiding principle.

Shutdown by Jeff Crouch

2007-05-13T22:32:00.000-05:00

THIS IS THE FIRST INSTALLMENT OF AN INTRIGUING SERIALIZED STORY BY JEFF CROUCH. THE INDELIBLE KITCHEN WILL POST NEW INSTALLMENTS OF THIS PIECE AT LEAST ONCE A WEEK.

Shutdown

At the Emergency entrance, those who could walk on their own were permitted to leave, but there was no where to walk. A few fleabag motels were about a mile away, but there were no sidewalks—only oncoming cars, apartments, gas stations, beer stores, topless bars, and an abandoned lumberyard.

Who among the leaving would know where to go anyway? A car was required.

City buses had been commandeered to take those who could sit up and hold on to their IVs and bladder bags to a downtown recreation center. Mats had already been unrolled for their arrival, and these patients had been told to hold onto their sheets and pillows. Most did so nervously.

Two security guards watched over their medication.

A few ambulances were carrying the more chronic to nearby hospitals, and they had two or three gurneys a piece. The hospital visitors, let alone the patients, were noticeably upset. The hospital had shutdown.

Tow trucks were available to move the cars not gone before 10 PM.

Large moving vans were lined up in the parking lot. A paper shredding operation was in full grind.

Like a line of army ants removing everything from a picnic, the movers rolled the hospital beds out the front door, to the parking lot, and into the trucks.

The generators had yet to kick in. Several men orchestrated the move with flashlights.

John Largent was on his cell phone to his boss. “I thought the fax order came from you. It was a secure fax.”

The power went off at 7:08 PM, and the backup generators had failed. At that point, John Largent put the shutdown order into effect.

The morgue had been emptied into one of the smaller moving vans. John Largent now knew there were six bodies without paper work, one of them his boss’s father-in-law and one of them his boss’s adopted son.

John Largent was going to have a busy night. He walked over to one of his favorite doctors and asked for a prescription to help him with his diet.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE SECOND PART OF THIS INSTALLMENT.

New Pig Collage No. 9 by Ira Joel Haber

2007-05-12T22:18:00.000-05:00

New Pig Collage No. 8 by Ira Joel Haber

2007-05-12T22:08:00.000-05:00

Last Pig Collage by Ira Joel Haber

2007-05-12T22:05:00.000-05:00

A New Poem by Felino Soriano

2007-05-11T11:43:00.000-05:00

Vagabond's Vision #87

Modest moments
akin to almost nothingness,
pursuing an escape from cluttered attributes,
attributed to over-the-edge
pushing of saddening
murmurs.
Escape requires relinquishing desire.

Doors,
the more elaborate retain closure.
A gifted hand
spun coloristic yarn into gifts
bequeathing symphony atop
doorstep's hardened hand.

A boy ran smiling
across lengths of rhythmic flowing air,
allowing panoramic views
and
birds from elevated vantage points
organic reasons to caw chamomile
sounds in celebrated versions of
unclenching sadness.

-Felino Soriano

The Bitter (Ex) Curator:

2007-05-11T10:50:00.000-05:00

Exciting, insightful news will be forthcoming about the pretentious and contentious world of contemporary art and curating. At least it will be after I escape San Francisco and drive across the country to return to my native Tennessee. If only I was of a slightly older generation, I’m certain I would know of a Grateful Dead song that speak to all the emotions I am feeling now. It promises to be a long, strange trip but I don’t know if “Truckin” properly captures this Diaspora.

DONATIONS IN MEMORY OF JONATHAN ZANIN (JONNY Z)

2007-05-10T19:50:00.000-05:00

If you wish to send a donation to honor musician, activist and artist Jonny Z you can send a check to Chop Suey Books . You can support the nonprofit group dedicated to feeding the hungry, Food Not Bombs, or you can contribute to the Nonesuch Fund to help pay rent on the store that Jonny Z helped establish and that will be in serious straits because of his death.

Chop Suey Books

1317 West Cary Street

Richmond, VA 23220

(804) 497-4705

info@chopsueybooks.com

(To post a memory, a link or other info or to read memories of Jonny Z, see the entry “Jonathan Zanin: A Kiss for Jonny Z”)

I Heart the Stilt Talker by Jay Snodgrass

2007-05-10T12:22:00.000-05:00

Catawampus trump us up to the stump

or, meaning this is a loaded option,

contagions aging in their rage

like, softly, locomotion.

All barge intact, wroth the Ironman.

Marvel will retire you before you rust

(Note alliterative ugliness. The sloth

is a two toed repetition.)

Now art, velocity, marvel at the monstrous

city, her two flag poles: inadequate & chimed.

Option Further is a dither of fur, mountained

on ruinous ore. Enter Delinquent the Progeny

You’ve proved by your portioned grove

my manners as ornaments on the roof.

JONATHAN ZANIN: A KISS FOR JONNY Z

2007-05-09T10:18:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Zanin, known as jonnyz (this was his preferred way of signing things) or Jonny, was a friend to Popular Ink. His Bizarre Market in Richmond, VA carried our shirts and books. An advocate for the arts and a number of worthy social causes, Jonny Z helped us with our initial promotions and always cheered us along the way.

Yesterday, I read that Jonny was killed on the Boulevard Bridge in Richmond when he was riding his bike home from a fund-raiser on Sunday night. Reports say that the police have not determined how Jonny Z died. (See article from The Richmond Times Dispatch below.)

I cannot imagine that anyone who knew Jonny Z would want to hurt him. He was, in all aspects, a lovely person.

Just last week, I went by his shop to check on Popular Ink’s stock. I had in tow my eighteen-month-old daughter, May. Above his store (which he shared with Nonesuch), located in the bottom of a converted row-house, someone was practicing on drums. Jonny Z was leaning against a wall out front, smoking a cigarette and intently listening.

When he saw us, he stood up. He was wearing a tee shirt, jeans and sneakers. With his slight frame, unkempt sandy hair and guileless smile, I thought to myself that he looked more like a kid than the proprietor of a popular store.

“Her eyes just lit up with the drums,” he said, motioning toward Baby May.

“She loves to dance, but that might drive me crazy.” I gestured at the open window from where the drumming boomed.

Jonny Z nodded thoughtfully and set down his cigarette. “Not me. I love it. I love it when anyone tries to make music.”

After we went into the store and talked inventory, Jonny Z carried a box out of for me and put it in the trunk of the car. Ever polite, Jonny Z waited as I tried to get May into her car seat.

May deftly slipped out of my grip and situated herself proudly in the empty booster seat that belongs to her older brother, Henry, who was at school. She leaned over and peered at the open car door to see if Jonny Z was watching her sit in the big-boy seat. He was. He grinned at her.

Then Jonny Z stood by for almost a half an hour while I tired to coax May out of the booster and into her own car seat. Finally, Jonny Z convinced May that she should get in her own car seat so that she could show him how to buckle up the harness. May fumbled with her seat belt and got the latch to click.

“There!” she triumphantly announced to Jonny Z.

“There!” he said, giving her his trademark, boyish grin. “Perfect!”

As we drove away, May blew a kiss to Jonny Z, a gesture she reserves only for those in her inner circle.

“There!” she said.

Excerpt from The Richmond Times-Dispatch

By JIM NOLAN
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

An abandoned bike, a pair of sneakers and blood on Richmond's Boulevard Bridge were among the pieces of evidence detectives pored over yesterday as they tried to solve the death of a popular city musician, artist and activist.

The body of Jonathan Raymond Zanin, 26, was found about 4 a.m. beneath the north side of the bridge.

Police were unsure yesterday whether Zanin's death was an accident, suicide or homicide. The pedestrian walkway where his bike and sneakers were found is narrow, and the fence that protects walkers and riders on the outer edge is about 5 feet high.

"We're still actively working to determine not only the cause of death, but the circumstances surrounding his death," said Richmond police spokeswoman Cynthia Price.

She said there was no preliminary indication that Zanin had been robbed, but the investigation is continuing.

Links to things of Jonny Z

Style Weekly Story on Jonny Z

A photo tribute from Nonesuch

Photos of Jonny Z

The Bizarre Market

WRIR will feature a show of Jonny Z’s music, including Tigershark and Castle Danger

An NBC news segment on his death

Tigershark’s MySpace page

YouTube video of Castle Danger with Jonny Z on drums

A New Poem by Gentry Hoffman

2007-05-04T11:20:00.000-05:00

CAUCASUS

Ossetian plain, Caucasian dirt highway
all roads lead through Troy and the usual delays

Troja Troja send my lady over
i last saw her crossing
the georgian border

Oh, Azerbaijan, who's side are you on?
Enough! bring the roses, i'm planting a garden.

Tbilisi, Tbilisi, Eurasia, she needs me!
the silk road dead-ended, a lake to a sea

And all i could smell was the rotting of fish
i wanted to help, but i never learned Ingush

i wanna fuck things up and then make them perfect
like Blumenbach, i wanna come around full circuit

But i know you're not listening
For you'd never deserve it
I do not have the nerve
To bus fare that desert

Georgia, send her bones if you've found them
If not, you may want to look in the mountains

I hope you are watching the mountains.

by Gentry Hoffman

Alex Podesta: Giant Rabbits & Other Art on Tour

2007-05-03T00:30:00.000-05:00

Dearest editors and readers,

I am thrilled to have been invited to join the august ranks of The Indelible Kitchen. Although I'm not sure what place a piddler in the dead world of objects has amongst a group of writers, I would never miss a chance at shameless self-promotion. So... here is a picture from a recent show of mine at the UNO Fine Arts Gallery. Hope it is pleasing to your eyes. To follow should be pix from a two-person show in Innsbruck at Andechsgalerie, opening July 3rd and an August 4th opening solo install at the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans (www.cacno.org). Join me at either of these if you're in either area.

Thanks Again Supremo!
Alex Podesta

Popular Ink/Indelible Kitchen Contributors in Inaugural Issue of CaKe Poetry

2007-05-01T11:50:00.000-05:00

Indelible Kitchen contributors and/or Popular Ink writers Jay Snodgrass, Clay Blancett and M. C. Boyes are all featured in the brand, spanking new issue of CaKe.

Here's a sampling:

When you are dead you still dream

the difference is you are not sleeping
though these dreams are all you will ever see
anymore. they are not fantastic or even splendid
dreams. insipid and annoying, at best,
these dreams will make you try to open
your eyes to escape.

only, your eyelids will be gone.
it would be better if your eyelids were replaced
by something gory, say oozing puss
or the decaying wings of a bat,
but the world of the dead is not a tactile place. you cannot reach out
and touch the worms that are working their way
through the place
where your small intestines used to be. There is no place
where your small intestines were, because
you are no more. you are dead
and you are dreaming an eternal dead dream.

It goes something like this:

A man is riding a bicycle stiffly, formally, as if as if riding a bike is a ceremony of state where a certain level of deliberation and decorum is required. You have never seen him before. He is wearing a blonde mustache that offends you somehow. Yes, it is the curve, the shape of the whole thing—insouciant but not quite defiant. The mustache is twisted into handle bars and carefully waxed. Handle bars, mustache, handlebars, bicycle—this is not lost on you. Around the man riding a bike wind begins to swirl. That swirl picks up water from nowhere until the wind is a whirlpool that has somehow lost its way. A whirlpool winding down the street.

you wish it was just a simple whirlwind.
nice and normal. you wish
it contained some scraps of paper.
papers with words on them. words that were meant
for you. That is what you wish
was in the whirlpool
that you wish was a whirlwind
that is winding its way down the road
by the man with the pretentious handlebar moustache
who is stiffly riding the bike
with the blatantly yellow banana seat.

you try to lift your lids—
open them to something better,
something you know,
something you can touch.
to the grey cat lapping
water from the rusty pail you left on the back porch.
to your mother’s arm, her soft blonde hairs
glistening slightly
under the yellow kitchen light.
but dreams are all you have left
and they are not even your dreams;

they are everything that you ever saw
that you never even
remembered when you were living.

These dreams are filled with all those things
that were never of any consequence to you

and you will feel you are missing something
but because this feeling is of consequence
you will not remember it

and it will not be incorporated into your dead dreams.

still
you will long for it—
the marked paper,
the hair on your mother’s arm,
the grey cat,
the rusty pail.

you will feel an ache in your absent side,
an itch on your missing right hand.

your entire being is that of an amputee
longing to be reattached.

if only you had died better you think.

you begin to weep the dry tears of the dead
but even this you will not remember.
all that you will see and feel
is the moment of waking
of not knowing where you are
eternally.

M. C. Boyes

To see more cool pix and poems by the likes of Campbell McGrath, Maureen Seaton, Rick Campbell and others, visit CaKe at www.cakepoetry.com.

Reality Creates Irony in Champa's Fiction

2007-04-28T21:38:00.000-05:00

Paula Champa’s book, Admissions--recently released by Popular Ink--features a dean of Admissions from M.I.T. A strange irony as the Dean of Admissions from M.I.T. made news today.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES, April 27, 2007

Dean at M.I.T. Resigns, Ending a 28-Year Lie
By TAMAR LEWIN

The dean of admissions at M.I.T. admitted that she had lied about having an undergraduate degree.

You Gotta Love a Naked Robot

2007-04-27T22:28:00.000-05:00

How can you not love this? A naked robot by Mimi Kirchner.

Vent Trickles 1.2 by Jay Snodgrass

2007-04-27T14:54:00.000-05:00

Sweet enormous bread-pan,

the brain, il cervello, prelude to stitches

and sleeping god of DIAGNOSIS

on your heels the sacrifice, lurid

still agoggle, blasted two ways to history

listening for the sounds

of assurance that the lord wears shit-kickers.

The city is composed of roadmaps

a full scale whimper and office complex,

the erosion of rain unfreezes new hamburger joints

malted Hercules in a dress, too strong but still

praying for the ax, the redeemer’s quiet candor,

Ortega, the family moon, dipping its donut

to the awful horse-smell of Hialeah, her belt loop

unearthing some hyper calculated slip of quivering flesh,

the moose horn and the milkshake,

each neighborhood’s set of jiggling driveway reach-arounds:

portions of the lobe which receives tire treads.

The Dentist by Nathan Long

2007-04-26T19:35:00.000-05:00

Becoming adult meant no longer having our teeth inspected daily by our father.

After we brushed our teeth, our father would inspect our work. We came up to his chair in the living room and opened our mouths before him. If he saw food between our teeth, he would send us back. Otherwise, he would run his closely cut fingernails against a tooth and see if there was tartar build up. His fingers were large and rounded at the end, his fingernails curved identically with the skin. Tufts of hair sprouted between each joint and I remember thinking how I never wanted hands like that.

“Look at that,” he would say with disappointment, if he found residue under his nail, and he would march us back to brush again.

I recently went to the dentist and he scolded me for not flossing enough. Now I do it every night, and as I stick my large hands in my mouth in front of the bathroom mirror, I think of my father—if only he had made us floss daily.

Photo by Jorn Ake

2007-04-24T22:23:00.001-05:00

Fall Trees in Central Park by Jorn Ake

Disaster on Wheels

2007-04-20T20:43:00.000-05:00

III. More from the Essay on What Used to Be My Really Hard Life -- This is the Masturbator-Flasher Part So Read It!

2007-04-19T23:47:00.000-05:00

IF YOU HAVE NOT READ PARTS ONE AND TWO OF THIS ESSAY, SCROLL DOWN AND READ THEM. READING THIS IN ORDER WILL MAKE FOR A MUCH MORE SATISFYING EXPERIENCE.

As far as commutes go, the counter-commute from Manhattan to White Plains was one of the better ones. No one to speak of was leaving Manhattan at 8:00 a.m. to get to White Plains since most of White Plains was already enroot to Manhattan. All I had to do was walk eight blocks down and six blocks over from West 48th Street and Tenth Avenue to Grand Central. If the weather was lousy, I could ride a bus to the station and pick up nice a Metro North Train.

Getting home was easy, too. Someone almost always gave me a ride to the train station in White Plains. The train back to Manhattan was always sparcely peopled (except on Fridays when everyone under 30 from all places due north seemed to tying one on and heading into the big city). I would get in a train car with ten or eleven people in it. Everyone sat far apart from one another, wearing our walkmans, reading our newspapers, books and magazines—a quiet crowd of mostly professionally dressed women.

By the time the train got to Manhattan and made its stop at 125th Street, the car was usually empty, save one or two people. Then the conductor would come through and check our tickets one last time and retreat for the remainder of the trip during which the train would put on speed and barrel into the long dark tunnel to Grand Central.

Ah, the stop at 125th Street. It marked the beginning of the end of the work day for me. And, until the Masturbator Flasher incident, it stirred in me a certain sense of excitement. I was 21 and I was in New York City. I would crank up my Iggy Pop or Grace Jones or Suburban Lawns, let my book fall to my lap and feel a tingle in my fingertips and day dream of the time when I would be somebody in the city. Somebody, who, say, didn’t have to counter-commute to White Plains to work in an office editing corporate publications. Somebody who didn’t have to wander around offering to make photocopies for everyone just so she wouldn’t have to look at the PC Junior manual she was rewriting.

But then, in the middle of Iggy’s stirring rendition of “Lust for Life” I caught, in my peripheral vision, a disturbing blur of motion. I glanced sideways, without turning my head, to check my senses. I must have known that something was wrong. I surreptitiously turned down the volume of the walkman and picked up my book. I held it close to my face and cut a glance again. A trim, middle-aged man in white tennis shorts and a green and white striped polo shirt was sitting in the seat (that before the stop at 125th Street had been empty) across the aisle. He was clutching his rather outsized penis in both hands. He stared at me with a half-smile and furiously jacked off.

I think I stopped breathing for the 80 or so blocks left in the trip. I looked around the car. Entirely empty. I started to stand up but then sat back down again. I pretended to read. I started to stand up but sat back down again. I repeated this pattern about ten times until the lights went out, as they often did in the tunnel when we were nearing Grand Central, and the train slowed. In the dark, I shot out of my seat.

I had only made to the aisle when the lights came back on. The masturbator-flasher guy stood up, white tennis shorts still unzipped, his large, now flaccid penis hanging out, and smiled and nodded at me. Needless to say, I did not nod back. I ran to the next car as the train pulled into the station and then ran all the way to the street, where I sprung for a cab.

Later, when I told my boyfriend about what happened, we decided, hey, this is New York City. Yup. Chalk it up to the city. What’s the chance of ever seeing that guy again? As it turned out, the chances of seeing that guy again were pretty good. Excellent even. That guy and I had the same train schedule.

The Skewer Report on a Really Hard Life

2007-04-16T17:57:00.001-05:00

The Skewer sends this riff responding to an article that notes: “last week mega-rich parents often set a spendthrift example – a Long Island businessman, David Brooks, spent $10 million on his 13-year-old daughter's party, which included performances by the rock group Aerosmith and the rapper 50 Cent, together with $10,000 party bags for the teenage guests.”

MY HARD LIFE
By the Skewer

As if a bad ski season in Gstaad weren't enough, I got scorched by an untrained bikini waxer getting ready to go to St. Tropez. Really! I had to take a week at Las Ventanas just to get over it.

And now, just when I should be relaxing, there's the pressure of what to get my niece, whose father gave her a miniature fainting pony for her fourth birthday. A horse that is known to fall over? What was he thinking?

But she loves it because the mane is so fluffy, according to the nanny (Vanessa? Birgit?).

I was going to get her a Big Sister/Little Sister Spa Day when I heard that, just across the park, the parents of a one-year-old threw her a $30,000 birthday party with 100 guests, each child dressed like their favorite member of a royal family.

And if you can believe it, not one etiquette book gives guidance and my friend, Claire, whom I usually consult, was climbing a peak in Patagonia and unreachable by cell. So on the way back from Las Ventanas, I was forced to start my own list:

1 Year Old - Lobster, life-size cake, guest appearance by Cirque du Soleil traveling troupe, for no more than 40 child friends (plus equal number of children of parents' business associates) in the Hamptons

5 Years Old - Custom-designed clothing line, launched at Fashion Week; factory tour with "Happy Birthday" sung by factory team associates

10 Years Old - A hard age. Polo team and own pony, with private lessons by team members. Or art lessons by downtown's next big thing, and stock portfolio, followed by all-night slumber party at museum

Sweet 16 - Party with known singing or rap star and private helicopter (no more lift lines) with pilot on retainer

Big 18 - Open-ended trip to Paris or Ibiza with jet-load of closest personal friends

21 Years Old - Private island or, if only islands with rocky coasts are available, refurbished castle in country of choice

I don't know - is it enough?

II. More from the Essay on What Used to Be My Really Hard Life

2007-04-16T00:52:00.000-05:00

So this is the next installment. If you haven't read the beginning, go down about three posts and there you will find it--complete with typos. Nothing like putting your stuff out there to help you see your errors. Anyhow, I promised myself I would press on with this essay (which is totally true, by the way--even though my family members will take me to task for later parts of the essay--which are not in this short and badly punctuated installment.) This is a short entry but it ends with Masturbator/Flasher foreshaddowing which should encourage you to wait breathlessly for the next installment. While you wait, you could practice your Masturbator/Flasher breathing. Really, I am digressing now and just repeating Masturbator/Flasher . . .

Ultimately, I started getting to work later and later. The windowless room that I shared with a perky intern from Berkley seemed to grow smaller, the black plastic clock on the wall larger. I finished the article on Rochester and it was finally published. I learned how to operate the copy machine and made copies for anyone who wanted them when the secretary wasn’t around. While making copies might seem a step down from writing articles for IBM Digest or for the Corporate Headquarters news letter, it got me away from the tiny office and the clock. Then I got to write a scintillating piece on a company basket ball team. I continued to work on the PC Junior manual, but mostly, I continued to watch the clock on the wall. Three months passed.

During my life outside of the office building, things happened. I wrecked my lemon yellow Dodge Horizon in a snow storm and had to start taking rides from other interns and young workers at IBM. I moved away from the Yonkers secretary and the hairy guys with necklaces and into an apartment in Hells Kitchen with my willowy, blue-eyed boyfriend. I began to counter-commute to IBM’s corporate head quarters in White Plains from Manhattan. I started to show up to work later and later. No one seemed to notice.

Then I had a series of small maladies, bladder infections and colds, which I milked. I began to miss work entirely—first one day a week and then two. I collected a good letter of recommendation and continued the charade of “working” at IBM until the occurrence of what I will call the Masturbator/ Flasher Incident.

My Rediculously Difficult Life

2007-04-13T19:49:00.000-05:00

Was made more complicated last weekend when my five year old son asked a broken hotwheels car, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

For I Am...

2007-04-13T15:26:00.000-05:00

After looking at a ridiculous computer screen, with computer jibberish on it, all day long, the last thing I want to do is blog for I am The Terrible Bald Man. Look out all!!!!

I. The Beginning of an Essay about What Used to Be My Really Hard Life

2007-04-13T15:05:00.000-05:00

This is the beginning of an essay. It's not done, so no wise cracks about how this has no arc. If my really hard life will allow it, I will post a new installment soon.

I have always had trouble with jobs—not work, just jobs. I don’t mind working. In fact, I love working so much that my husband, Clay, occasionally threatens to divorce me. Clay’s idea of a good vacation is to snowboard and watch movies, maybe go to a museum. My idea of a good vacation is to stay at home and scour the bathroom grout with a toothbrush, then to edge the twelve beds in our lawn, re-glaze the windows, refinish the furniture, alphabetize the album collection (CDs are all in order, but the albums have gotten out of control), hang shutters, inventory our books and mulch and mulch and mulch.

If I have to go on a vacation, I am always gunning for some kind of eco-tourism or humanitarian work—you know, clean up the beaches of Alaska, unclog a threatened river in Brazil, build houses for the needy in Zimbabwe. We never get to do this though. Invariably, we have to take some kind of “relaxing,” all-expense paid vacation that involves Florida and the in-laws (the payers of the expenses) and riding bikes and swimming and eating in restaurants and watching movies. I can’t tell you how oddly stressed all this relaxation makes me—how all I can think of is the work left undone.

Lately, I have been dreaming about taking some time off to use a pressure washer. I have never used a pressure washer, but I have seen them in action. Once, I lived next to some people who were much more compulsive than I am. Every morning, the man would pressure wash his driveway and then his wife would scrub, on her hands and knees, any area that was not completely gleaming. Man, they had a good looking driveway. Pressure washer . . . I could blast out the dirt and bizarre plants that crop up in our driveways. (We have two and I swear they haven’t been repaved since the house was built in 1937.) I could shoot off the flaking (probably lead-based) paint from our trim. And the walkways, the concrete pad around the back of our house, the tiled side porch, the concrete stairs to the basement, the stone walls . . .

Work is relaxing. Jobs are not.

While I can spend an inordinate amount of time folding my underwear and arranging them by type and color—black, bikini cottons to the left, beige, synthetic body shapers to the right—this has yet to bring our family any kind of great fortune. Jobs, on the other hand, seem to bring in the money, not to mention health insurance.

I have always (since the age of 14—the legal age at the time) had a job. Yet, I have never successfully held a “normal” day job for more than a year. When I work at, say, an office, at first I believe I can make a difference and jet out of bed to go to work. Then, invariably, I become sodden, depressed and melancholic. For instance, my first “real” job was am internship at IBM. This was back in the days when computers were new and IBM was the model corporation. Big Blue paid me heaps and it was an honor to have the job. I competed with a bunch of much more advantaged and well-educated people (not folks who grew up in rural Virginia) to land this job. My internship coworkers went to Yale or Harvard or Berkley. They knew what salsa was (the food and the music—both were news to me), they had flown in airplanes, they got their hair cut at actual salons instead of entrusting their coiffure to roommates and siblings, they had luggage with its own pedigree and papers. I had hit the big-time.

For the first two weeks of my job I jumped out of bed and raced to work at the ungodly hour of 6:30 a.m.. Gee, I thought, I can add zest to your corporate publications. Thanks for choosing me.

I got my first assignment: rewrite the manual for the PC Junior so that normal people can understand it. This is a good idea, I thought, since the manual made less sense than an IRS publication on how to deduct certain kinds of plastic surgery (did you know you can deduct for plastic surgery if your ears are too large?). After about two weeks of rewrites and running my rewrites by six different managers, who all had vastly different ideas about how to make the PC Junior Manual more accessible to the general public, I began to sag. My main boss, Don, recognized this and offered me a side article to spice up my new life at IBM. I could write about Rochester, New York and why people who were living in the New York Metropolitan area would be delighted to move their families to the cold, less urbane, significantly smaller, oh, let’s face it, grim city of Rochester. I still remember the first line from the piece, “Colonel Rochester was right.” As for the rest of it, I come up blank. And this is not because I was using drugs or drinking excessively. Granted, I was sharing a cottage in Chappaqua, New York with a secretary from Yonkers who had various hairy, necklace-wearing “boyfriends” over for sex every night. And sometimes these boyfriends were so courteous that they would wander downstairs to try to invite me to join in on the fun. I always greeted these requests with silence (actually, muffled anxious breathing on the other side of a locked door with a dresser and a couch pushed in front of it). Okay, so maybe I was tired. Maybe that was why I lost the zeal for that IBM job. For reasons I can no longer remember, during that time I painted my bedroom, including the ceiling, black. I do remember that this took a lot of time and the results were not good. I also cleaned the grout in the bathroom with my toothbrush.

Test, this is just a test

2007-04-10T00:14:00.000-05:00

do not be alarmed