Death and the Maiden - Wisteria

Hello. My name is Mike and I am a Danny Brady-aholic. Last year he was involved with my #2 record of the year, the minimalist-electro band Élan Vital's brilliant debut "Shadow Self", and now he is involved in my "so-far" top pick for 2018 with Death and the Maiden's sophomore disc "Wisteria". Sparse instrumentation, drum machine beats, ethereal vocals, catchy songs and smart lyrics tie this into one hell of a package. Imagine combining both of Henry Frayne's bands (Area and The Moon Seven Times) with Lorde on vocals. Comparisons to her will be made on Lucinda King's voice and not just because DatM also hail from New Zealand. And yes, that is a compliment. Their music is so slick and refined. The vocals are elegant. This is smart pop. This is what should demand attention rather than the formulaic tripe passing as popular music now. Leading off this opus with the title track easing up into your speakers, you quickly find the groove and get lost in Hope Robertson's repeating guitar line as the beat makes your head swim but allows you to be just far enough above the water to take in the lilting vocal. The absurdly named "Oooh Baby in the Chorus" is the highlight of the album. Chiming instrumentation churning around the central lyric, "Everything is wrong around us". Dance-ably downtrodden. 'River Underground' is a track begging for a Tricky remix. The album closer "Everything is Stressful" does feed you a full teaspoon of tension complete with the aftertaste. It builds into the albums biggest bang leaving you with a fade out of bass fuzz in your ear but the sweet smell of Wisteria in your nostrils.


Death and the Maiden's new record Wisteria is available now from ​www.fishriderrecords.com/ and via Bandcamp
Follow them on Facebook.

​

Michael Mitchell's love of music started at an early age and slowly became an addiction that courses through his veins to this very day. It is guaranteed that if you are in his proximity that he will try to get you to travel to the nearest record store and make you buy beyond your means. His wife and two children acknowledge his problem and continue to encourage him into rehab.

​impetus

my body was a mountain once but
you made it just a hill
because
my vast panorama was
for you a bitter pill
to swallow
my body was a river taking me
to greater things 
you dammed me up like I was mud
yet
I bubbled up like springs
because
my body was a vessel
my mind the force 
inside it
if you want something you can
cage
you’ll have to go and 
find it




fairy tales

does the king of birds
always love a girl made of glass?
slamming into her invisible wall a thousand times
before blinking marrow tears and
flying away ?
 
the preying mantis fucks
whichever boy she wants,
rips his head off and eats it after she
is satiated.




priorities

and days unfolded, life
not stopping
despite all the little deaths.
and the deathbed of her hymen was a place
where flowers bloomed;
if only to be plucked again and again
by men on their way
somewhere else.

​

The way we hold space for ghosts.


I carry an acorn in the pocket of my jeans and its small form is a binding oath that I use to evict
spiritual entities. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the brownish cap and the green body and I
picked it up and kissed it like I was Peter Pan or Wendy or whoever fucked with that thing in the
story. It seems like finding acorns has become rarer and rarer these days. If this isn’t a vessel for
fastening a demon by oath, I don’t know what is.

Its cup-shaped shell serves as a reminder of the day I was first freed from thoughts of your ghost.
And during that instant, I was happy—the leather body commanded my presence out of a fog of
thought. But negative contemplations are like shitty specters, swooping in like smug Draculas
swooshing out from behind a curtain and it was no different following the acorn kiss. Clouds of
reflections blotted the brief happiness and the plunging weight dragged down my shoulders. I
hunched my bird's wings in an arc to protect my heart.

The problem with ghosts is that there’s no amount of space – within me or without me – that they
can’t take up. They’re feelings without feeling and I have yet to learn the mechanics of holding
onto an outline. I’m scared I’ve grown used to your hauntings.

The breaks in my body are how I hold space for ghosts. Memories are a philter that I can’t help
but drink from.
                                                                                              ***
I set a dinner for lonely suppers. Hot pans on the end table leave rings in the starch of the wood
accompanied by plastic ladles that I eat out of—spoon feed myself whatever slush I heated up.
Ghosts can eat wherever and whenever they want and I feel unseen and alone as I try to swallow
meals that are all too salty with un-cried pride. Hunger is how I hold space for you and I continue
to save you a seat at this table.

I’m told that a fatty acorn can make a meal, sort of like almonds. Maybe the shell I carry with me
is an icon filled with the banquet of our history. I wonder if eating the acorn is the ritual that will
release you, but I’m no fucking Jesuit and I don’t want to anger the authority of the amulet. So it
stays in my pocket.
                                                                                              ***
There was a time when I wasn’t afraid of the buzz of text messages and anticipated their
vibrations like a pulsing heartbeat. Bzzz bzzz bzzz. Friend. But ghosts can’t type messages with
their tree branch fingers and the silence is loud. I text “Me” to my own phone number so when I
get the message back I know that I’m still alive. 8:45 AM: Me / Me, 2:56 PM: Me / Me, 7:27
PM: Me / Me, 5:15 AM: Me / Me, 6:00 AM: Me/ Me, 6:05 AM: Me / Me. I don’t know how
shadows communicate, but the thunderous hush of an empty phone makes the silhouette of you
ever present. Now, I shrink from the sound of the occasional hum because I know it’s never
going to be who I want it to be.

In absentia, you’ve learned new tricks. Your ghost is inescapable and it takes up space in the
cavities of my insides. Is the acorn an exorcism or is it a tree that grows you ever larger? Has
connecting you to a symbol I carry kept you flowering? Lots of time, I wonder if I can ever out
run anything, should I even try. You flourish even in death. So, I hold steadfast to the gift from
above and maintain that it is a harbinger of future freedoms. A mini cauldron to contain the
negative floaty species you’ve become.


If I knew how to drive I would keep the passenger seat buckled all the time. Safety options for
spirits. But since I don’t know how to drive, I walk everywhere with the storm of nostalgia
whipping up a tornado that engulfs my whole body.

Walk walk walk.

Sometimes, there are whole hours I can go without thinking of the past as feet pass over
pavement with jelly legs. Remembering that I’ve forgotten makes me so grateful I say a prayer of
thanks to a clock, but it’s only moments until I’ve remembered that I forgot and then I remember
again. We make room for ghosts by shaping time into an unbearable ouroboros. You are a belt
wrapped around my body. Fatigued soles and I head back home, the medium in my pocket
rattles.  
                                                                                             ***
The earth’s magnetic field is dragging westward and I think that maybe with the earth moving, I
might as well hustle out of here, too. Move west with it. If the earth can move forward, why
shouldn’t I? Restaurants and shops and parks and fast food spots are cratered with shades of you.
Those places are covered in cobwebs, darkened with the ash of what remains when a person
becomes a ghost. If I leave my home will I be free of phantoms? The leaden feeling in my chest
is your apparition and I’ve been embracing that weight for so long I wonder if its absence will
leave me even more orphaned. But I’m willing to exercise you from the space inside, move my
whole body away and follow the earth’s lead.

I hold the acorn in my hand, I press it against my mouth. I will the acorn to be the instrument of
your exorcism. Make it a spiritualist that will trap and change your ghost into a tree, or a
memorial plaque, or a meal like almonds, or a dent of silence that puckers in a distant memory
shriveling in on itself and eliminating the pockets and passages of a space once saved for you.

​

​Volcano
 
"The economic position is only flourishing on the surface. Germany is in fact dancing on a volcano."   -Gustav Stresemann, 1929 

How do you love a city that's all surface
A proud layer of grime on the window of a train
That rumbles uneven circles around and around
A lumpy public drunkenness you can no longer afford
How do you love a city that will stare and stare 
But never make eye contact 
A city where the myth of walking home un-accosted
Still seals the lips of anyone longing for sympathy
A city that knows you're hurting
And likes it that way
A city on the shit-end of a new beginning
Controlling austerity with rolled up notes
How do you love a city that tore down its wall
And replaced it with a thousand bouncers
Death strip throbbing with bad techno
And heads throbbing with the Kopfschmerz of
Furtive bumps off keys soon to be lost
Somewhere between never-ending supposed utopia 
And puking in the canal
Where Rosa was killed for trying to lift the lid off 
A city that still thinks it's better than America
How do you love a city that never finishes what it started,
Just moves on to something worse
A city of cultural Zwischenmiete
Where predetermined eviction of dreams and bodies is public knowledge 
And no one is wanted for too long
Every previous inhabitant a ghost
Paradise lost her mind playing in the shell
Of a city cleared by investors and a genocide that's too cliche to mention
But the streets are gold with it

The whole of this city is dancing
Uneven circles around and around
On the edge of itself
At the center of everything
It claims to keep distant
Dangling marionettes over errant flames
And waiting for the inevitable drop
To really get the party started

​

Darling Fitch is an American-born, Berlin-based writer, musician and performance artist whose compositions often grapple with issues of collective and individual identity. Their work has appeared in festivals internationally, including the Dixon Place HOT! Fest, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the Month of Performance Art – Berlin. In addition to performing regularly in Berlin and abroad, Fitch runs the local performance series Yes/No/Other/All: Performance on the Boundaries of Identity. www.darlingfitch.com
Photo credit: Aurora Romano Photography

In this age
 
of digital displays—clocks beside the bed, in cars, on microwaves, ovens, phones, et al.—I find such signs as 11:11 or 7:47 or 12:34 quite talismanic. Wake up or walk into the kitchen or whatever & come across such a display & I think it's a good thing. Not necessarily propitious, but at least offering something positive.
 
I have similar attitudes towards the chance sighting of particular birds, or the hearing of particular songs that have some sort of charge for me. I don't follow through on them, to check to see if they're prescient incidents, just note them in passing & move on. Enough that they've occured.
 
Of late, however, they've become something more. Not premonitions, more akin to knots in a rope that provide handholds. I see them, hang on to them, refuse to let go until another one comes along. & they're no longer chance: I seek them out. As I write this, I have a YouTube track of Miles Davis' So What playing in a minimized browser.
 
Nine more minutes of future I don't have to think about.
 
 


A variant on Ernesto Priego’s Hubiera
 
If
yesterday the
rain, even if
 
falling
ever so
lightly, & we
 
had
gone out
in it, bare-
 
foot
& naked,
& just in
 
case
it never
stopped raining we
 
running
so the
ice spilled from
 
the
glasses we
carried & melted
 
making
the run
a little lighter,
 
making
the rain
a little harder.


​
Mark Young's most recent book is les échiquiers effrontés, a collection of surrealist visual poems laid out on chessboard grids, just published by Luna Bisonte Prods. Due out later this year is The Word Factory: a miscellany, from gradient books of Finland, & an e-book, A Vicarious Life — the backing tracks, from otata.

 asdcjasdcj: Flickr CC



​​5th Floor Support
 
Another Thursday night, one of a string of Thursday nights lately starting with an 8 AM Grand Rounds neurology
lecture at Jackson Memorial and ending across NW 12th Avenue at the VA Hospital. There’s a barricade and some
benches near the lobby door where guys smoke before our support meeting. I see a couple of friends in the crowd
—my generation—and sit next to an OIF friend fresh off a spinal surgery.
 
curlicues of smoke
wrap around the flagpole--
the past’s python feeding
 
P. asks if I heard about last weekend’s Boston bombing and mentions his flashbacks to Ramadi. I’d frozen in my
living room when the words flashed across CNN: ball bearings. At that moment, I knew what my fellow medics saw
at the finish line: shattered bones, open chest cavities, fasciculations of amputated muscles…
 
lunar eclipse--
drops from a
shrapnel hole
 
P. nods. J. looks towards the sliding doors behind us. It’s good that we’re headed to a meeting. I wheel P.
past the visitor’s post to the elevator corridor and press 5—the behavioral floor. In the designated room, we
hold hands and pray to start our meeting.
 
nanotubules
stronger linked together
than apart



​#22aDay
 
It’s a hashtag that’s circled the Veteran community lately and even has made it into the news. It’s only half
the story, though. The tally doesn’t include suicide by cop or finding a friend cold with a needle in his arm.
It doesn’t include drunk driving accidents or a dealer-related drive-by. Do not resuscitates. Barroom brawls.
Neglecting a helmet or seatbelt. There are a lot of creative ways to die without the death counting in the
tally.
 
Living is harder. Aside from the well-publicized flashbacks or lost buddies on the battlefield, there’s the
Facebook posts and late-night texts. Did you hear that X has died? Finding a friend face-down on the living
room floor. Ten-month backlogs at the VA hospital. Revolving deployments of family and friends. Even hearing a
professor or classmate rail against the military every other week. Life is harder.
 
out of the rubble,
a lily pokes through--
life winning



Colleen M. Farrelly is a freelance writer and data scientist in Miami, FL. She's seen and experienced a few things over the years and enjoys passing it on to others.

after your lobotomy

smiling, with the personality
of an oyster, you listened
while I told you about you.

you liked me better
once you had
forgotten me,

and I wondered when
you began to give up on me.
what had done it?

maybe it was when you realized that
mandalas were used by Hindus
and Buddhists;

you hated the sacrilege
that I committed with colored
pencils.

it is still manifesting,
permanent ink on my arms,
needles reminding me

how it feels to
not be flatlining,
displaying who I am

in such a way
that I can no longer
hide it.

I feel more alive
than ever before
when I am naked.

everything changed
when you were taught
to be ashamed of me.

when you forgot
your walls and why
you had built them,

when you forgot
that I was a sinful child
“going down an unhealthy path,”

you looked
at me, for the first time
in a long time,

with love
in your
eyes.

all I wanted
was for that
look to last a lifetime.

something precious
was stolen from me,
and from you too;

the problem is
I realize it
and you don’t.

you forgot you said,
“you don’t give up
on someone you love.”

you thought it would
cheer me up,
but it didn’t.

it only made me
feel worse that you
entertained the idea

of giving
up
on me.

and for what?
for my spirituality?
for my tattoo?

if anyone should
give up,
goddamn it, it’s me.

​

Vapor Trails

It’s only us, on the cusp 
of sleep, lost in sagging 
heat. We drown in our bed.
Here in the furnace of night, 
we peel back the only skin 
we ever need. A shadow
brushes past. We slide out, 
naked, free from breath 
and thirst. We drink the wind. 
We spring into air, flutter 
around the porch light, then 
sail across the dry yard, 
leaving vapor trails 
as we vanish into dark trees. 




Red Barn Road

Wind Rises.
Birds scatter among birch 
and pine. 

Thunder in the distance, 
lightning where the river 
winds south
past the iron bridge. 

The heat breaks. 
Now rain lashes the house, 
whipping young trees 
which bow and bend. 

In the street, dark water 
reflects a streetlight’s glow.



​
Green Flame

On the bridge, 
a woman leans 
against 
the railing, 
stares out 
at the tangle 
of woods on the far bank. 

Once she tiptoed
above a waterfall, 
agile on slippery 
stones. 
Her features 
were lost in smoke, 
her hair loose in wet air.

Her eyes burned 
like green 
flame.
She waited 
for velvet night, 
speaking 
only the language of birds.

​

​The importance of a story's viewpoint
　
Waking to a blanked landscape
offers an opportunity to see it differently.
Your mother's story of your birth changes
but repeats that you were early and healthy,
so that becomes what your family remembers.
Your father's story is more hesitant and rarely
heard: you were the tiny, fragile baby,
he carried in the palm of one hand.
　
No one noticed you didn't speak because
your mother spoke for you and you
were so well trained not to interrupt her
in public. And if you'd said anything?
You were told you'd misunderstood,
your mother had never said that.
The silence at the heart of you
became a space where you stored
　
your deepest secret. Others thought
that your landscape could be mapped
as paths, trees, houses, while failing
to notice this wasn't the view
you'd drawn. Would you take advantage
of the snow and use the altered landscape
to reveal what hadn't been seen?
　


Emma Lee’s most recent collection is "Ghosts in the Desert" (IDP, UK 2015), she co-edited "Over Land, Over Sea: poems for those seeking refuge," (Five Leaves, UK, 2015), reviews for The High Window Journal, The Journal, London Grip and Sabotage Reviews and blogs at http://emmalee1.wordpress.com.

A Reflection on Pathos

Rabbits circle near our raspberry bushes searching
for something to eat.

My son reaches to brush his baby fingers
over their backs and ears--

they freeze, startle, escape,
the grass waving behind them like a soft crop

of hair,
a landscape so unmolested—perfect.

Some say he looks like his father. I think
he looks like me, every mite and particle; his

thick brows and bold jaw demanding
attention, but not the sort that most sons do.

I taught him to be mine, to remember
the consequence of matriphagy, how Eve

guided mothers toward the importance of sons--
to let them consume,

protect their fragile egos after ritual offering. And
how this pathos favors touch.

Silence in our most holy texts replaced with
and he went to her and comforted her.

Coping. Sex.
Cain begotten in a shed behind the house

where the tools for gardening are kept. When not
in paradise, reads the sign above the door—an unfinished

phrase. If only we knew beforehand
what would come of our longings

for Eden. What damage we would make.
My son, a shadow of some image stumbling
away from me. I pull his infant body to my body, cut
his waist into my hip, point toward

the bushes. He follows my reach with his eyes,
observes the rabbits searching for insects

in the grass. Against what we know of their nature,
today they are craving fresh meat.

​


A Tattoo is Inked Over Our Scars

        
           “. . . and the amaranth said to her neighbor, ‘How I envy

                       your beauty and your sweet scent. . .’.”

                                                    -Aesop, The Rose and the Amaranth



                                   Where our shoulders kiss: a soft coloring of pink spreading,

blooming side by side—a single stalk.



Petals bleed over our chests, across our backs—ivory, white,

deeper shades of fuchsia:


                                                            we are drunk with memory, reeling. I hold
        
                                                            you steady with my unsteady hand,
                    
                                                            as we draw circles around the bruise of lung
    
                                                            and spleen,

            
                                     of living body.
            

Do not name this sorrow, I say, name this unfading instead.                            In paradise,

we will call it

                                             Gethsemene, the place

                                                       of ears, the blood


                                                 of martyrs streaming down our necks.

                    


I tell you not to touch it—let it bleed across your jawline

from where we share a mutual scare. Let



the artist do his work, needle

organs into place, whisper fortune—tell the one but not the other

            where these energies will lead once escorted from this place. You purchase


silence and a pack of cigarettes. Smoke.


The amaranth grows wildly inside us, burrowing its root

into our limbs,

feeding as it does on our complying—and we have been here long enough



to know to breath first last,

                       forget the sound our petals make when they ready themselves
    
for dying,



             the garden growing with parasite. The last time you will look at a woman and

             see God. And God


                         will see and call this good, this thing you do with your body, your

                                   left hand holding an ear, a startled pain,

                                   a knife—not mine

                                   clatters to the kitchen floor. You point in my direction, moaning.




​
Our vanities flower and break.

​