Wondering When My Life Began

The instant? an infinitesimal sperm from my father?
Penetrated into my mother’s egg? on a dark ? night

The second? my little head ? was pushed and pulled
Right? Out of my mother’s teenager? womb?

Or the minute? I hit a brick? broke my forehead
And thus got my first scar? (memory?)

With? no awareness of any earlier? childhood
When? or where? did my life? begin on earth?

​
​
Yuan Changming published monographs on translation before leaving China. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver; credits include ten Pushcart nominations, the 2018 Naji Naaman's Literary (Honour) Prize, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review and 1,449 others worldwide. 

Anti-Heroin Chic is pleased to announce its 2018 nominations for the best of the net! Congratulations to our fabulous contributors.

Poetry:

What You Gave Me By Amanda DeJesus
Vigil By Emily Blair
To My Mentor By Nicole Melchionda
Recovery Rounder By Cat Hubka
Self Portrait as First Lines By Preeti Vangani 
treating a burn By sally burnette

CNF:

A New Diaspora By Sarah Elgatian
Thicker Than Water By Hannah Maerowitz 

Fiction:

Angelo Loves Tammy By Emily Hoover
Little Woman Calls This Love By Kathleen Connolly

​

Dancing Barefoot in Mississippi

Icelandic cookbooks occupy our days, seductive icy pages filled with blue clam recipes           
and photos of the woman who saved the island’s goat population from the brink of extinction,
her serious expression softened only by the sweet face of a once doomed animal she cradles      
in her arms as I dance to Led Zeppelin and you turn your attention back to Ireland with thick
mutton gravy and potato-infused pies, this is what I will eat for my next meal, this is the brogue
of my first husband, the way I followed his whiskey-ed voice into motherhood and tried for years
to understand the mysteries of marriage, this is the sound of rain, constant and understood,
here in sticky sunshine that cannot be carried north of the arctic circle, the sound of sobbing
trains, and you tell me that I tell you that I love every song, this is the sound of my wandering
feet, like ghosts of mice, the sound of floors, of days, this is what I’ve been singing all along.

​

“So Let’s Stay Here Hazy”: A Review of Sam Valdez’s Mirage


Sam Valdez lives in California and grew up in Nevada; much of the writing on her songs notes this and associates her work with the open desert. Yet the thick, heady music on her new EP Mirage is an appropriate soundscape for taking long walks through the humid woods at dusk while you let Valdez’s meditations linger in the heavy air with your own. Since Mirage was released on June 29, I’ve been doing just that.

Valdez’s work, dubbed “shoegaze meets Americana” by Consequence of Sound,  is often compared to Lana Del Rey, Mazzy Star, and Angel Olson; she said in an interview that “Angel Olsen was the first artist I got into that had this low, broad vocal quality that made me feel more comfortable to sing in my natural deeper tone of voice.” However, Valdez’s training as a classical violinist also lends a unique intricacy to her music, which is simultaneously gritty and carefully-wrought, intimate yet coolly balanced.

As a broody type, I’m particularly drawn to the paradox of self-destruction and self-reflection in these songs, the lyrics that are hypnotic and tantalizing, that snake themselves around you. I also love the fact that, though Valdez’s lyrics explore relationships with other people, they are self-centered, and I mean that as a compliment. Relationships are catalysts for introspection.
 
In the first single off the EP, “It’s Alright,” she sings: “I know if I go back to you I’ll die. You’ve been gone for months, but you’re burning my mind…Now there’s only dirt where a garden was/love grew so fast just to die so young/so you left me sleeping in my party clothes/keeping with this feeling before I let go.” “Farther Away” opens with a line I wish I had written in a poem: “You’re like a dream I had once, then you got drunk and drove off.”  Later in the song, Valdez sings she’s “filling this space by wanting more/living in this fog and all of my branches are breaking off.” In “Other Side,” she’s “been digging up everyone else’s grave just to look for you…so let’s stay here hazy…it’s better than knowing the truth.” Meanwhile, “Carnival,” which begins with a vintage-feeling vinyl crackle, navigates similar territory more wryly with its refrain: “You’re a shitty prize at a carnival/I want you back but I don’t know why….”
 
Valdez cites Sylvia Plath as an influence, and certainly Plath’s ghost swirls through the luscious Sturm und Drang in the songs mentioned above. I’m also very intrigued by the solipsistic mood of Valdez’s songs, especially “Funeral;” to me it recalls Plath’s poems “Mad Girl’s Love Song” (“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead/I think I made you up inside my head”) and “Soliloquy of the Solipsist.” Solipsism, or the idea that the only thing that can be proven is the existence of one’s own mind or self, probably sounds negative to most; however in “Funeral” it’s a coping mechanism, solipsism as self-defense, mind over matter, and something, for better or for worse, I very much relate to.
 
“Funeral” confronts death by dealing with how the one left behind processes the loss; the song repeatedly begs the deceased to “just stay alive in mind.” This idea that the dead will live as long as she “[makes them] up inside her head” is interwoven with grieving spread over time (“At your parents’ house your picture’s in the kitchen/I feel like throwing up every single Christmas”) and the chance for short-term comfort in the form of a one-night stand: “Summer heat is hot but I don’t want to show my legs/it could make for a fun night if I go and sleep with him.” But she opts to not sleep with him perhaps because it might lead to more emotional investment; as she sings in my favorite lines from the EP, “I’m loyal to my solitude and I don’t want to lose it/and all my pretty plants would die just waiting for some music.” It’s tender, moody, beautiful, and weird, a perfect sonic backdrop for being alone but not lonely and perhaps for even cherishing your loneliness.


​Keep up with Sam Valdez via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Listen to Other Side from Mirage below.
​

​

Jessie Janeshek's second full-length book of poetry is The Shaky Phase (Stalking Horse Press, 2017). Her chapbooks are Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press, 2016), Rah-Rah Nostalgia (dancing girl press, 2016), Supernoir (Grey Book Press, 2017), Auto-Harlow (Shirt Pocket Press, 2018), and Hardscape (Reality Beach, forthcoming). Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010) is her first full-length collection. Read more at jessiejaneshek.net. 

​Yellow
 
Three, almost – a couple months shy
eager & watching, always watching
repeating & giving everything
a number. My nephew can count to twenty
in English & knows all his colors;
his alphabet holds twenty-six letters
but like him, it’s growing. He’ll learn how
the r sometimes rolls – already prefers how
the l sounds like y when doubled.
You should hear him say yellow
in English, realizing Spanish
is already dancing on his tongue.
You should hear him say amarillo
from his white boy mouth, & will.
He’s learning this, loving this
learning how to speak to the neighbors
we’re afraid to tell him are in cages.

​

​​Still life with your arm


Snapshot is I'm asleep in you
Drapery mixed in pounds of body
Morning stupid, uninvited, marches
In--- 

Today! It's today! 
Go the fuck away!!!

We say, curl like fiddle heads 
Below each other's necks, 

look you say, 
at the way I've become you
Look I say, 
shut up and just hold me

Sleeping, you remind me of Link
In Zelda, a real life elf but a little 
more manly
Emboldened by my love 
plus a renegade
Hanglider, zooming around the Glen
Bashing Bokoblins, knight slay 
Calamity Gannon.

I drape your arm across 
my long breasts
A study in weighted 
human pheremones
And muscles. I won't count 
the hairs 
Upon it, that'd be nuts, 
but prepare to 
Compare it to every 
single vegetable I know

Imagining the taste, the fiber, 
antioxidants
And which wine I might 
pair your skin to
I imagine devouring you
​


Bio: Elisabeth Horan is an imperfect creature from Vermont doing her best to make the world a little bit better with her words. She is an advocate for animals, children and those suffering alone and in pain - especially those ostracized by disability and mental illness. She has work published and forthcoming at Occulum, Former Cactus, Moonchild Magazine, Hedgehog Poetry and Ginger Collect. Her column "Arsenic Hour" is live at TERSE. Journal. Find her on Twitter @ehoranpoet

The Ghost

Breathing in, breathing out, standing still,
I stare at the body, the stranger in front.
I analyse each detail, every single fine inch,
Like staring into the eyes of a ghost, I flinch.

Those wide eyes are tired, hooded and heavy,
Lips so cracked and pale, the reaper would levy.
Hair untamed, nails brittle, vulgar appearance.
All so familiar, tightly shrouded with adherence.

I place my hand forward, to touch the tainted skin,
Blocked by a barrier, I feel my patience wearing thin.
Could it be, I cannot believe, the ghost in front that I see,
Is but a glaring reflection in a dusted mirror, this is me.

​

Charlotte Underwood is a 22-year-old from Norfolk, UK. With a passion for helping others and writing, she has found love in words and expression of them.

​Hawthorn

It was only one night, you said  
with a pat on the back
which felt like a punch
from behind as I turned
from the sunset and saw
the falling leaves stained
by the first rust kiss of Autumn.




In Sickness and In Guilt

When it looked like you were going to be ill,
as in
doctor/hospital/dead/ kind of ill,
I thought of myself, and how
like your cells,
I was failing you
devouring you from the inside
until there’s nothing left
but fear and regret.
 
I thought of how I’ve wronged you,
used your hope
against you, lied -  
but never cheated,
and hurt you so.
Re-affirming,
as you do on occasion
that you’d be better off
without me, you accused
that it was the easy way out
you said that
 we’d get better
and I resented that, and you.
 
And when you got your results
I decided there and then,
that we both needed
a fucking hit.

​

Andrew Velzian is a Scotsman currently living in Vietnam. He is sub prose editor at Under The Fable magazine and has poetry and short fiction published both online and in print.