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.
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7/7/2018 0 Comments Best of the Net NominationsAnti-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 Therapy with a Wine Bottle The cork in me plugs throat from bowel, an axis stitching my atoms and mending my pith. This glass is cracked dulling stable – glint to make nations steady with discolor. There is stoppage without me, convulsion is my disease. I make bitterness from the light, make water out of mouths, my mind a wine-stained blouse. Today I’d kill to be repaired – David Bankson lives in Texas. He was finalist in the 2017 Concīs Pith of Prose and Poem, and his works can be found in concis, (b)oink, Thank You for Swallowing, Artifact Nouveau, Riggwelter Press, Five 2 One Magazine, etc. 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. Beth Gordon is a writer who has been landlocked in St. Louis, Missouri for 16 years but dreams of oceans, daily. Her work has recently appeared in Into the Void, Quail Bell,Calamus Journal, DecomP, Five:2:One, Barzakh, and others. She can be found on Twitter @bethgordonpoet. “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.
7/4/2018 1 Comment Yellow By Rachel NixYellow 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. Rachel Nix is an editor for cahoodaloodaling, Hobo Camp Review and Screen Door Review. Her own work has appeared in L'Éphémère Review, Occulum, and Rogue Agent. She resides in Northwest Alabama, where pine trees outnumber people rather nicely, and can be followed at @rachelnix_poet on Twitter. 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 7/2/2018 0 Comments Poetry By Charlotte UnderwoodThe 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. 7/1/2018 3 Comments Poetry By Andrew VelzianHawthorn 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. |
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