KITH
02
found poetry SWORD & KETTLE PRESS
KITH 02
found poetry
KITH 02
found poetry FEATURING DANIEL GALEF, R.L. BLACK, SUSANNAH BETTS, & PJ CARMICHAEL
SWORD & KETTLE PRESS
Š 2017 Sword & Kettle Press. Authors retain the rights to their work. Headings set in Lora, designed by Olga Karpushina. Text set in Source Sans Pro, designed by Paul D. Hunt. Cover photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash. Second digital edition. The poems in this issue were found in blog posts, search engine results, song lyrics, and printed pages. Magical poetry can be found in the most ordinary places. Special thanks to Mark & Fran Allen, and everyone who supports Sword & Kettle Press. Sword & Kettle Press Kayla Allen, Editor-in-Chief Zahan Mehta, Contributing Editor swordandkettlepress.com
THE SOLIPSISTIC OUROBOROS Daniel Galef Experiments have shown that snakes will knot themselves in a weightless environment. After initial thrashing, the researchers observed, the snakes became quiet upon self-embrace — to put it another way, they calmed down once they’d tied the knot and (literally) gotten a grip on themselves. To you or me this might sound like a good thing. Not to the scientists, who thought it suggests a failure to distinguish self from non-self. How dare you compose yourselves, you silly reptiles — don’t you know the situation calls for existential dread?
Source: Article answering whether snakes can tie themselves in knots. <http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3186/can-a-snake-tie-itself-into-aknot-it-can-t-get-out-of>
FAÃ&#x2021;ADE R.L. Black
Source: Shortcut to a Miracle by Michael C. Rann & Elizabeth Rann Arrott.
DARK OCEAN PJ Carmichael I. Most people waste their youth wishing they were dead. There's something you should know: I could have died with you and Boston is the reason I'm feeling so blue. (I only wanted to be loved; I only wanted to be in love.) II. And then waste the rest of their lives wishing they were young again. When your “golden days” are “that was just a phase…” III. But I will never end up like that. (In this condition I write extraordinary love poems, most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.) IV. Wishing I was young instead of dead.
Sources: Dominic Owen Mallary, Wesley Eisold, Billy Collins.
AUTO-BIOGRAPHY Susannah Betts I am a retelling of the Book of Susannah set in rural Tennessee, an opera containing some mature themes. I am American folk. Appalled that His first sight of her is when she is injured. I am the Partner of Troy, a white female shocked to hear a shot ring out, innocently bathing, nude, in a creek on my family property, perhaps the most remarkable of this century, unique and made by hand using traditional construction methods. A recasting of the apocryphal story of Susannah and the Elders: I am vindicated when the Elders give conflicting reports of where they witnessed my alleged impropriety. I am already a fallen angel, an agent of the Devil, illiterate, and why I have a Bible is a mystery. I am certain I am doing the right thing pregnant with rural America, in the last stage of labor. I am Song and Girl and every reason why the dog won’t dance, anymore. I am listed as a wife and true to life. Susannah is returning to Seattle.
Source: googlism.com search for “Susannah.”
NEW DAY R.L. Black
Source: Shortcut to a Miracle by Michael C. Rann & Elizabeth Rann Arrott.
LONG-NECKED ELIJAH Daniel Galef This gives me the same kind of feeling I got on a cold night when I was a little kid and my parents were roused to a frenzied search around the house to find that there was a, “draft coming in the front door!” Me... Not understanding the word ‘draft,’ was sadly looking to the front door and all out the windows up and down the street for the giraffe... Imagine my disappointment!
Source: Blog post on the anticlimax of seeing a meteor shower. http://riseindustries.org/arkv/556
FROM ASHES PJ Carmichael The saddest songs make sense to me. (There’s a bluebird in my heart.) To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. (I shed more tears than God could ever have required.) “Love will get you through times of no sex better than sex will get you through times of no love.” We're real poets, man.
Sources: Wesley Eisold, Charles Bukowski, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud.
AUTHORS Susannah Betts is originally from Bowie, MD, but is beginning graduate school at the University of Rochester in New York this fall. She has been previously published in Crab Fat Literary Magazine, Vagabond City Lit, Five2One Magazine, and The Greenblotter, and is currently the fiction editor at the online feminist literary magazine The Fem. R.L. Black (@rlblackauthor, rlblackauthor.tumblr.com) is the editor-in-chief of UnbrokenJournal and UnlostJournal and her own writing has been published in journals and anthologies across the web and in print. PJ Carmichael (@pjcarmichael, pjcarmichael.tumblr.com) is a writer, philosopher, romantic, and existentialist from Wakefield, Massachusetts. He is editor of the literary and arts zine High Tension. Daniel W. Galef (@DanielGalef) has published found poetry in Verbatim, The Found Poetry Review, and Word Ways. He writes from the five corners of the globe (yes, there's a fifth one that they don't tell just anybody about).