SF&D Winter 2013 | [FootNotes]

SF&D | Short, Fast, and Deadly Winter 2013 | [FootNotes]

ISSN (print) | 2163-0712 ISSN (online) | 2163-0704 Copyright Š 2012 by Individual Authors | All Rights Reserved

Joseph A. W. Quintela | Editor Parker Tettleton | Editor Chris Vola | Chapbook Reviewer

Published by Deadly Chaps Press www.deadlychaps.com www.shortfastanddeadly.com DCsf&d2013| 1

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iv | CONCEPT [FootNotes] Joseph A.W. Quintela | FootNote // Maxwell Clark | Footnote to E. Levinas’ “Totality and Infinity” // Emily Gaudette | Footnotes to an Excerpt from John Gardner's “Grendel” // Emily Gaudette | Statistics // David Tomaloff | th th Bruises/Insect Exchange // Steven Minchin |cf. Upright on 5 ’s 9 Portfolio // Steven Minchin |Blindside Realtors pr. Special Floors & Design // Steven Minchin | fr. Short One Off Term // Greg Johnson | The Fallacy xv | Featuring Chaun Webster| Questions // Chaun Webster| Book Cover // Chaun Webster| Book Excerpt with FootNotes (1-4) xxiii | Featuring Kristina Marie Darling| Questions // Kristina Marie Darling| Book Cover // Kristina Marie Darling| Footnotes to a History of the Corsage // Kristina Marie Darling | Footnotes to a History of the Chandelier xxxiii | Word Art Aliza Tucker | Homage (to Ted Leo) xxxv | Prose Sarah Kendall | How to Tolerate the Dawn // Erin Entrada Kelly | She Had

the Spirit of a Hummingbird // Kelsie Hahn | Snorkeling // Kelsie Hahn | The Fate of Macaroni // Kelsie Hahn | In Which I Find a Mermaid // Kathryn Kulpa | Pinhole // Amber Burke | Every Billboard Says // Kevin Tosca | In the Bathroom of a Local Café // Kevin Tosca | In Sickness and In Health // Refe Tuma | Bedtime // Marie Abate | The Cigarette Fox // Amanda Deo | Divine Eros // Adam Purple | The Last Train Out of Paris // Jesse Bradley | For Your Safety xlx | Poems Dan Simmons | Hips // Dan Simmons | Selecting a Reader (after Ted Kooser) // Dan Simmons | Thank God for Dentists // Sara Clancy | thunderhead // Sara Clancy | cinquain for the monsoon // Micah Cavaleri | 2-Inch Utterances (1-5) lxi | Views Joseph A. W. Quintela | reView of Chaun Webster’s NAT

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Parker Tettleton | A Note from Our New Editor

Dear Reader, It’s a pleasure to work alongside Joseph A.W. Quintela – it just is. It’s a pleasure to write & receive words in their own code, to know how it feels on both sides of the submission fence. I’m so very proud of the work contained in the Winter 2013 edition of Short, Fast, & Deadly. I’d like to thank all who in any way support the continually evolving realization of this journal & press – now go bleed your eyes out.

Parker Tettleton Co-Editor Winter 2013

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C

oncept

[FootNotes] Joseph A.W. Quintela | FootNote // Maxwell Clark | Footnote to E. Levinas’ “Totality and Infinity” // Emily Gaudette | Footnotes to an Excerpt from John Gardner's “Grendel” // Emily Gaudette | Statistics // David Tomaloff | Bruises/Insect Exchange // Steven Minchin |cf.

Upright on 5th’s 9th Portfolio // Steven Minchin |Blindside Realtors pr.

Special Floors & Design // Steven Minchin | fr. Short One Off Term // Greg Johnson | The Fallacy

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Joseph A.W. Quintela (Editor’s Contribution)| FootNote

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Maxwell Clark | Footnote to E. Levinas’ “Totality and Infinity”

“The total refusal of the other, the will preferring death to servitude, annihilating its own existence in order to cut short every relation with the exterior, cannot prevent this work, which does not express him, from which he absents himself (for it is not a word), from being entered into an alien reckoning, which it defies, but recognizes precisely in its supreme courage. By its work the sovereign and self-enclosed will confirms the foreign will it means to ignore, and finds itself “made game of” by the Other. (...) In its effort to escape the Other in dying, it recognizes the other. The suicide to which it resolves itself in order to escape servitude is inseparable from the pain of “losing,” whereas this death should have shown the absurdity of every game.”1

_________________________ 1

E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity. [Footnotes imply an appropriation of the otherwise exterior article of text within the interiority of another article of text. The peripheral location within this articulated interiority, at the “foot” of the page, is the insufficient mark of the footnotes’ proper exteriority. But ‘proper’ is a difficult usage herein because, within many current forms of state powers and their jurisdiction, the compromised exteriority of another article within the footnote apparatus, or rubric, is one of the few legal representations, i.e. proper,

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ways of explicitly acknowledging the influence of others on authored article. Making the Maxwell Clark | Footnote to E. Levinas’ “Totality and Infinity” (cont.)

_________________________ influence of others, of exteriority, of the implicit, explicit—or interior to the influenced article of text—implies an aporetic mode, of course, but nonetheless a real and viable, indeed everyday, behavior. (Suggesting a permanent slippage between logic and labor? Insofar as any such twofold construction as that of “logic and labor” is forever, and already herein by its conjunction-dependent grammatical formulation, a juxtaposed sequence, yes, the slippage is innate to its form—but not “always-already”, insofar form is, at least in one American modernist poetic tradition—that of R. Creeley, “an extension of content”. Content, i.e. the implicit exteriority of others, or the otherwise, to the— multiplicitous, also infinite—formalization/formation of the interiority of a textual article.) There is no triumph over the idea of content, not even in suicide, because it is not an idea, it is an influence. An influence whose translation is ultimately “pre-original”; in the Levinasian lexis. See also: E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being; E. Levinas, Time and the Other; J.

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Derrida, On Touching: On Jean-Luc Nancy; M. Buber, I and Thou; W. F. Flames, Flockaveli. –MC]

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Emily Gaudette | Footnotes to an Excerpt from John Gardner's “Grendel”

“I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears1. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. 2 All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back 3. I create the whole universe, blink by blink.4”

_________________________ 1

My mother becomes a born-again Christian the day I turn seven.

I come home after her public baptism and cry in my room because I can’t get God to talk to me.

3 I tell her at 16 that I have sexual feelings for a girl. She says I am misinterpreting something.

4 Here I am at my mother’s funeral. She’s waiting behind the pews for my eulogy to begin. My mouth opens. She called me last night to wish me luck.

2

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Emily Gaudette | Statistics (Footnotes to an Excerpt from Sara Teasdale’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground1 and swallows circling2 in their shimmering sound3 […]

And not one will know of the war, not one will care when it is done.4

_________________________ 1

It is 61 degrees in Boston today.

I ate my lunch looking at the Charles River, talking on the phone with my Dad. I told him I got a library card, and he asked if I am coming to my brother’s bar mitzvah.

3 My brother Eli hates his Torah portion about counting livestock.

4 Of the 142 Israeli children killed in conflict since 1987, B’tselem estimates that 5 of these occurred in 2012.

2

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David Tomaloff | Bruises/Insect Exchange (Footnotes to an Excerpt from Jane Hirshfield’s “Bruises”)

You who knew yourself kissed1 by the bite of the ant,2 you who were kissed by the bite of the spider.3 Now kissed by this.4

______________________________ 1

dissolving to the extent of insect exchange. a. motor impairment; b. the process of degradation c. as experienced through a filtered or indefinite pitch.

2

medicinal rituals; sequenced exploration, a. capable of transmitting signals through touch.

3

an emphasis on legs & fangs. a. the ability to avoid detection by prey through visual or auditory camouflage.

4

petals exhibiting curling, a. decomposing into simpler matter; b. a children’s game known as taphonomy

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Steven Minchin |cf. Upright on 5th’s 9th Portfolio

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Steven Minchin |Blindside Realtors pr. Special Floors & Design

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Steven Minchin |fr. Short One Off Term

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Greg Johnson | The Fallacy (Footnotes to the Author’s Own Work)

On the top of the pile of mail was a leaflet with faces of The Missing. It showed a woman and a girl1 who was aged by computer to appear as she would now, four years later. Someone2, maybe the company who sends these leaflets, had not given up hope. He noticed they had the same last name, and Levi coddled himself with the thought these two were mother3 and daughter, and that somehow this kidnapping was a reunion, and they were somewhere happy and missing only to someone who had no business finding them; another rationalization for the wicked world. Tire coupons were printed on the leaflet's back.

_________________________ 1

Ann drinks two fingers of milk, skim is not sweet but with it she’s Juliet, vial in hand.

2 Ann’s aunt and uncle wanted a child, and there it was. A Godsend. They even had a new name picked out for her.

3 The great fallacy is that the mother creates the daughter, but there is no mother without the daughter, they create each other.

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F

eaturing

Chaun Webster| Questions // Chaun Webster| Book Cover // Chaun Webster| Book Excerpt with FootNotes (1-4)

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Chaun Webster| Questions Who? My name is Chaun Webster and I am a Poet, Publisher and Graphic Designer in no particular order. I write out of a fusion of traditions.

There is the Black Arts Movement from which I first found my love of poetry and publishing that honored my African heritage. It was the Black Arts Movement that inspired me to create Free Poet's Press. Then there is the concrete poetry tradition out of which I found a way to further transgress the politics of language, visual representation and have my own attempt at a textual materiality.

What? because when we say NAT it be writ large, was my attempt to bring a wrecking ball to the book object using legend, the narrative of Nat Turner, and my own personal narrative as a filter. Considering the fractured nature of Turner's own story, from whom we get brief fragments of historical narrative, I found the method fitting. Nat Turner has always fascinated me, along with the tradition of trickster tales, and what is Turner if not the trickster par excellence. Seeing as how coming to literacy were important aspects of both Turner's and my narrative writing/designing it as vizpo biomyth came in a disturbing and natural way.

When?

This project took me a year to complete and was one I had to break from and revisit several times within that year. Researching Turner and the African cosmology he interpreted the Judeo-Christian tradition through made the project feel sacred in a sense and at times exhausting. It took me quite awhile to arrive at something that I saw as open enough to

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evolve. I didn't want to create a static object but something, living, and robust, a map of sorts.

Where?

The story centers around Bas who is also Turner, who is also Harriet Tubman and Assata Shakur. It folds both characters and time in a way to not give special significance to the act of one "great" being that is so different or disconnected from the rest. Spatially as well the story folds between the scene in South Hampton post rebellion where we find Turner in hiding for two months and Minneapolis, my home town.

Why? I found this story important in light of the nearly conspiratorial silence that remains about Nat Turner. That W.E.B. Dubois himself found Nat Turner so fascinating he was going to write a biography on the subject but was denied the request by his publisher. Turner's absence seems as much a part of American myth-making as the looming presence of who Abraham Lincoln is suspiciously "made" to be in the American story.

This to me seemed to be the why, to address the absences, and presences with a set of my own visual poetic absences and presences.

This with the hope that questions I intended and did not intend would be disturbed from its pages.

//“because when we say NAT it be writ large” by Chaun Webster will be published in May

by Free Poet’s Press (www.freepoetspress.com)//

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Chaun Webster| Book Cover

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Chaun Webster| Book Excerpt with FootNotes (1)

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Chaun Webster| Book Excerpt with FootNotes (2)

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Chaun Webster| Book Excerpt with FootNotes (3)

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Chaun Webster| Book Excerpt with FootNotes (4)

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F

eaturing

Kristina Marie Darling| Questions // Kristina Marie Darling| Book Cover // Kristina Marie Darling| Footnotes to a History of the Corsage // Kristina Marie Darling | Footnotes to a History of the Chandelier

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Kristina Marie Darling| Questions Who? Me, Hilda Doolittle, Sigmund Freud, and Jared Michael Wahlgren's fabulous publishing company, Gold Wake Press.

What?

A poetry collection called The Body is a Little Gilded Cage, which is available from Gold Wake Press. The book, loosely based on H.D.'s experience as a patient of Sigmund Freud, culls text and images from her letters and personal papers. The end result is a series of collages, footnotes, glossaries, and erasures that attempt to evoke the fin de siècle, its definitions of femininity, and the cultural assumptions about madness that surfaced during that time period.

When?

The book was written in late 2012, when I rediscovered H.D.'s fascinating biography, poems, and correspondences while working on a masters' thesis. The images, text, and range of literary forms found within H.D.'s work helped me say things that I otherwise would never have otherwise been able to articulate. Because this was a time of intense grief and disappointment during my personal life, I was so grateful to have found a vocabulary to work with.

Where?

The book was written at Yaddo and at the Vermont Studio Center, where I received so much great feedback on my work, not only from other poets, but from visual artists, sculptors, and musicians as well.

Thank you Josh Atlas, Carl Adamshick, and Kara Candito!

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Why? I hope that the book brings more people to H.D.'s writing. Although everyone reads her contemporaries - Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, for example - H.D. is often overlooked. In my opinion, she's as marginalized as she is brilliant.

How? With a phonograph, some lilies, and a yellow dress.

//“The Body is a Little Gilded Cage� by Kristina Marie Darling is available from Gold Wake Press (http://goldwakepress.com)//

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Kristina Marie Darling| Book Cover

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Kristina Marie Darling| Footnotes to a History of the Corsage

______________________________ 1. Two of the darkest lilies, which he fastened at the shoulder of her green silk dress.

2. On nights like this the dance hall groaned with their erratic foxtrot. A phonograph spinning beneath dim chandeliers.

3. "I had wanted to transcend the ordinary, with its brick houses and gardens of white crocuses. Now the most bourgeois ribbons gathered at my wrist."

4. Courtship.

1. The act, period, or art of seeking love with the intent to marry. †2. A set of inherited conventions or customs. ‥3. The solicitation of praise, favors, etc.

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Kristina Marie Darling| Footnotes to a History of the Corsage (cont.)

______________________________ 5. The mural depicts her attempt to maintain a noctuary, detailing his adulation of her finer points. Despite numerous scholarly articles devoted to the work's inscription, art historians have not yet discovered the fate of her milky-eyed beloved.

6. She slipped a flower in his coat pocket to preserve the ritual, its delicate structure. But before long the music stopped. The phonograph still spinning beneath its luminous needle.

7. The film (c. 1933) follows a woman through a series of broken engagements.

Although several attempts have been made to differentiate between the four men, the problem seems intrinsic to her own psychology.

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Kristina Marie Darling| Footnotes to a History of the Corsage (cont.)

______________________________ 8. Melancholia. A state of mourning for the lost object.

9. "It was then I remembered the dance hall, his ominous presentation of the corsage. A manicured garden held by the most intricate clasp."

10. When she unpinned the lilies, a quiet upheaval. The most startling numbness in each of her fingertips.

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Kristina Marie Darling| Footnotes to a History of the Chandelier

______________________________ 1. Each candle was affixed to an iron stake, which rose from the chandelier's intricately welded crown.

2. She lit the wicks when the shades were drawn. Their light stuttering into the hall's beveled mirrors.

3. "Even my dreams unfurled in the most Neoclassical style. Within each room, a gilt cornice framing the portentous chandelier.

In every champagne glass the most brutal display of light."

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Kristina Marie Darling| Footnotes to a History of the Chandelier (cont.)

______________________________ 4. Luminous. †1. Radiating or reflecting illumination.

2. Intellectually revelatory or enlightening.

3. The quality of being intelligible.

5. A lost chapter of the manuscript, in which she realizes the otherworldly nature of her beloved. This intricate Faustian motif extends well into the novel's denouement and its prose diagrams of the evil city.

6. Every house in the province contained a hidden staircase, which was lit by the most exotic chandelier. At night she would lie on her back and count the endless tiers of Bohemian crystal. The ominous smoldering of the candles.

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Kristina Marie Darling| Footnotes to a History of the Chandelier (cont.)

______________________________ 7. Malcontreuse. Translated from the French as star-crossed.

8. After the fire, she remembered the dance hall. Its beveled mirror and perfect rows of white tables.

9. "I had wanted to preserve the strange white light that shone that evening. Now the most barren ashes scattered on the lawn."

10. Meaning, in this case, to discover or unearth.

11. An early bildungsroman, in which the heroine retained an unusual fascination with fire. Her coming of age involved a cremation of childhood mementos. For a more detailed list, see Appendix B.

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W Aliza Tucker | Homage (to Ted Leo)

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ord Art

Aliza Tucker | Homage (to Ted Leo)

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P

rose

Sarah Kendall | How to Tolerate the Dawn // Erin Entrada Kelly | She Had the Spirit of a Hummingbird // Kelsie Hahn | Snorkeling // Kelsie Hahn | The Fate of Macaroni // Kelsie Hahn | In Which I Find a Mermaid // Kathryn Kulpa | Pinhole // Amber Burke | Every Billboard Says // Kevin Tosca | In the Bathroom of a Local CafĂŠ // Kevin Tosca | In Sickness and In Health // Refe Tuma | Bedtime // Marie Abate | The Cigarette Fox // Amanda Deo | Divine Eros // Adam Purple | The Last Train Out of Paris // Jesse Bradley | For Your Safety

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Sarah Kendall | How to Tolerate the Dawn

Reason with her gently. Buy the good sheets with infinity thread count.

If she persists, suggest bargains, send for reinforcements. Nudge the sleeping bear beside you. He’ll join in negotiations. If she still won’t yield, then mourn her arrival. Stretch like cats one last time together.

Yawn and praise the night, the dreams that cradled you safely, far from her reach.

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Erin Entrada Kelly | She Had the Spirit of a Hummingbird

She had the spirit of a hummingbird – sharpened direction and none at all. I built a cage of sea glass and ivory so she could find her way. The clasp was shaped from melted gold and inside I placed a pillow of perfect white feathers. I laid there. Waited. Said, I built something for you.

She peered inside. Her eyes, curious and shining. She peered, but did not come in. I heard the hinges creak and moan as she closed the door in front of her. Then I heard the gentle drumming of her wings and I was alone, on my pillow.

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Kelsie Hahn | Snorkeling

I thought you pried and lifted the starfish from the reef to show it to me, but then you twisted it around so the bigger fish would see it and swarm it to chunks and then I threw up, but that only brought more fish.

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Kelsie Hahn | The Fate of Macaroni

When your dad dies and your dad is the president, you cry because you think they will take away your pony and your house and your friends and your room and your presents from people with accents and mornings wearing frilly dresses at the giant table and afternoons on sailboats and evenings with pretty books, but then it turns out you get to keep the pony.

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Kelsie Hahn | In Which I Find a Mermaid

When I realize the basking form on the shore is a manatee, its back cross-hatched by propeller blades, its skin pale, one flipper half-off and bloodless now, I motor and motor and motor away.

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Kathryn Kulpa | Pinhole

Because his mother is Catholic and he may be too, subliminally. Because nothing binds like a double helix. Because angry condom factory workers do it anyway, to one in every thousand: you read that somewhere.

Because accidents will happen. Because you've never had anyone or anything that was truly yours and had to love you. Because that includes him.

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Amber Burke | Every Billboard Says

Believe us, buy this, eat this, drink this, watch this, read this, wear this, drive this, call us, come here, forget death. Except those billboards for funeral monuments, which, on our way out of the city, hit us like stones falling from the sky.

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Kevin Tosca | In the Bathroom of a Local CafĂŠ

Two women, one pregnant, one wearing red shoes, walk into a one toilet unisex bathroom together. One pees, then wipes. The other pees, then wipes. They talk as they urinate and wipe their vaginas; they chat as they swap positions. Then they leave, both having felt the intimacy of their behavior, which they will never need to acknowledge with words.

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Kevin Tosca | In Sickness and In Health

Yogi married a girl he didn’t love. Then he shot her in the face. When her brains exploded all over the cherry tablecloth, he laughed a sad laugh and went to look for some real cherries in the refrigerator. None of this happened, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

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Refe Tuma | Bedtime

She wanted to shake him; to scream, “Stop ruining our lives.” He latched on, snotting and spasming. He dug his nails into her stretch marks, pulling her nipple with his teeth until her breast was a party hat.

“Stop it!” she said. She pried his fingers off one by one. He threw back his head and wailed, pushing against her belly with his heels.

“Try not to yell,” her husband said from the doorway. “He’s just a baby.”

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Marie Abate | The Cigarette Fox

Tonight a fox circles my car on the highways away from you, and he reminds me of blood and fire and smoke, too much red and not enough stars, of beauty in all the wrong places, but I can’t help but follow him until he runs away without any warning, just a glowing spark in the distance, a flash in the midnight air.

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Amanda Deo | Divine Eros

I drink the funeral in a dream. I give satisfaction in voiceovers. In an instant. I hold attention with it’s better than a lie and your eyebrows are so pretty and It wasn’t only once. Every pew has a broken set of legs and a last breath and an obvious confession.

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Adam Purple | The Last Train Out of Paris

Lights out, our train skulks in darkness toward Bordeaux. Bayonne would be next, then across Spain. Safety in Lisbon. No seats, I rest on my suitcase, upended. She sleeps on my lap, a stranger propped against the glass, while the walls groan in time with the clacking wheels, the car overstuffed times four. My money, stolen; my visa, forged. And I know she has neither—if only by the way she ground against my knee.

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Jesse Bradley | For Your Safety

These left handed scissors accurately carved out our replicas, hands melding, frayed; they wait for the end of Saturday delivery, blood.

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P

oems

Dan Simmons | Hips // Dan Simmons | Selecting a Reader (after Ted Kooser) // Dan Simmons | Thank God for Dentists // Sara Clancy | thunderhead // Sara Clancy | cinquain for the monsoon // Micah Cavaleri | 2-Inch Utterances (1-5)

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Dan Simmons | Hips

I’m sorry your pre-pregnancy jeans won’t fit over your post-pregnancy hips, but not for my imagination sliding around and around as you wiggle.

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Dan Simmons | Selecting a Reader (after Ted Kooser)

She is as naked as I am and passionate about "show, don't tell."

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Dan Simmons | Thank God for Dentists

the sons of bitches.

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Sara Clancy | thunderhead

afternoon's pardon bears down on the desert like grandmother's iron

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Sara Clancy | cinquain for the monsoon

water like sepia paints vertical halos across the arroyo -- solace, ozone

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Micah Cavaleri | 2-Inch Utterances (1)

a field of white shoes is a field, a friend. A field is a physical structure. A friend is addressed. a field of white shoes in the grass.

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Micah Cavaleri | 2-Inch Utterances (2)

a harmony of bees and pikas in a grass of wild flowers and columbines is a human study of release of cloud, sky, will

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Micah Cavaleri | 2-Inch Utterances (3)

a milk bottle of grace[,/of] vastly different life experiences converge to a point momentarily

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Micah Cavaleri | 2-Inch Utterances (4)

the anthropologie of flowers is a simple girl scratching her nose

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Micah Cavaleri | 2-Inch Utterances (5)

here in three lines I write my perfect fall where a small sign breathes my only calm

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V

iews

Joseph A. W. Quintela | (re)View of Chaun Webster’s NAT: NAT in NAT’s Own Words

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Joseph A. W. Quintela | (re)View of Chaun Webster’s NAT: NAT in NAT’s Own Words

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