PULP Staff Zine 1 by Finnialla

Editors Note

I’m so proud of the staff at PULP! We are making history here. Let’s raise a glass, smash some windows, and eat the ultra rich .

Staff

Will - Poetry Writer

Devon Webb - Poetry Writer/Editor

Samruddhi Patil - Poetry Writer

Yasha - Prose Writer

S.G. Mallett - Prose Writer

Samantha Barrow - Prose Writer

Kayla Shawn - Social Media Manager/

Prose Writer

Dimitri - Editor/Photographer

Finnialla - Editor in Chief/Poetry Writer

Small Town - Dimitri (Photo Collection)

present reverie - Will Meyers

STARING AT BOYS ON BALCONIES, WET FOR LITERATURE - Devon Webb

Mother - Samruddhi Patil

Grocery Delivery on a Saturday Morning -Yasha

Avidity - Samantha Barrow

Understudies - S.G. Mallett

Sad Boy Walk, Silence - Kayla Shawn

paradise of the west coast, attention whore -

Finnialla Beauty Eater - Dimitri (Photo Collection)

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED

WET FOR LITERATURE was previously published in The Friday Poem (UK)

paradise on the west coast and attention whore were previously published in Outlander Magazine

presentreverie

Will Meyers

To the parts of me that linger: please do not weigh yourself against the scales of what was done to us, keeping on par with a world we should not abide.

Adorn us with aqua and lazulis, for a battle well fought is yet to be won. But we existed through hell, retracing our steps when humanity left your words, awaiting my echo.

See my willows abound in your heart, and do not hate what you have made our time. And do not empty drain your love for our sake, covet it for mine

Go and powder our lonely child with love, allow them space to rest, and sing sweet lullabies to soothe their tired heart, for I know that’s who we still are.

Do not let your restless spirit go to waste from your outline to my touch, I beg of you.

Sing an ode to the lovely light igniting your heart, blazing trail to a golden dawn

STARINGATBOYSON BALCONIES

Devon Webb

Here I am again trying to slip inside circles I don’t fit in, too small & too uncomfortable to stand out in a crowd. How funny, that this balcony used to be my whole world. That I could actually make myself heard amid all this swirling noise. How foolish to pretend that time hasn’t passed & I’m not growing old, that I’m not being forgotten.

What an embarrassment that I gave them so many years of my life, even when they tore the days from those years like wolves. When they gorged themselves on my name. I come back to this city & it’s sick of me & vice versa. Stuck in a cycle like shit lovers like I was always hooked on my own delusion my own dream before dissolution.

I am staring at boys on balconies again but nobody knows me anymore. Everybody packed up & went home but I lost mine along the way. Is it nostalgia or some persistent hope that keeps me going, hanging around here blowing vape clouds into the nothing like I want the ghost of me to be tangible.

Clinging to the hug from the bartender that is just that little bit long. Drowning myself in a drink. Watching myself in the mirror & seeing my past selves. The mess they tried to make of me – I left her at the top of the stairs. Some things change but some things stay the same. Always looking up because I never stood on the stage.

WETFORLITERATURE

Devon Webb

I used to go out of my way to get laid but now I’m lying here on a man’s bed thirsting for the third instalment in the Magicians Trilogy by Lev Grossman you know like I’m not even that fussed about sex anymore I just wanna read Bookshelves make me horny

I have two in my bedroom & the patterns, the colours of the spines all lined up are so reassuringly familiar it makes me feel safe in an exciting kind of way & I lie there before them in a state of heated anticipation like oh my god I’ve still got the whole of Cloud Atlas before me & this thick Murakami & the new Paolini & all the Kerouac I’ve not yet read as my perfect Bardugo collection glitters at me like an old lovely friend & then when that’s all done I’ll go to Unity with all the money I specifically don’t spend so I can spend it at Unity & I’ll stock up on the rest of the Dune books & Nancy Mitford & those specific middle-grade books that make me feel like a kid again& the classics I haven’t got to yet

& maybe some local poetry cos I want THWUP to publish me & just whatever the fuck calls to me from the fantasy section cos it all makes me weak

IT WILL LITERALLY NEVER END

unlike men

I sit here building mental shrines to the boys I meet along the way Quentin Coldwater who everybody hates but I adore & Laurie, & Gilbert Blythe who I’m having a hard time accepting isn’t real

I have a literal framed photograph of Eddie Kaspbrak on my bedside table who reminds me that we’re all a little gay & anxious & afraid & that’s ok

Anyway point is books are brilliant because they aren’t real in the same way that they’re terrible because they aren’t real imagine if this was actually like Narnia or Fillory & we could just step inside & disappear

I guess we can in a way as I lie here entirely alone & yet profoundly unalone the time passes with breezy vivid ease & I feel so much less ADHD

Sucked in with my whole soul dripping with this bright ecstatic pleasure call me a slut for escapism anywhere but here the boys are actually into old-school romance

Here they learn from their mistakes & have character development here everything is easily constructed into dialogue & reader & character can both understand here words have power, magic essence of creation & everything makes sense in a sad happy way

Like if you just turn another page you’ll get laid but not in a quick apathetic boring modern kind of way but Daphne & Simon style, like, in a fucking meadow on a picnic blanket or some shit in a like, we’re saving the world but we’re also in love but we’ve also got very realistic emotional tension Alina & Mal kinda way like… beautifully, you know

If I have sex I want it to feel like how I feel looking at my bookshelves, sparkling spines lined up tenderly comfortable, enchanted, holding my breath & ready for whatever comes next.

Mother

Samruddhi Patil

Holding diet Coke like a can of beer

So I’ll become her one day

And tie up my hair like her

And sit like her

And fill the gaps in my eyelids

Bite down raw guavas with black pepper

And my tongue

To protect you from the world, but not myself

And tell a different story every time

It's not my fault

Memories aren't even real

And one day I’ll think like her

And not of her

Not because I tried

And tried

But because

I am here

Mother

For we are the ones who never have a choice

So I’ve become her now

Holding the diet Coke like a can of beer

GroceryDelivery onaSaturday Morning

Yasha

I pick up the phone and speak in a language I do not know. He speaks in broken English.

‘I’ll be there in about three minutes,’ he says.

‘Sounds good. I’ll be right there,’ I say.

Outside, the sun is bright and the air is still; like stealth, like robbery, like laziness. An old woman walks past with a tie-dyed scarf tied around her face. She looks at me; I can’t register her expression. Her face is too full of wrinkles, pockets of fat under her eyes, and thick, buttery creases on her cheeks. Her right hand holds onto a beige cane as though it is everything to her. Like something she never wants to part from. One day, she will.

When the van pulls up, I know it is him wearing his red uniform polo and, frankly, hideous denim capri pants. I stand against the main gate of the building, keeping the door open. I do not look at him as he jumps from the van. Does he look at me?

He opens the container and brings the grocery bags to me. His arms tense, his muscles bulge in his red shirt. His head is covered by a red visor; I cannot see his eyes.

‘All right?’ he says. Polite. Non-committal.

‘Yeah, thanks,’ I say and pull out my phone. I wait as he gets the credit card reader ready. We stand for a few seconds in an uncomfortable silence. The air is still stifling and the old woman is out of sight. I notice his shoes. Not black, but dark probably from regular use, the dirt and grime of being a grocery deliverer. He taps his feet, lazily, as he waits for the reader to start.

‘Shit thing,’ he says in a thick Russian accent. He smiles at me, briefly. He looks away before I can smile back.

It is always like this, I take too long to register things, and play catch up when it is too late. I’ll be extra nice as he leaves.

He presses a few buttons on the reader and I watch the screen go black and reboot.

‘Trouble with the thing all day. Just a moment,’ he shakes the reader about, as though he’s reprimanding it.

‘No problem. Take your time.’

‘Yeah,’ he looks at the machine with his brows furrowed, then sighs. ‘Nice day, yes?’

I look at the sky not a cloud. Pristine blue that is almost white and yellow. I hate it.

‘Yes, nice day,’ I say, and then think, ‘Have any plans for the weekend?’

He looks up at me so quickly that his visor slips in position. His eyes are a steely grey, his nose is too big for his face, and his lips are too pink and too thin. It is the first time I’ve seen his face though he has been delivering my groceries every week for about a month. And maybe it is the fact I haven’t had sex in three years, but I’d really like to fuck him.

I think of a possibility where I am bold and I make innuendos. I would ask for his help with the oh-so-heavy grocery bags. We’d take the elevator, stay too close in the humidity of the enclosure. I would feel the rhythm of his heart, hear the whoosh of his breathing, even smell the musk of his breath, the manliness of his sweat. He would look at me unsure, but ready for a gamble. He wouldn’t see the matted hair, the acne spots on my chin, the white of dandruff, the creases of my thrifted shirt he’d only see a woman he wants to have sex with.

By the time we’d reach my door, we both would know what was about to happen. We’d have to make it quick. He has got to be back at work, and he’d already be thinking of excuses to make to his boss. His van broke down or something. In the moment, it wouldn’t matter.

I’d unlock the door and step in. Maybe for a moment, he’ll hesitate. He’ll consider the stakes, and then he’ll think, ‘Fuck it.’

The kiss will be urgent, we’re both sweaty from the white hot sun, our bodies are sticky, and so compatible. I’d lead him to the bed and he’ll be so good in it. Afterwards, he’ll move to the other room to have a quick word with his manager. He’s sick and can’t finish the rest of the job. His manager will be understanding and leave him to be with me all day.

We’ll stay in bed and talk. It would be too much effort to peel ourselves off each other, so we’ll choose the path of least resistance. He’ll tell me about his job, I’ll ask about his family, he’ll tell me about his dead sister. I’ll only be half-listening to him speak. All my focus will be on his fluttering eyelashes. His eyes are so grey, I’ll forget myself in them.

He wouldn’t ask me any questions, or the ones he might will be futile, non-committal. But it wouldn’t matter to me, I’ll just be happy to have someone else in bed with me. I had no idea late July could get so cold.

Once we both run out of words, we’ll resign ourselves to just looking at one another.

There isn’t enough strength or lust for another go at having sex, so we’ll resort to visual intimacy. I’ll memorise him the softness of his gut and how I could cup my palm around it, the little chip in his tooth, the weight of his thigh on mine. He’ll look at me and think what a desirable woman I am, and how lucky he signed on to make this delivery.

In my broken Urdu I’ll tell him that my closest companion these days is the neighbour’s dog that won’t stop barking and the two stars that hang in the sky like a snakebite. I’ll talk about how easy it is to rescind into the shadows, to become something of a mystery. What a slippery slope. You wake up one morning and the bed is cold, the house is empty. The shower curtains stay dry and the towel stays hung behind the door. The second toothbrush begins to grow mildew much sooner than you’d expected. I’ll tell him how hard it is to decide what to throw and what to keep, reminding yourself that what you keep is what will stay when you’re at your desk, when you’re in bed, these will be the only things that keep you company.

He’ll say something that will sound like a question. His eyes, grey, almond-shaped, slick with a delicious exhaustion; I’ll whisper into his hair that some questions have no answers, especially because so often you cannot understand them. For instance, you can say ‘Why do you love me?’ and it might sound like a confession or a sentence.

We would never finish our conversation and we would never understand each other. It does not matter.

‘Ah, finally,’ the delivery guy says.

All at once he has become so important to me, like part of my own heart.

He thrusts the reader in my direction and I tap my phone on it.

The seconds feel like a prison sentence; the end is near. Ting.

‘All done. You’ll take receipt?’ he asks. This time, he looks me in the eye and I almost cry.

‘No, thanks.’

‘OK. Thank you,’ he says, turns around, then stops. ‘You need help with that?’ His forehead houses a thick set of creases. The sun hits his eyes and they almost disappear, and only the pupils remain visible. In a flash, I picture him dead and rotting. Time is always ticking. You lose people in an instant before you can even understand it. By the time you do, it’s too late to do anything about it. You remain with a present that is always past.

‘I’m good, thanks,’ is all I can say.

He smiles at me and begins walking away.

After months of silence and absence, I feel the urgency of the human connection. Everything is fleeting. We’ll all soon be dead. So...

‘Sorry,’ I call out to him. He stops and turns.

‘What’s your name?’ I ask and attempt my best smile at him.

Avidity

Samantha Barrow

Light reflects from the low-hanging disco ball in the center of the room. Glittering patches of silver and white catch on his freckled skin, his tailored suit, his blue eyes. It’s jarring seeing him so put together in a sea of half-naked nurses and bloody Ghostface masks, like a mirage in a hazy desert except the haze is just smoke from the gravity bong in the sink meant for laundry and the only thing dry in this house is my cotton-mouth.

I stumble in my platform heels, and he catches me with a large hand on the crook of my elbow. I don’t acknowledge the butterflies in my stomach or the hint of Chanel N°5 on his coat.

What girl in her twenties wears Chanel N°5 anyway?

“Easy there,” he huffs not because of my weight but because of my incompetence.

He’s the only person to ever make me feel that way. It hurts sometimes, but mostly it makes me feel seen makes me feel human. Makes me feel like I’m flawed and can be, unapologetically, and it’s alright because he’s still here, catching me when I fall huffing in irritation. Because the reality is I make him feel useful. I make him feel strong. I make him feel alive in all the ways the stuffy suits at Donaldson & Associates never will The way Chanel N°5 wearing Penelope Carson never will.

“Sorry,” I half say, half laugh as he rights me until I’m standing in front of him, sweaty and out of breath. The gold spaghetti straps of my top dig into the skin around my shoulders as I jut them back and stare up into his iridescent face. “You came.”

His mouth twitches in amusement, no doubt smelling the three glasses of craft beer on my tongue that Sean Foster kept pushing into my hand with the promise of, “This IPA is less hoppy than the others, Mia. I promise it won’t taste like soap.” But they did all three of them. Like I knew they would.

And now I’m standing in front of him, wide-eyed and soaptongued, and I just want to feel him. Just want to see how iridescent he’d truly be under my fingertips, under my thumb.

“Well, you did ask me to,” he supplies, offhandedly, like it doesn’t mean anything when in reality we both know it means everything. I asked, and he came.

I nod my fuzzy head as the disco ball continues to turn and sparkle and glow. My eyes are hooded from the smoke and the IPA, and I’ve never needed to touch anyone more in my life.

“I’m gonna dance,” I say as I twist away from him and begin heading out onto the packed, makeshift dance floor.

His arm reaches out, grasping me by the elbow again before his thumb brushes across the raised hairs on my skin.

“With who?” he asks.

I shake my head, a baffled smile playing across my lips as my brows push together. “With myself.”

I attempt to turn out of his hold, but his grip tightens, pulling me backwards until my side is flush against his front. His breath ruffles the baby hairs across the nape of my neck as he bends down and says, “Not if I have any say in it.”

His hand glides down from my elbow to my hand, entwining our fingers together smoothly, softly, expertly before he leads me out into the heart of the crowd. He doesn’t hesitate replacing his grip on my hand for the grip on my waist. My obnoxiously bejeweled halter top rides up just as he skims the soft flesh of my hips, and I’m all goosebumps and spine chills. I can’t help thinking, I hope he does it again.

The upbeat rhythm of the Top 100 pop song is switched for the sultry sound of a ballad, and I can feel truly feel the way his breath hitches as my hands snake their way around his neck. He’s hot to the touch, no doubt burning up in his fancy lawyer suit in the center of this dingy old basement.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

His head bends down, lips ghosting across the top of my ear as he asks, “What are you supposed to be anyway?”

I fold my hands together behind his head, letting my fingers dip into his hairline, cool olive meeting fiery copper and say, “The official title, courtesy of the Spirit Halloween costume bag on my bedroom floor, is Iconic 70s Disco Queen.”

“Hm,” he muses just as his hands dip down and scorch my bare skin once again. “That’s oddly specific.”

I shrug in the most nonchalant way possible hoping no one notices how fucking giddy I am to have myself so intimately woven into Parker Wesley.

“You can’t tell? Is it not obvious with this hair?” I shake my errant curls, hoping to drive home my point.

He shakes his head, that ghost of a smile still pulling on his pink lips. “No, you just look like Mia.”

I’m still staring transfixed at his lips when I feel a harsh buzz from his front pocket vibrating against my thigh. My eyes zero in on the offending interruption as Parker fishes out his phone.

His gaze is on me, sharp and unrelenting, when he answers. “Parker Wesley here.”

I can’t hear the voice on the other end, but I can tell from the immediate change in his demeanor that it’s the office. That it’s Penelope.

I uncoil my hands from around his neck as he twists away from me and the dance floor, back towards the edge of the basement. Towards the small door in the corner of the room that leads out into the driveway leads away from me.

He doesn’t have to tell me he’s leaving when I follow. I can tell in his posture. I can sense it in the pit of my stomach. He’s hanging up when I reach him.

“You’re aborting the mission,” I accuse. Because that’s what it is an accusation.

He nods his head. A bead of crystal sweat glides down his temple. “We have an emergency meeting in the morning with a new client. I should already be home, but ”

But he came here. To me. For me.

“You just got here,” I protest, and I know it makes me sound juvenile.

Makes me out to be an insolent child just a nuisance to him. But I can’t help it. The beer is starting to work its way down from my fuzzy head to my heavy tongue, and I know soon I won’t be able to walk in these godforsaken platform heels too expensive, even discounted, with their cheap plastic straps that rub my pinky toes raw.

I’m pitiful, and I want him here. Is that too much to ask?

“I know,” he says while nodding along like some broken bobblehead, remorse evident in the dimming of his eyes. “But I have to go anyway.”

I grab at his sleeve, my fingers itching to feel him again skin against skin. “So you’re just gonna leave me here?”

I don’t mean for it to sound as desperate as it does. I want my words to be cruel and biting. But I can tell from the cringe that flashes across his face before smoothing out that I’ve missed the mark. That I’m becoming a pathetic problem.

“You were fine before I got here.”

And he’s right. Obviously, he’s right. It stings just as much, though.

“But I’m not fine now. ”

He nods, flattening his lips and glancing around the hazy basement one last time before locking eyes with me. “I can take you home, Mia. Do you want to go home?”

No, I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go anywhere he isn’t be anywhere he isn’t.

“Sure.”

We don’t talk during the drive to my house. The radio is turned down low, playing some little indie band I’ve never heard of, just like all the other bands Parker listens to. The night sky has closed into itself, heavy and laden with thick mist. He periodically clicks up his windshield wipers instead of just leaving them on like a normal person. It’s infuriatingly endearing.

The gravel crunches beneath his tires as we pull up to my apartment, and he turns to me, expectantly.

I know I should get out. Thank him for the ride and just get out of the car, but I don’t, because I’m me and he’s Parker and I’m feeling just the right amount of buzzed and jealous for something entirely too reckless.

“Parker,” I start as I unclasp my seatbelt. His hand fumbles with his own belt as he locks eyes with me.

“I’ll walk you to your door.”

Just as he reaches for the door handle, I reach for his arm. My hand is shaking as I close it around his oxford button-down. It’s damp and cool, no doubt from the amount of sweating he was doing at the party. He turns back towards me, eyebrow raised.

“Mia?” he questions.

“Wait,” I say as I lick my lips. “Just wait a second.”

He doesn’t ask any more questions, just sits back in his seat and lets my hand stay resting against his arm. Doing as I asked. Always doing as I ask.

The cottonmouth has returned full force as I try to situate the words on the tip of my tongue. “I know you have an early morning and you need to get going and all but I just wanted to thank you for the ride and for, you know, showing up to the party. You didn’t have to come, but it’s really nice getting to see you.”

“Of course,” he says, a small smile pulling at his lips. “I’m sorry I had to cut it so short.”

I nod along before abruptly snatching my hand away as I realize it’s still on his arm. I dig a manicured nail into my thumb cuticle.

“It’s okay. I mean it’s not okay. Or it’s okay in the sense that you have to do it, obviously. But not okay in the way I wish you didn’t have to go.”

His ginger brows pull up and wrinkle as he flattens his lips before reaching over and patting my leg.

“I know what you mean. I feel the same way. But I can see you tomorrow? Maybe grab lunch in between classes or something?”

I hear his question. I acknowledge it in my head. Because lunch sounds great, and I don’t have any classes in the morning. I can sleep in and put off my impending hangover. But I don’t say any of this, because my focus is locked on his big, soft hand sitting and rubbing and stroking the length of my bare thigh, and I know he means it to be friendly, consoling even, a consolation prize, of sorts, but that doesn’t stop my eyes from narrowing in on his fingers wrapped around my thigh or my heart from racing.

Suddenly, I’m the hottest I’ve ever been, burning up from the outside in, and the only way I’ll ever recover is if I have his big, soft hands over every single inch of my body. “Parker,” I say, voice thick and syrupy.

His gaze catches on his own hand as if just now realizing what he’s doing before swallowing. “Yeah?”

I keep my eyes locked on his face, watching for a sign, any sign, while I slowly reach over and put my hand over his, guiding it tentatively up, allowing his jagged nails to snag against my sensitive skin before reaching the growing heat between the apex of my thighs.

His breath catches as his hand flattens against my cheap, faux leather hotpants.

“Mia?” he asks, voice as strained as my resolve. “Yeah?”

He’s on me before I can take another breath. I hear him knee the console between us, but he doesn’t relent, keeping his hand pressed firmly against me while the other goes straight to my hair, cradling me against him as his lips claim my mouth, my jaw, my cheek, my neck. And all at once, I’m bucking against his palm, riding out this high, this blissed-out euphoria that I’ve never felt not once in my life before now. I’m needy as I whimper for him, and he’s unapologetic as he gropes me through my costume, and suddenly I can’t feel the rawness of my pinky toes or the fuzziness of my head. I only feel my suffocating desperation.

Nothing can compare. I could kiss a thousand more men in my lifetime, and not a single one would kiss me as soul-shatteringly perfect as Parker Wesley in the front seat of his Benz.

All too soon the spell is broken as the phone in his pocket begins buzzing, interrupting us for the second time tonight.

He’s annoyed when he flings himself away from me and snatches his phone from inside his slacks before smashing the power button down until the screen goes dark, but only after I see the Caller ID flash across it and the pretty smile of his blonde secretary.

His phone is tossed into the cup holder in the center console before he’s back on me, but I place a firm hand on his chest, keeping him from descending any lower.

“Wait,” I say as I gasp for air.

He freezes at my words, and I see the horror cross his face in real-time.

“Oh, my God,” he says, pulling himself away. “Oh shit, I’m I’m so sorry. That was this is so out of line. I don’t know what came over me.”

A knife plunges into my stomach before I twist it myself saying, “What about Penelope?”

Parker raises his eyebrows, his mouth down turning into a deep frown.

“What about her?” he asks earnestly, as if this is the first time he’s thought about her all night. I fumble with my words. “Well, won’t she be pissed about this? About what’s happening here, in your car of all places.”

He releases a huff of air, his eyes still dark and lidded. “Why would it be any of my secretary’s business who I kiss in my car? She’s not even on the lease.”

He laughs at his own joke, and suddenly, I get the sense I’ve misjudged the situation. I struggle to try and piece together the puzzle in front of me. “But aren’t you two a thing? Like shouldn’t you be kissing her instead?”

Parker’s white teeth dig into the flesh of his kiss-swollen bottom lip before he says, rather exasperatedly, “No, Mia. I shouldn’t be kissing Penelope instead.”

My breath hitches as he leans forward across the console again

his big, soft hand running along my collarbone before slotting itself against my throat.

His breath ghosts along my lips as he says, “I shouldn’t be kissing anyone but you. Always you, Mia. No one, but you.”

And then his head dips down, his bottom lip brushing mine teeth marks still indented along his skin.

Understudies

S.G. Mallett

§1: A project of katabasis & anabasis and katabasis & anabasis and katabasis & anabasis and katabasis & anabasis without a watch to check, lights cast strange but consilient shadows, I didn’t enjoy my dreams so I read Hillman. I look at images without my thoughts about images. Hermeneutically, this should be impossible, or so says Gadamer, that one cannot read a text without somehow or somewhen interpolating other texts one’s already read. Hillman points to the space between the underworld & the underground, chthon & ge, the psychic realm & nature, below the earth & beyond it, of the earth & in it, Demeter’s spirit & Demeter’s space in The Dream and the Underworld before arguing that Hades is necessarily an anticapitalist space: Hades, person, place, and thing, is the referent to deadspace, the site of the underworld, the undersite & the persona. §1.1: That one can picture the end of the world easilier than one can picture the end of capitalism is both one of the few memorable [and unproblematic] Mark Fisherisms and the introduction to Can the Possible Exist in Physical Form? On Architectural Projectiles, Computation, and Worldbuilding, in which work Jeremy Lecomte goes on to ask the serious reader to marry both senses of project to the architectural project, which at first blush seems mere language-game that of course an architectural work projects into the logic of the future, as tangibility & verb but carries practicality in its reminder of the one vow of the marriage, though perhaps unfairly to Lecomte’s article: projects project. §1.2: Objects object.

§2: Connections & Choreography by Jacob Schepers through Bottlecap Press is more than the song & dance routine it appraises itself as. §2.1: C&C plays out four acts. One “struts about,” (1) triumphing as in the conquest of death [of form(s)] under life a being-towards-death, “how is it that one can be more lost but not more found?” (9) to “assemble” (7, 8, 14, 20, 21, 27, 29, 33) and to be “productive” (1, 6, 18, 25, 34) this is ours, “it,” poppets on the stage, of understudies becoming selved, to be some-thing else might as well be no-thing, does neither modify nor commodify itself, again & again, consecutively, anti-ism. §2.2: Choreographer of the seasons’ sense (6), sponsor of the harvest, elder sister to the liver-eating eagle and part-time mother-in-law to death; the harvest queen’s understudy (5, 7, 8, 10) finds herself/itself dependent on the four {acts}/{seasons} in her/its personal and professional life, §2.3: interoperability is what precedes the Persephone-Hades dialectic, is what allows for married terms, is what verbs nouns, is how we make sense of sense or sense of non-non-Euclidian space. §3: Sarah Fay for the Paris Review writes of Kay Ryan in a 2008 interview that Kay Ryan exercises “the recombinant.” And Kay Ryan says she likes to ‘squeeze things until they explode,’” which echoes two techniques going on in C&C: recombination & compression. The work of Kay Ryan one of the few US poets elected to laureateship on merit may clear C&C by a few orders of magnitude, but this isn’t a dig, as a Kay Ryan poem outclasses any post-post-modern poem pound-for-pound, so what so imbues her work is this M.O.,

the mixology which makes a collection like The Best of It the best of it indeed, but so C&C takes the techniques and works its own show. The work of Kay Ryan one of the few US poets elected to laureateship on merit may clear C&C by a few orders of magnitude, but this isn’t a dig, as a Kay Ryan poem outclasses any post-post-modern poem pound-for-pound, so what so imbues her work is this M.O., the mixology which makes a collection like The Best of It the best of it indeed, but so C&C takes the techniques and works its own show. Where the type of craftmaster Kay Ryan’s poems feel after is something like clocks or drinks or miniscule mechanized trinkets eliciting private delight, Schepers’ scale is grander and staged and showy: the former one pictures with a loupe, the latter with a clapper or wheel of masking tape.§3.1: C&C is less Burroughsian than it sounds, less about the will to power of the scissors, and more about the parataxis the masking tape keeps. They’re projecting their lines well. It isn’t rocket surgery. But the show ends at raveling: C&C isn’t more intricate than y=2x i.e., there’s no arc but not unsatisfactorily; how could the ride get old if it never stops? My copy clocks in at 35 pages, and its last word is “closer,” a word which appears three additional times prior, so its landing is anticipated, and anticipation & justification and call & response are dependable techniques, so C&C isn’t exactly cutting edge on the rhizomatic dramaturgy front with respects to “unraveling,” so it upends the pending transactions (1), and we never make it to the quintains, and all we’ve caught are cooties.

§4: Because Schepers doesn’t connect so much as he recombines and compresses, cf. “The riddle’s answer / requires selfeffacement. One object contains another//” (13, 27), any choreographic work strikes as a projection of a thing rather than a thing itself (at least from pages 13 through to the endpaper, acts 2-4). §4.1: Plats (2014) by John Trefry through Inside the Castle purposes structural integrity to literary ends by a similar type of animism: the eighth plat on page three comes to mind, and here I’m quoting directly where “Freedom is release from will. Parallel to the hills roads run ever distant in furrowed ruts converging into later afternoons on a segmented band of colors refracted from the sun into the asphalt. It is a stumbling spectrum converging to a point while she gains ground, and, while it creeps further away from her, claims her future with the pointless exploration of its compressed impressions and mysteries. She follows the horizon through serpentine high walled corridors that claim space not through distance and division but by coverage, claiming every spot in a surface by wrapping in a continuous mess of fluid turns where the uncertainty of direction and extent rivals the ubiquitous straight line” and I’d be pleasantly surprised if you’d share this feeling that this passage [which Plats Plats Plats Plats Plats (2024) quintuples] describes what C&C seems to aim at: I propose this shared pananimism’s mode pervades Plats’ phenomenology, C&C’s ontology; C&C’s perspective is clear and distinct, its thingness malleable, as if the connections were open, as if it were what you make it.

§4.2: That’s what poetry does, or ought to, eke (p. 9, 17, 26, 29) out sense through the needle-sized eye of the line, its conceits only as powerful as its constraints, spring-loaded, self-tautening, submissive to the same basic maths matter’s subjected to. §4.3: {A dark severity on the white space, language is the inevitability understudies purpose; movement as dynamic as the prompts dictate and freedom as softly determined as the stagehands planned, as the understudies pinned between margins.}/{It is because the text is as exacting as its first act that C&C projects.}

§4.4: This premise of reading names onto unnamed figures into the text is shaky at best, at worst damns the reading. The understudy {& to under-study} like the experiment is not a project so much as a projection onto the whitespace (what’d be less sexy of a show than to find in your bed a union of carpenter ants?) into the future tense, but this is “nothing more natural than associative fallout of / matryoshka-doll proportion” (10, 15, 22, 33), the words in our inner dialog tree are “tools at present culled from chthonic recesses or / otherwise known as bottomless pits fit within each / crag” (11, 18, 21, 32), the sides anticipating and echoing their folds. §4.5: {Because interiority is necessarily inaccessible, masqued, the realization of the project is less exciting than to project. This is not to say that to think critically on what one has read is less exciting than to read (if there’s any difference), but that to replay one act thrice over just might be overkill.}/{C&C doubles down, triples down, quadruples down, drills down to the extent to which its logic is, it is [the project[ion] of] itself the whole way down.}

SadBoyWalk

Kayla Shawn

From my bones to my brain, I’m tired. My body begs for sleep, but my heart is aching for a warmth I haven’t been able to replace. A walk.

I’ll take a walk to clear my mind. The brisk fall air slaps my cheeks, so I pull my knitted hat further down over my head, shove my earbuds too deep into my ear, and keep my chin down.

I watch my boots slosh through the muddy leftovers of a rain storm.

I wonder what she’s doing. I wonder if she’s happy. I wonder if she misses me.

I listen to the sound of tires rolling over loose gravel. My playlist ended long ago. I’ve been walking for a while.

I thought my feet led me to nowhere in particular, just some parking lot on some street in the same town I can’t stand to be in. But there’s her building. Muscle memory is such a bitch. There’s a car in her guest parking spot with a bumper sticker. “Stanford Alumni.” She told me not to worry about that guy she had a few classes with.

I always worry.

I should have worried.

I can see them through her window, backlit by the kitchen light I replaced the bulb in last spring. They’re dancing. She’s smiling. I can almost hear her laugh. My heart is aching again. My brain is being so loud, but my body is too tired. A walk.

I’ll take a walk to clear my mind.

Silence

Kayla Shawn

“We should go back.”

“Probably.”

Silence. The kind that twists around unspoken words and memories of stolen late night kisses.

“What if we ran away?”

“What if?”

Silence. The contemplative kind, but as short as the breath between words.

“We can’t.”

“I know.”

Silence. The kind that forces the realization that there’s more than just two people in the world to settle over them like a weighted blanket.

“Meet me back here. When everything is better. When the war’s over.”

“I will.”

Silence. The kind that’s filled with promises they can’t keep, but they make anyways because a promise is hope.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Silence. The kind that fills them up and makes them feel alive because even when everything is bad, she is good, and even when everything feels broken, he makes her whole.

paradise on the west coast

Finnialla

sunset dreamers, disillusioned stars

patina on the palm trees that sway in the wind ocean waves lap at the beams on the pier

sea foam gets stuck in your hair

redwoods wind their way up the houses pillars of sand and botox injections bend and break and leave you to the wolves if only I had connections in this town