http://www.springgunpress.com/issuetwo/SpringGun_Ebook_IssueTwo by SprinGun Press

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to the editors of Ahsahta Press where Kate Greenstreetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s from The Last 4 Things and 25 January have most recently appeared.

SpringGun V1, N2 Erin Costello Mark Rockswold

CO-PUBLISHERS

Contents POEMS Kate Greenstreet

Two Poems

Joe Hall

Four Poems

J. Michael Martinez

Praxis 34 & 45

Derrick Mund

Apology for Breath 1&2

Matt Reiter

Two Patrick Fragments

Alison Strub

Conversation Fragments Between a Miner and His Wife

A Conversation with Kate Greenstreet

Paulette Livers

from Hilldale: A Suburban Biomythography

Christopher David Rosales

Neighborhood Watch

J.A. Tyler

of paper

INTERVIEWS Derrick Mund

FICTION

CONTRIBUTORSâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; BIOS

JOE HALL

from Knife & Mirror â&#x2014;&#x2039;

On the first island no stream or spring, only one tree & only one cloud. They drink deeply from the leaves & branches men & animals. We come to the port, they think we bring rain we are praised On the last island, teeth falling out, burying more dead in this relentless meridian light We come to the port, they steal our skiff & other small things I am Pigafetta, I serve Magellan. I am telling you this story in several tongues & I am from hell, or, perhaps some place closer to hellâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; here, to be exact or, silently, our holds full of silver fish, through the Strait of 11,000 Angels or between us & the hurricane, the fires held the forms of three saints

â&#x2014;&#x2039;

Dear Cheryl, listen when one dies, husband or wife, the other lies on the corpse foot to foot, hand to hand, mouth to mouth while the dead oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hair is cut For what seems like a long time we are six hundred miles apart. The living are not without the dead & the dead are still changing. I think you climb a chair to hang heavy drapes across a doorless doorway. In reaching up, I think your head & shoulders tilt backwards &, by these increments, you are closer to me, in the pale mirror scent of camphor scent of cloves

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The outline turning, your profile, in the morning, on the shore, was a charred length of driftwood. It’s unfair to have to bring your sickness into words. If prayers are swift, deranged birds I am letting them loose from the decks of my body Look for them. Two years & more promised, seven months apart, what gifts are there to give? A ring to describe your finger or another book in which to write what is your pleasure or Dear Joe, Hello? the tools to bind a book & how much flesh is the book? & how much bread is the book? Blood signals the divine Dear Cheryl, to see you—

Pantoum 2: Unfinishable, with Circumnavigator & National Cathedral…

In the basilica crypt, what do you pray for? On the shore Pigafetta, in strange motion of hips, memory of beside the Black Virgin . Lafayette . confirmed Stephen Christopher her spotted hands Pacific fleet, will protect In the basilica crypt, what do you pray for? Your green purse on veined stone—chapstick, notebook, steroids, thoughts flowering toward of of Antipolo moving, of gesture toward the boar’s heart piercing again & again, it My grandmother the medal he , sailing Nagasaki: St. Christopher would not from lung cancer (what’d I care) Chop down Pigafetta, give me breasts Your green purse on veined stone— thought toward The tourist’s digital camera aimed at the saint to your left—take this thought, this this lance revolving around the boar’s heart, in her hand with the dearest word between thumb & forehead protect my grandfather give me breasts, my face smeared with boar’s blood I don’t want this or worry, I want, or, I want— camera aimed at St. Take This Thought, taste of iron to be Pigafetta or you, priestess or eaten boar, to be the space between the father’s thumb & my forehead, oil which or, on the shore, an old woman in Spanish armor x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x or I don’t want this or worry, I want, or, where you are, I am, changing

J. MICHAEL MARTINEZ

Praxis (34) Gaze and Aperture

Cast between intention and Being, the human glance occupies an unassigned date of birth: in the whiteness, a dispelling curve settles into light, taking to mouth erasure against presence. i.i Example: a finch once flew toward the south of faith in Autumn, making a nest in a chimney after arriving in Brazil. While a boy looked out a window to stare at the strange bird, destiny leapt in like a frog and promptly got stuck behind the bookshelf, calcifying over time. The story goes the boy cried, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Me Me Me Me Me,â&#x20AC;? before closing the window.

i.ii Example: the parable of Averroes1—to cast Being to the word casts the human through the name, music fallen like the bride’s sudden blossom. 1

The 17th century Arabic scholar Averroes speculated, unoriginally, that there was a word that, when spoken, encompassed all worlds; furthermore, and thus his genius, this word could be traced through the coils of a single letter. Like Descartes, Averroes held that the further removed from He of Infinite Consciousness, the less conscious creation becomes—from the self-awareness of man, who was made in God’s form, down to the dead of a stone. However, Averroes felt the lone letter still maintained a trace of God-consciousness; Averroes believed if he truly knew the intricacies of the letter, from whorl to stain, he would know the cast of all creation. Averroes, who once translated Aristotle, scholar of the Talmud, lost himself in the Kabbalistic study of the word. There was no one letter he sought, he believed all letters of all languages contained equal traces of infinite consciousness. A letter was all letters, in all combinations, and was none singly. Averroes began to have a recurring dream of a garden in which a labyrinth was built. The labyrinth, he knew, was the letter that contained all possible worlds. At night, he would dream of this garden, him standing in the moonlight before the entrance. There were pillars of marble on either side of the entrance, the visages of pagan Gods from all cultures inscribed on the four sides— there Jove, Zeus, Yahweh, Quetzalcoatl, and unknown others. At the top of the right pillar stood a statuette of Mohammed, on the right, a faceless man. He knew in the labyrinth’s center, residing like a bloodied Minotaur, was God. One night, after a day of intense study and despair, Averroes dreamt: he fell from the sky, softly landing before the marble pillars. Running, he entered. Path after path he took, thorns of the walls tearing his clothes until only remnants remained stained with blood. Morning came. Then night. He ran to the point of exhaustion. Resting against one of the labyrinths many fountains, he drank and despaired he would never find the center. He began to think the labyrinth, if it held God, was God—every path was the center he sought, the circumference of the labyrinth infinite and inaccessible; he ran blindly through the eternal name. He could not accept this confusion of pathways and fountains. Reason would not allow it. As the morning rose before him, a tenuous hope. He realized if the morning was rising, there was reason: the rotation of the planets, the architecture of the labyrinth as a labyrinth amounted to coherent structure and, hence, a center he could decipher. He leaned against the thorned wall, whispered to himself. At this moment, a flash blinded him and threw him to the ground. When he rose, Averroes found himself encircled by hummingbirds of all hues. They flew around him furiously. Through the wings of the speeding birds, he spied at distance a maelstrom of feathers and wings. Inside that, a shape the size of a man. He reached his arm through his cage of darting birds, ignoring the pain of the piercing beaks. As if trying to avoid hurting him, the hummingbirds flew away, leaving him. Holding his bloodied arm, he stumbled toward the other maelstrom of feather and wing. He collapsed from exhaustion. He saw a great black eye staring at him from the within the tidal of birds. A terrible screech arose. The birds flew furiously. Emerging, battering itself against the flying bodies, a great black beak. It opened, and screeching, began to

peck at the hummingbirds, eating. The birds attempted to avoid the beak, but instead of fleeing, they flew harder, seemingly desperate to encircle the thing. As torn feathers became more numerous and bodies gathered on the ground, Averroes saw what the birds had been containing: a creature with the naked body of a man but with a head of a giant crow. The black eye he saw centered on him. It thrashed back and forth with its beak, eating and tearing into the flesh of the birds. The thing leaned its monstrous head back and screeched. A few birds limped hapless on the ground. With terrible insight Averroes realized the truth: the labyrinth was his choice of mystery to surround the eternal; like the primordial Adam naming the lion and the bull so that name was Being, so did Averroes name his God and his God become it: a confusion that was all languages and was none, a letter that was everything and nothing. The thing, screeching and pecking at the ground, leaned its beak up. Cocking its head back and forth, it choked back the last of the hummingbirds. Averroes raised his hands to his face. A beak bloody with organs.

ii. As in: woven with carnations, braids of light / unfurl dim horizonsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;/ columns of fountains, fire, / honeycomb, / oxygen opens mirrors within the lung, / capillaries expanding. / Arteries thin to an irradiation of / mauve, purple, lucent red: / an annunciation of light not / the body of dawn in / eucalyptus & lilies, the shelled gold of bees.

Praxis (45) Desire’s Negations

Desire operates as an organ emanating from fragmented unities: reason, corporeity, witness—all bound to guilt adorned by pearl shells, our body’s nave of humilities. i. Example: David’s betrayal of Uriah the Hittite2, Bathsheba’s breasts dipped in tears for the dead.

2 Samuel 11

ii. Example: The Parable of King Salaam3: the sea turning its salt upon the gull, the wolf’s lust of the lamb.

The Night King Salaam Took His Screaming Daughter to the Boiling

But first was the day an army of loyal servants wearing only silk slippers spread out in a hundred rows across a thousand acres of fauna. The animals fled these naked and their soft plodding. Poppies, wisteria, calla lilies were unstrung from earth and hung from pins onto sheets of vellum. The librarians organized the plants according to their alchemical properties—motherwort, lady’s mantle, and mistletoe paged together under the heading of “Life root.” The books of fauna were taken to the cauldron’s depth to the cauldron’s culler. The albino culler opened the books of the flowers, dipped the thousand stems and petals, calyxes and bulbs into a molt of gold. After the lily’s fall and the wisteria’s orbital ridges were shelled in amber, King Salaam rushed from his throne with salivating hands. He took one of the culler’s arrangements to his garden, planted it delicately in moist dirt. He climbed to his topmost tower. Purple robes fell like waterfalls over his crooked arms. He trumpeted orders from a conch shell. Wearing black cotton garments and kidleather boots, the servants spread out in obedience across the razed fields re-planting what had been torn. But before then was the day that Salaam ordered three stones a day to be taken from his keep. Stone on stone for a thousand days of stone until all were pliable sublimations of light. White apron against albino face, the culler bowed. The king, seated on his throne, stood before his supplicants; he climbed to the highest mounds of golden blocks. Purple robes fell like waterfalls over his crooked arms. He trumpeted orders from a conch shell. Dressed in white cotton garments and barefoot, the servants, standing in one hundred and one rows, bowed simultaneously and set to the task of rebuilding. On the throne the king sat light-bowered, his frame a mineral, embodied and alive.

II.

Resolve: to recover betrayal of its seed; to learn the heart, hands made of bitter wax. i.i Example: “For Augustine, this experience of the unknown word (verbum ignotum) in the no-man’sland between sound and signification is the experience of love as will to know” (Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem, pp. 64) a. In the year after her passing, I wrote: “is deathless is”; this to say—/ hollowed within eyes / of tears and blood clots. b. While she slept, I touched her lips to possess no tongue’s shape; rather, seas sealed beneath splintered ice, the generation & name.

DERRICK MUND

Apology for Breath (1) apologize to the ashtrayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s modest bloom, un-owned, dew-sogged, and browning. Montana is a place with plastic bags rustled against each fence between rez dogs and forearms blistered out a nissan with a twin mattress in the back, the broken hatch waving to the liquor store swimming 464 North with chewing black-bones looming. She sweats, lifts her tank top. The place between each breath becomes a daytime constellation rooted in punishment. Still forget to apologize to the ashtray from each mapped breath left in Nebraska.

Apology for Breath (2) I used the wrong words; it seems anything around your shadow was made of trees. The fog on this window came from my mouth, it has a finger tracing trees with cloud tops. The tree breaks noise; our bodies become a lamp trapped memory of our grandparents.

MATT REITER

Two Patrick Fragments lemons like Patrick a party song called “What Time Did the Lost Girl Fall?” sleepy little fountain silly little letters completely useless to pardon our selfish plays and temptations lemons disappear like when Patrick asked, “Do the shapes of us help anything really? Does it always cry, for what it wants?” These leaves, books, empathy for empty stores they feature little readers lith little books like Patrick’s Little Lemon-like Car

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agency: critical magic theory brassiere: filling up the cup corsage: Patrick’s little lady don’t: get caught in this evasive: not in the pagination forethought: one page is read then turned gravity: Patrick doesn’t feel his head size harbinger: bringing the last chapter introspect: here is his masturbation room joint damage: the main characters flaw k: his fall into the hole lament: this is the next page’s ending manuscript: not his first but first seen niggle: he pinpointed each letter ochre: Patrick earthen cover color poetaster: this is why he’s writing the novel question: critical inquiry story radical: his hero was a memoirist sanctum: his little studio musician tall: stories are made from milk, not water universe: this is the problem with milk vox pop: discriminate toward novelists withdrawn: the novel remains unfinished xenophobe: Patrick huddles in the kitchen yours: the character’s hidden systems zenith: this is the next first page

ALISON STRUB

Conversation Fragments Between a Miner and His Wife I move upward to you, pockets full of paper, climbing into bed still speckled with coal dust, dirt on the outside of the folded paper. Your shadow is paper thin and thinning above ground to underground. So I’m Under The roots in the walls look like your hair. Palm prints, someone braced himself on the wall. Roots in the wall feel like your hair. I touch it, my hands there and there. Water from collieries irrigates the soil When does the water from the pipes touch earth? Groundwater drips down touching roots. Kettlebottoms, clay veins, and slickensides I look for a chink to see you through. Tunnels don’t work like that. I could hear you running like ants below if it were quieter. Still I say it looked like your hair buried in the dirt wall. I’m scared you’re weeding in a lightning storm. 16

Death in the mines: disasters and rescues in the anthracite coal The neighbor dies. So You’re Above You draw the drapes and use your stained hands as tools to make a tunnel out of the sheet. You point down into it and say, That’s the coal seam you follow when you run the miner, a huge machine like a dozer with tracks. It's got bits on it, that’s what cuts coal. The roof could collapse until its bolted. You close up the earth by smoothing out the sheet. There was a hole under his ear and a cut on his back Maybe in the walls I could find a fossil, one like a mouth or ear twisted together. Someone pressed their ear to the dirt wall, maybe. I pressed my ear to that dirt wall, maybe, when I first started. I touched you with my hand, dirt fell on your hair. Color strips from your eyes as your pupils grow.

KATE GREENSTREET

author of The Last 4 Things (2009) and case sensitive (2006), interviewed by Derrick Mund I noticed that the DVD companion to The Last 4 Things is very transitory in nature. I’m wondering if your new writing reflects that at all. I took a lot of that footage when I was out last time with case sensitive. That was the first video I ever did. I swore to myself that this time I was out I would write and exercise everyday but I haven’t done either, not one day. This is day 25. [During readings] I read from the new book and sometimes I read from other things because the students have only read case sensitive, or someone wants me to read from the last chap book, etc. But in order to make it interesting to me, I make a new thing out of it. To do that I read parts of things—I’ll read on my set list and it’ll be, “first paragraph second sentence,” then I’ll flip through the book and I’ll just make new poems out of the thing by re-ordering it. That’s the closest thing I’ve done to new writing. How do you approach something that you’re making both for film and page? How do the two processes relate? Well, the first part of The Last 4 Things I wrote years ago, so that was written for the page. You know I did change it of course, but that was done and supposed to be the book. Then I wrote 56 Days. I had 56 days for writing, so that’s just where the title came from. When I wrote it, as I was writing it, I made the movie so those two things happened simultaneously. And that was a different kind of movie because I was just taking a piece of text—one piece of text I would say and one piece of text I would use as a subtitle just to work with that “dialogue/subtitle all in the same language” idea. It was a little bit more like a real film project in the sense that it wasn’t a transcription of the book. The other one, I’d been doing these experiments. First I made a whole recording of the book, then I was just fooling around with all the junk I had on film and I just, I felt like I really quickly tried to make some little parts. Some little parts, some little pages—they’re not poems.

Between the two films, The Last 4 Things seems to have a more experimental feel. They’re all experiments, whereas 56 Days is just one experiment. There even seems to be more of a score to it. We did a lot of music for it but we hadn’t intended to. And Max used to be a musician. But we were learning garage band together and I was just learning all of these programs all at once. Did you ever hear of Lynda.com? It’s such a cool place where for 25 bucks a month you can learn any program for as many hours as you want to spend. So I learned Final Cut and Soundtrack and Garage Band and all these different things. So yeah, we were surprised. We were moving notes around in Garage Band visually. It wasn’t really like music. We were amazed it worked as well as it did. The film component then adds to that feel of narrative? Yeah, it does have a little bit of a narrative feel. Reading it, it didn’t. Right. Working on the film began to convince me that there was just a thread of narrative or the smoke of narrative. I just began to feel like, “I know her. I know. I get it.” But it didn’t change the writing as such. The writing was coming the same way it always comes, to be bringing in all the notes that I had and spreading them all over the floor and trying to say it and walking around getting into a trance of “what is it?”

It was delved into. (Laughs). Yeah, or what I like to think, “dwelved.” Sort of a combination of dwell and delving. So I dwelved into that pretty hard. I think it’s just a sort of basic fact of my life now that I’m actually 60 years old that a lot of stuff that I’m writing… I’m time traveling. It’s not necessarily about my life but I don’t necessarily feel that old. I don’t think that there’s a person alive that ever thought they were 60 years old, at least not until they were 90. I’m just trying to tune into myself I guess. A lot of people by the time they’re my age, they’ve figured everything out already. They’ve had a whole life—they’ve achieved their success or failure. I don’t know anybody like me that’s my age. I know a lot of people who are like me who are a different age, so I think that comes into it. When I picture a character that I’m writing about, she might be 40. She’d still be in the middle of what she’s trying to do. It all combines. There’s a child, a 9 year old girl for instance, who’s lighting the fires. There’s a lot of dream stuff. Like that particular one came from a dream from years ago that I put into a painting. I used to put a lot of words into my paintings and basically took some sentences from it, so it’s all very intertwined. I noticed in a few specific places that there’s this inability to own— there's the line “the sea can’t stay inside you,” and a section about having a baby… I hate to sound like an idiot savant or just an idiot, but that’s just a dream. It was a dream I had and it was a very powerful dream. Speaking personally, I’ve never been pregnant but I often have dreams about babies and when I do, the love that I feel for the baby is overwhelming. I’ve never had a child and it’s not like I think, “Oh, gee I wish I had had a baby.” It’s not like that—in my dream life it’s almost as if I know about it.

KATE GREENSTREET

from 56 Days 25 January I have a baby with me. Not mine, like a plant. “Nature boy.” His hair is green and black, fernish. Who’s driving? Everybody wants to look. But they’re protected, by nets. Am I taking good enough care of him? Not mine. And he’s so tiny.

from The Last 4 Things First I was setting fire to the house, but we didn’t want the authorities to know. So I was setting small fires. Setting the blue rug in the living room on fire in several spots. I asked my mother, should we try to save anything? We can begin with the projection. —What would illustrations of the inner life tell? —It was forbidden, but there was no wall.

PAULETTE LIVERS

from Hilldale: A Suburban Biomythography I The man who lived behind us, a single father, screamed at his children and mowed his shabby lawn in furious back and forth rows, piling sticks and brambles and stray toys against the fence. One day we realized the windows were dark and curtainless. None of us could say how long they’d been gone. Inexplicably, the shit-mobile of a station wagon, with its oxidized navy paint and cracked windshield, still haunted the curb. He’s murdered the children and walked away from the house in the middle of the night, one of us said. Taking the curtains? says another. He sold everything and put the children up for adoption. Yes, and the car would only remind him of the little trips they took, times they might have been nearly happy. Before she left, another one adds. That’s why he had to leave the car behind. The lawn remained uncut for months, brambles crawling toward the front door. Casa de bruja, Maribel would say when she came to our house to clean on Wednesdays. Witch house, she’d add with a shudder. And we’d always look at the house again, checking the windows for one of the little blond girls.

II We wouldn’t have known about the poems if we had not periodically stolen our neighbors’ mail. Generally this was a harmless vandalism. We were bad at being delinquents, and most of the time didn’t even snag the five bucks in the birthday cards from Grandma; just silently examined the contents, read the cryptic messages, licked the envelope and pressed the flap with our dirty thumbs. People don’t mail very interesting things these days—with the exception of the man who wrote poetry for his dead wife. Once he wrote: I am as a man inebriate / made drunken with the sweetness of this vision / inebriate at fair Fortune’s fountainhead / and reeling through the wilderness of joy. How do you know it’s to a fake address? somebody asked. Because 221b Baker Street is Sherlock Holmes’s address, Shit-for-Brains, someone said. Another person said it was sweet, that we didn’t understand poetry, and began to cry, and licked the envelope to reseal it, her snot and tears no doubt mixing with the widower poet’s own saliva, and probably his tears, too, if you stop and think about it. That may have been the end of our mailbox thefts—no one can recall for sure.

III Our street dead-ends into the remnant of a forest left after the developer scraped and leveled everything. No telling how long we lived before realizing there was a house in the woods, a small house with very little paint left on it. It took us several weeks to get the courage to peek in finally that summer night. A bed. A table and chair. A small refrigerator and stove. One flowery wingback and a lamp. The oldest woman any of us had ever seen sat with a radio pressed to her ear, head bouncing like it was being yanked on a string. We crouched under the window, a rectangle of light fanning out over our heads, until someone got one of those uncontrollable snigger spasms. We ran into the trees when the screen door creaked open, and the old woman called out into the dark, Hugh? Hugh? just like an owl.

CHRISTOPHER DAVID ROSALES

Neighborhood Watch There’s your house. You don’t leave it at night without the porch light burning, and that sticker in the window that says beware of owner, means beware of gun, lies, cause all that’s in your top-drawer are balled up tighty-whities. Beware of what then? Beware of you who ducks down the alley when you see him walking that slobbering dog stretching taut its chain? Beware of you who loiters outside his yard at night, where shadows pool beneath the orange tree, eyeballing the bicycle on its side that you swear belonged to you, would swear it to God if that same claim did not prove he was strong enough to take it. What else he got in there? That stereo missing, replaced by the cold air from the open window when you got home from your date? Think he got Jimmy’s Dayton rims? Junie’s girl’s cherry? Just what-all fine-ass things is he trashing? He stirs in the dark on his porch. You see his red-tipped cigarette arc over the silver-wet grass. One night soon you’ll break down, break into his home like he’s done to yours. But for now you hear the screen door open and shut him safe inside. You eyeball the dog curled on the porch— mangy, yellow, cropped ears and tail, no end or beginning, pulsing like a fly’s egg. For now you just take stock of all the wrongs been done. You know there are other thugs like this one but you’ve made this one yours and he belongs to you as much as what he’s stolen used to. But wait. Take stock, man. Just you take some stock. As you stroll home empty-handed, tally all the losses. As you pass the neighborhood watch sign planted just before your yard, go on, jump up, and slap that thing’s cold face.

J.A. TYLER

of paper He writes to her: I love you I love you I love you I love you. He writes to her: Come come come come come come come. He makes a bow of his tongue and presents his mouth as a gift, open to her hands, her fingers, waiting for the unwrap. He giggles. He is charming. He lusts. He is sick. He is drawing near to her and she is drawing away from him, and in-between someone else has drawn a full hand raised up at them, a wall separating the two, a parallel distance. There is paper and it is his arm, his arm is paper and he writes: You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mean that, say youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re sorry. She is not sorry. There is nothing to make her sorry. Her legs are not college-ruled. Her elbows are not hole-punched. Her face is not a margin. Her eyes are eyes with colors in them and looking. She is looking. She is looking in a magazine for pages. She is not reading. In the magazine there are none of his limbs. He writes: Give me back all that you took. He writes the book of her, of him, a sentence that goes: This is what you have made of me.

A phrase he keeps saying, writing: What will happen, What will happen. She shuffles her hand across his ribs. She is opening the blinds but it is him she is fanning. It is his chest she tickles when she pulls the strings of her hooded-sweatshirt. It is his eyes that follow when she takes a page and seams it over, folds it into a triangle that makes half of a square. Perfumes him with her breathing, each nostril horse venting, the coming fast of words in sentences on pages. She is not on his page. She is not in pages. She is not in words or sentences. So, he says. She is reading a romance, she is reading a newspaper, she is reading the words on a sign that says no one can park here. She cries, the language on her tongue. There is none of him. He writes: There was a day when you wanted me too. Come around he says, and then draws a picture of a boat, the wind from his arms waving to her window from the street, from the curb, from inside himself. She turns off the light and rolls, her eyes closing on the pages of him. She does not see his arms flailing, she does not hear his words, she is too tired to read anymore words. If, a, the.

Like on a map, all the places they have been, had been, San Bernardino, Buffalo, Houston. A map with routes traced in yellow highlighter. A map rock jagged, pictures of mountains and gas icons, the places they stopped to eat. She reads a pamphlet in a waiting room. She reads a business card from a man’s hand. She reads an envelope addressed to her with a bill inside it for all the light she uses, late at night, to read. He holds his hands to the sides of his face, to the glass of a window, sees inside but it is not her, she is up a story, two stories, nine stories, she is at the top, near the top, taller than he is. He sees a woman eating dinner with a man. He sees a kid in a seat, his face a mess of ketchup, mustard. He sees a tv on, lulling out news-anchor blurbs, game show murmurs, cartoon antics. He sees a couch and a chair, lamps turning on. He sees a family sitting down eating dinner. He does not see her. This is a paper him. Don’t you see me here? Don’t you see how this is going? She has tattoos of butterfly and turtle, a sunflower opening on her ribs, bloom of tree on her back. She puts her head through a turtleneck; today is chilled. She puts her lips on a glass full of milk. She puts a fork into a slice of pie. She puts her hands into her hands, around a mug. There is a ringing in his ears and he writes: There is a ringing in my ears. And he wants to ask her if she hears it, if she is the one making that sound, if it is the white noise of

how they have come apart. But he doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t write that, he doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ask. What he writes is I told you I could be a shelter. I will not blow away. The ringing goes on, her fingers free of gripping anything, limp by her sides, falling into a sleep, in darkness, all the lights gone. She. It. This. There is no light for her to read by. And she is asleep. And there is no one looking for him, there is no one following his words. She is not reading his ribs, extended to her, waving arms. He writes words, this, that, until the night eats his paper edges, until it is all shadows and no more white, torn from one another.

“MEZ BREEZE does for code poetry as jodi and Vuk Cosic for ASCII Art: Turning a great, but

naively executed concept into something brilliant, paving the ground for a whole generation of digital artists” (Florian Cramer). The impact of her unique code/netwurks [constructed via her pioneering net.language “mezangelle”] has been equated with the work of Shakespeare, James Joyce, Emily Dickinson, and Larry Wall. Mez has exhibited extensively since the early 90s [eg Wollongong World Women Online 1995, ISEA Chicago + ARS Electronica 1997, The Metropolitan Museum Tokyo 1999, SIGGRAPH 1999 & 2000, _Under_Score_ @The Brooklyn Academy of Music 2001, +playengines+ Melbourne Australia 2003, p0es1s Berlin 2004, Dissention Convention @Postmaster Gallery New York 2004, Arte Nuevo InteractivA Mexico 2005, Radical Software @Turin Italy 2006, DIWO @ the HTTP Gallery London 2007, New Media Scotland 2008, the Laguna Art Museum California, Alternator Gallery Canada 2009 and Federation Square Melbourne 2010]. Her awards include the 2001 VIF Prize [Germany], the JavaMuseum Artist Of The Year 2001 [Germany], 2002 Newcastle New Media Poetry Prize [Australia], winner of the 2006 Site Specific Index Page Competition [Italy] + awarded the 2007 “Deep Structure: Deep Play” Neutral Ground/Soil Digital Media Commission [Canada]. Mez is also the Executive Editor of the “_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_” project, a Synthetic Ecology Strategist, Futurist and Game Theorist who practices _Poetic Game Interventions_ [the creative manipulation of MMO parameters in order to disrupt or comment on various aspects of augmented states]. KATE GREENSTREET’s second book, The Last 4 Things, is new from Ahsahta Press and includes a

DVD containing two short films. Ahsahta published Greenstreet's case sensitive in 2006. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, 2008). Find her new work in current or forthcoming issues of jubilat, Fence, VOLT, the Denver Quarterly, Court Green, and other journals. JOE HALL is the founder and co-organizer (with Wade Fletcher) of the Washington, D.C. area

reading series, Cheryl's Gone. The poems here are from his first book, Pigafetta Is My Wife, which will be published April, 2010 by Black Ocean Press. Other poems from the book have appeared in Versal, Phoebe, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. SHANE HINTON is worried that the internet might be two people in a small room in Mexico

talking about the state of humanity over tepid apricot soda. judsoN completed a Faculty Fellowship at ITP (Interactive Telecommunications MA Program) at

New York University / Tisch in 2007. He programmed interactive artwork in 1996 with one of the first online galleries Ädaweb. In 1999, with artist Michael Craig-Martin for the MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art's web art collection), under circus tents in the Czech Republic and Poland with avant-garde theatrical legends Mabou Mines, for the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum web biennial, for the Arts Council of Mildura Australia, featured at the Kitchen theater in New York with multi-national group Shadow Casters, three times for the FILE festival in Brasil, at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and an interactive piece with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and composer Eve Beglarian at the Brooklyn Museum. The Handbook on Computational Arts and Creative Informatics (including his chapter) is available now from IGI Global.

PAULETTE LIVERS’s fiction has appeared in The Dos Passos Review, Palimpsest, Frequency, Dogzplot,

and in the audio-journal Bound Off. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Artcroft Artists Residency, the Bedell Foundation at Aspen, the Center for the American West, the Denver Women’s Press Club, Key West Literary Seminar, and Squaw Valley Community of Writers. CRISTOBAL MENDOZA is a Venezuelan media artist and programmer whose interests lie in the

intersection of technology with the personal. His current research involves databases and data bodies, networks and visualizations of networks. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Electronic Arts and Graphic Design at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. He obtained an M.F.A. in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007, and a B.A. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in 2003. His work has been shown in various venues in the United States and Europe. J. MICHAEL MARTINEZ’s writings have appeared in Five Fingers Review, New American Writing,

Colorado Review, on NPR, and, most recently, in Quarterly West, Eleven Eleven, Copper Nickel, and Parthenon West. He is the recipient of the 2006 Five Fingers Review Poetry Prize; his collection Heredities was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award, and will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2010. DERRICK MUND grew up on Lake Michigan and has lived in Kalamazoo, Detroit, New York,

Chicago, Montana, and Colorado. He has been published in Third Eye, North Coast, Fogged Clarity, and others. He likes Squirt when being surprised with soda from a gas station, and blogs at http://internationalradiofrequency.blogspot.com/ JASON NELSON was born from the computerless land of farmers and spring thunderstorms and

somehow stumbled into creating awkward and wondrous digital poems and interactive stories of odd lives. Currently, he teaches Net Art and Electronic Literature at Griffith University in the Gold Coast's contradictory lands. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking, playing, and morphing their creativity with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around globe in New York, Mexico, Taiwan, Spain, Singapore, and Brazil at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, ACM, ELO, and dozens of other acronyms. But in the web based realm where his work resides, Jason is most proud of the millions of visitors his artwork / digital poetry portal http://www.secrettechnology.com attracts each year. MATTHEW ROBERT REITER teaches Creative Writing and English at the College of Staten Island

and New Jersey City University. He holds a BA in English from West Virginia University and a MFA in Poetry from Boise State University. His work has appeared in cold drill, maddening loop, mid)rib, cornslaw, wierddeer, and others. He lives in Jersey City. CHRISTOPHER DAVID ROSALES was the recipient of the 2009 McNamara Family Creative Arts

Grant for his novel Plata o Plomo, and won the Center of the American West's writing awards for 2008 and 2009. His work has appeared most recently in Palimpsest and 34th Parallel. He runs a blog on writing at http://word-is-bone.blogspot.com/

SYLVANUS SHAW has exhibited at the National Arts Club, the International Art + Design Fair,

and most recently the 2009 International Fine Art Show at New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Park Avenue Armory. His poetry and criticism have appeared in Aufgabe Journal of Poetry, Lilies and Cannonballs Review, and elsewhere. The Sylvanusylvania Limited Liability Corporation is the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s entrepreneurial extension and corporate homunculus, broadcasting at www.sylvanusylvania.com. ALISON STRUB is currently pursuing her M.F.A. at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

She is the Managing Editor of So to Speak: A Feminist Literary Journal, and likes dogs, artist's books, and novelty candy. J.A. TYLER is the author of the novel(la)sINCONCEIVABLE WILSON (scrambler books,

2009), SOMEONE, Somewhere (ghost road press, 2009) &amp; IN LOVE WITH A GHOST (willows wept press, 2010)&amp; has had recent work with Sleepingfish, Caketrain, Hotel St. George, elimae, &amp; Action Yes. He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. For more details, visit: http://www.aboutjatyler.com.