SF&D | September [Floor Plan]

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SF&D | Short, Fast, and Deadly September 2012 | [Floor Plan]

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

Joseph A. W. Quintela | Senior Editor Sarah Long | Poetry Editor

Chris Vola | Chapbook Reviewer

Published by Deadly Chaps Press ISBN | 978-1-937739-11-9 www.deadlychaps.com www.shortfastanddeadly.com DCsf&d2012 | 9

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iii | Theme Joseph A. W. Quintela (Editor’s Contribution) | Living with the Ghost // David Tomaloff | Straytaking // David Tomaloff | The Elephant in the Room // Michael Andrew O’Brien | Untitled // Ryan Biracree | Psychasthenia; Curation of Materials and Curiosities // C. Martinez | Blueprint Chest // Eryk Wenziak | 20[seventh] // Meg Tuite | Constipation // Michael Shattuck | Unruly // Tony Fusco | Those Understanding Bending Language, // David e. Haase | Escher's Dream // Spencer Selby | Floor Plan // Mark James Andrews | Memo to Q. T. // J Quinn Buckley| Birth(Floor)Plan (1) // J Quinn Buckley | Birth(Floor)Plan (2) // J Quinn Buckley | Birth(Floor)Plan (3)

xx | Featuring Angela Veronica Wong | Statement // Angela Veronica Wong | Photograph // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (1): Living Room // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (2): My First Barbie Dream House // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (3): The View From Up Top // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (4): Time Is Not But Time In Time // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (5): The New Barbie Dream House // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (6): The Act of Being

xxix | Black Market Gulnar Tuli | Red // Gabriel Don | Two Sides

xxxii | Prose

Ryan Heimberger | Red Cherry Krill // Sean Daly | Duplex // Howie Good | The Complete Absence of Twilight // Craig Fishbane | Punctured // Eve Lampenfeld | The Tsarina // Katherine MacCue | A World Without Salt

xxxix | Poems

Michael Alleman | Vow // Michael Alleman | Scarecrow // Christina Stephens | Your typeface is so small, it is too small // Bill Yarrow | On the Road // Bill Yarrow | What a Monster I Would Have Become Had I Gone Through Life Unimpeded // Jessica Gleason | 1:30AM at The Stumble Inn

xlvi | Views Chris Vola | (re)View of TERMINAL INSEMINATION ART by Clive Birnie // Thomas Wexler | (re)View of 1975 by Eryk Wenziak // Joseph A. W. Quintela| (inter)View of Eryk Wenziak

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Theme

September 2012 | [Floor Plan] Joseph A. W. Quintela (Editor’s Contribution) | Living with the Ghost // David Tomaloff | Straytaking // David Tomaloff | The Elephant in the Room // Michael Andrew O’Brien | Untitled // Ryan Biracree | Psychasthenia; Curation of Materials and Curiosities // C. Martinez | Blueprint Chest // Eryk Wenziak | 20[seventh] // Meg Tuite | Constipation // Michael Shattuck | Unruly // Tony Fusco | Those Understanding Bending Language, // David e. Haase | Escher's Dream // Spencer Selby | Floor Plan // Mark James Andrews | Memo to Q. T. // J Quinn Buckley | Birth(Floor)Plan (1) // J Quinn Buckley | Birth(Floor)Plan (2) // J Quinn Buckley | Birth(Floor)Plan (3)

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Joseph A. W. Quintela (Editor’s Contribution) | Living with the Ghost

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David Tomaloff | Straytaking

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David Tomaloff | The Elephant in the Room

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Michael Andrew O’Brien | Untitled

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Ryan Biracree | Psychasthenia; Curation of Materials and Curiosities

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C. Martinez | Blueprint Chest

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Eryk Wenziak | 20[seventh]

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Meg Tuite | Constipation

the fist that punched a hole in my invisibility

skin-sliced eyes bloating contorted me purple-vein into my face a planet thrusts distended browbeaten into desperate a week’s worth strained of my plastered fiber sitting on stools in my intestines no longer blustered by across the surface like an anorexic earlobe lips drained of anything hued my fists a revolution a weight lifter staggering up three hundred pound barbells with every Higg’s particle pushing to break the toxic stuporific opium den of waste that lounged extending into an unseen mass I battled but couldn’t expel I still looked for some remnant that might have escaped still flushed wild-eyed and hyperventilating

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Michael Shattuck | Unruly

shoeboxes of letters, no

address

Orange

volumes of prayers, no belief

Yellow

legions of flags, no country

Red

piles of bricks, no pattern

Violet

clips of ammo, no pistol

Blue

reams of data, no formula

Green

sets of leads, no mystery

White

list of rules, no game

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Tony Fusco | Those Understanding Bending Language,

Those Understanding Bending Language, As Falling Secrets Secrets and names bind to our senses all things Falling from the lips of God hidden As ideals and ideas of forms in Language, the bards alone address the heart Bending sound and word through force of will Understanding creation as is was meant to be Those reborn in memories and deeds of others revealed

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David e. Haase | Escher's Dream same fever/ e______ / hasitso a strap w c n h s trap \different brand r r \ o s trap a o c mdeathmachine_ k

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Spencer Selby | Floor Plan

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Mark James Andrews | Memo to Q. T.

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J Quinn Buckley | Birth(Floor)Plan (1)

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J Quinn Buckley | Birth(Floor)Plan (2)

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J Quinn Buckley | Birth(Floor)Plan (3)

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Featuring

Angela Veronica Wong | Statement // Angela Veronica Wong | Photograph // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (1): Living Room // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (2): My First Barbie Dream House // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (3): The View From Up Top // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (4): Time Is Not But Time In Time // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (5): The New Barbie Dream House // Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (6): The Act of Being

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Angela Veronica Wong | Statement [Author’s Name] lives and [Favored Activity] in [Place of Residence] [With/Without] [His/Her] [List of Significant Other(s) And/Or Animal Familiar(s)]. [His/Her] work has appeared in [Most Prestigious Print Publication Credit], [Most Prestigious Online Publication Credit], and [Offbeat But Very Hip Publication Credit]. Most recently, [He/She] was granted [Prestigious Writing Award/Manuscript Award/Residency/Scholarship]. A full-length collection [Was Recently Published/Is Forthcoming] from [Press You Haven’t Heard Of] in [Some Far And Distant Date In Past or Future]. [Self-Consciously Witty Final Sentence].

//the above bio template was co-written by Joseph A. W. Quintela and Angela Veronica Wong in lieu of the usual author’s statement//

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Angela Veronica Wong | Photograph

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Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (1): Living Room

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Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (2): My First Barbie Dream House

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Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (3): The View From Up Top

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Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (4): Time Is Not But Time In Time

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Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (5): The New Barbie Dream House

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Angela Veronica Wong | A Framework A Framework (6): The Act of Being

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Black Market

Gulnar Tuli | Red // Gabriel Don | Two Sides

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Gulnar Tuli | Red

Can it be, that I shall tread in this sticky warm blood? Darkness and confusion were in his soul Good God, My own death, Shaped vaguely like an airplane

//written with words excepted from “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky and “Rabbit at Rest” by John

Updike//

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Gabriel Don | Two Sides

Blanco that’s been kept in white oak casks Called Don Imported Domestic Honey Patron, patron, Patron Silver topped dolores Shredded sweet black Grilled Inside out Lightly On the side Served Super On the side Rolled in a Choice Deep In

//with words excerpted from the menu at Benny’s Burritos (New York)//

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Prose

Ryan Heimberger | Red Cherry Krill // Sean Daly | Duplex // Howie Good | The Complete Absence of Twilight // Craig Fishbane | Punctured // Eve Lampenfeld | The Tsarina // Katherine MacCue | A World Without Salt

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Ryan Heimberger | Red Cherry Krill

The shoes are tired and require me snatch a fresh set of socks. I go unseen to purchase a pack of thick grays and a bucket of cherry red krill for sustenance. Minus guidance I wonder why I am here. Man is an ideal, not the male Human, but namely the Self-Actualized Nihilist. My brain stops. Pennington's wife will find us soon, and the shoes will stir out in the morning. I hope the krill will keep without its basin.

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Sean Daly | Duplex

We moved to a duplex when dad left. It smelt like food we didn't eat. “It will be a fresh start for us,” mom said. She caught the bus to her job at the dental office, and a couple of kids pushed me around in the alley the first day I walked home from school. A Mexican girl on the top floor saw the whole thing through her window beneath the weathered blue awning. Her eyes filled with mercy.

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Howie Good | The Complete Absence of Twilight When the clock you had shot couldn’t be repaired, you placed it on a hill as bear bait. The floor of the forest was littered by then with the red-and-black checkered caps of hundreds of hunters. There was, your last postcard said, a complete absence of twilight. You should have lived to fifty or even fifty-five, a pint always tucked away in your back pocket. Other fathers did.

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Craig Fishbane | Punctured My mother told me not to open the toy in the car. I might break it. She didn’t see that everything was already broken. A bridge had collapsed and shut down the expressway. A peace treaty was being violated in a country I would never visit. Fenders and headlights were ruined when my mother turned to scream at the sound of punctured plastic. I watched her shadow leak through cracks in the windshield.

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Eve Lampenfeld | The Tsarina You're drifting, the Russian woman says, jiggling with nasty that must have taken years. It was she that left the bloody band-aid in my lane, too rich for this, staring at the young girls, back and forth. Crowded widths in the pool of the longest length you'd see. It wasn't over in the lockers. She’s waiting, yakking about the best part of communism, staring as Americans shove plump hips into pants, busts into bras, smiling, rolling their eyes. "It isn't over," she says, finally reaching into a locker.

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Katherine MacCue | A World Without Salt The eggs are bland today, I'll stay in bed, remain in this stupor. Last night, I held the sea, let her cry about a fine thing she lost amidst a violent rage. It is not enough to tolerate something, you must like its gravity at all hours: the pirate’s whiskey song, choking mermaid gargle. Without you is a tongue without pull: is drowning. I surface up in these sheets, dreaming of the special lick before tequila.

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Poems

Michael Alleman | Vow // Michael Alleman | Scarecrow // Christina Stephens | Your typeface is so small, it is too small // Bill Yarrow | On the Road // Bill Yarrow | What a Monster I Would Have Become Had I Gone Through Life Unimpeded // Jessica Gleason | 1:30AM at The Stumble Inn

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Michael Alleman | Vow

In autumn, swear on leaves and mercury that you will find direction. Geese begin to spell. They know one word and have forgotten the vowel.

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Michael Alleman | Scarecrow “Let us pretend,” we said, “that we are clothes.” We raised our hands. Birds fled. We lowered our hands. We wept. We wanted to love.

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Christina Stephens | Your typeface is so small, it is too small Your face a grayed out photograph papering each full moon. I think it’s just the moon. a cemetery never closes a cemetery is an adamant fist

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Bill Yarrow | On the Road The sky was clear but how did they not know they were driving into lightning?

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Bill Yarrow | What a Monster I Would Have Become Had I Gone Through Life Unimpeded

the title of this poem is far better than this naked snake of words

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Jessica Gleason | 1:30AM at The Stumble Inn She was wide in the place where women sometimes go wild. Having wanted too much from alcoholic pool- players, she limped off making a distinct clacking sound.

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Views

Chris Vola | (re)View of TERMINAL INSEMINATION ART by Clive Birnie // Thomas Wexler | (re)View of 1975 by Eryk Wenziak // Joseph A. W. Quintela| (inter)View with Eryk Wenziak

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Chris Vola | (re)View of TERMINAL INSEMINATION ART by Clive Birnie

“Experiment and swagger” through the bodily murk-fragments of Clive Birnie’s TERMINAL INSEMINATION ART, a clever, sexualized thought-history strewn with early African still-lifes, androgynous Japanese, and witch hunt agendas. Chunks of weird, pleasant-slash-violent verse provoke and disturb, a prescient song for any number of discordant times. Where even the white space is “so damn big you can’t get away from it.”

//TERMINAL INSEMINATION ART by Clive Birnie can be found online at Silkworms Ink (http://www.silkwormsink.com/products/chapbook-lv-terminal-insemination-art)//

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Thomas Wexler | (re)View of 1975 by Eryk Wenziak

Eryk Wenziak’s warring words are perpetrators/victims, guilty/innocent, bound dependently in depravity and suffering. They embrace, then struggle to escape confinement, jarring and unsettling as the actions they portray. We are assaulted. Destabilizing gestures strip familiarity and comfort, testing what is communicable the way the horrors of the Khmer Rouge test human resilience. Stark, urgent repetition is either threat or plea – “KILLING FIELDS, KILLING FIELDS, DON’T KILL MY BABY.” Radical, reconstituted documentary speech, 1975 confronts the tortured silence that has accompanied the ever-present legacy of the genocide in Cambodia. The poem’s conclusion emerges like a strange, sad song. Bones “speak” a “human truth,” traumatized villagers can hear years later, ultimately a sign of hope as Cambodia works to reclaim its culture, with members of the Khmer Rouge finally being judged by a tribunal.

//1975 by Eryk Wenziak can be found online at Deadly Chaps Press (http://www.deadlychaps.com/1975.html)//

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Joseph A. W. Quintela | (inter)View of Eryk Wenziak

/1975 by Eryk Wenziak was published by Deadly Chaps Press as part of the second series of A5 sketchbooks. To supplement the independent review by Thomas Wexler (published in this issue), we asked Wenziak a few questions

about his work//

Joseph A. W. Quintela: I'd like to start by simply acknowledging that 1975 is an amazing achievement of poetry. It vividly pays testimony to a genocide that many Americans have already forgotten, or worse never were taught about in the first place. Can you tell us a little bit about how the poem came to be? Eryk Wenziak: I began writing the piece at the end of 2006. It began as one-page with 5 stanzas which, at the time, was more of a cathartic exercise than anything else. A close friend survived the genocide at the age of 6 months when she and her family fled into Thailand. She lost her brothers and other relatives during that time. She later passed away here in the states and when she died, I wrote this for her to cope with loss and emptiness. I wanted to give voice to the atrocities that she, her family, and the people of Cambodia suffered. Over the years I worked on it and put it away many times due to the subject matter being so close. It was a big decision to choose this piece for the A5 Series from an emotional standpoint, but I felt the time was right. I felt it in my heart. JAWQ: The September issue invited our readers to play with the visual form of the floor plan. Obviously, space is a very important formal element of the floor plan, and similarly, your use of space in 1975 seems carefully thought out. How do you feel space plays into the poem and was this influenced by the A5 concept of filling a blank sketchbook? EW: Space played an extremely important role in the writing of this piece. Just as important as space—and by that I mean “white space”—was the visual aspect of how words were arranged on paper. Last came content, which seems a strange order of priorities, but the experimental nature of the poem allowed me to present a visual representation of the genocide using the layout of words and space on the page with content functioning in a supporting role. And at various places the content matter is very unsettling and disturbing, as I used direct quotes from texts on the genocide. I can best explain the space aspect by the first 1/3 of the poem being visually chaotic—words float on the page, the concept of margins/punctuation/grammar is destroyed, multiple fonts are used, various sentences are written in Khmer, and single words take on different meanings through the use of parenthesis. An example of what I’m talking about: one stanza on page 3 is placed on the page as a field, with the words “Killing Fields” representing rows of buried bodies between lines of hyphens. JAWQ: Right, I can see that, so what do you feel comes out of this overwhelming sense of chaos? EW: As the piece moves forward to the middle and end, the use of “white space” is much more apparent. I reduce the visual aspect, and go for a more minimal appearance. What is nice about

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the A5 Series is that the blank books are completely black and white. When I received it, I knew instantly what piece I was going to use for the project. The minimal aspect of the book was perfect for the “feel” I was going for. But like I was saying, towards the end of the piece, space functions as a way to stress the fact that this entire event has unfortunately, even by some of the Cambodian population, become a forgotten genocide. And I tried to achieve this by having only thirty-four words on the last 3 pages, with a single word on the bottom of the final page. JAWQ: Truly stunning. Thank you for taking us through your engagement with space and visual form in this work. One last question, and on a lighter note: For poets (and all creative engagements, really), I think “play space” is a very important concept that quite obviously can lead to very serious work. What’s your favorite “play space”? How do you like to play? EW: My favorite “play space” is my brain, where I can often be found playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” on an imaginary wall in an imaginary English pub that smells of imaginary stale beer.

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