Unshod Quills

On the themes of Your Very Flesh, Groceries, and Gratitude

Artist Biography

http://www.chuckkaiser.com

On the theme of Gratitude

THE KING OF BEEF

I said it right on prime time. I said, I’m quitting Chef Marty’s Fistful of Meat. I said, “Fuck this!” The censors bleeped that part, I’m sure. The show’s director rolled her eyes  and drew a quick finger across her throat. The cameramen screwed up their faces. Members in the studio audience rose with open mouths and hands. But the cable home viewers could make out my lips. Hell, who never saw an MTV video without lip synch?

***

Greek Potatoes

When a nice golden-brown crust has formed on the potatoes, give them a stir to bring the white underside up, season lightly with a bit more sea salt and pepper and just a light sprinkling of oregano. 

Add 1/2 cup more water if pan appears to be getting dry, and pop back into oven to brown other side of potatoes.

This will take about another 40 minutes. Do not be afraid of overcooking the potatoes they will be delicious.

***

No, my viewers, my loyal armies willing to grow obese in the wastelands of fats and triglycerides, my tragic eat-or-die disciples who dreamed of a land of free cheeseburgers and root beer floats and smiling teletubbies. They could read between the lines of my high cholesterol, clog-those-bifurcating-arteries-until-you-need-a-stent-or-a-new-heart. Yes! I announced on the air that I was starting a crusade. I would turn vegetarian. I was going to march and hitchhike across the country, from Brooklyn Bridge to Golden Gate, passing out lo-cal recipes, shaking hands and apologizing to the people who once believed in my Magnum Beef Double-Deckers with O.K. Corral Hot Sauce.

***

Sticky Rice

Soak rice overnight in cold water, or for 15 minutes in boiling water if short of time. 

Drain the rice, rinse and spread out on a wet cloth inside a steamer.

***

I broke down and cried on the air. With arms raised, I cried out, “My meat-loving, too much girth and big-assed brothers and sisters, I HAVE SINNED! I am the Reverend Moon of Food Gurus! I have ruined you, cost you millions of pre-Obamacare dollars.” I said, I WAS PAID TO FATTEN YOU, TO MAKE YOU DIE FOR A LOUSY ONION RING AND ITS COUSIN THE FRENCH FRY! I’M NOTHING BUT A FAT GREASY BASTARD WITH WARTS ON MY BEHIND!

I said, facing the cameras, that I couldn’t refund their clotted lives, but I would withdraw money from my personal bank and checking accounts and give back to each what I could.

A camera technician fainted. Someone threw a glass of water in his face.

***

Spinach and four-cheese manicotti (vegetarian)

In a mixing bowl combine two cups of ricotta cheese, 1-1/2 cup mozzarella cheese, cream cheese, 6 tablespoons Parmesan cheese, Italian seasoning; beat with a wooden spoon until smooth and well combined. 

Season with sea salt or garlic salt and black pepper to taste

***

After the producers fired me, after I was escorted out of the building situated three blocks west of Times Square, after I read and cried over so many fan letters in my high-rise apartment on East 3rd and 57th street, I traveled westward, equipped with only a knapsack of clothes, books of blank checks and some fresh fruit from the farmer’s market.

One of the last letters I received before I left was from Oprah. It said: I LOVE YOU, MARTY, AND ALL YOUR MACHO BEEF RIGHT DOWN TO THE LAST FORBIDDEN CHEESE DOODLE. AND  DR. OZ and I CAN RELATE TO YOUR MISSION. IT’S TIME FOR AMERICA TO WAKE UP AND TRIM DOWN! I WISH YOU THE BEST OF LUCK AND HOPE YOUR JOURNEY ENDS WITH A NEW SENSE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT.

I CAN UNDERSTAND YOUR GUILT. I’VE BEEN THERE. XXXXXXXX O

***

Granny’s Slow Cooker Chili Recipe

In a saucepan, sauté the onion, bell pepper, zucchini, and celery for about 5 minutes. 

In a slow cooker, combine black bean soup, kidney beans, garbanzo beans, baked beans, tomatoes, corn, onion, bell pepper, zucchini, jalapeño, chilies, and celery.

Season with garlic, chili powder, cumin, parsley, oregano, basil.

Cook for about 6 hours on low.

***

As I hitchhiked cross-country, people picked me in their humble station wagons. They saved me from walking in the rain. Dogs licked my hands. Even they recognized me! Women listened to my stories, how I was tricked and coerced into reciting recipes that I no longer believed in. How my girth was the girth of Middle America, of Americans traveling every highway, from Rt. 66 to Rt. 90, how I helped in making America bulge. How I ruined her precious and perfect belly button.

Their husbands shook their heads, said it wasn’t entirely my fault. The women fed me cooked cabbage and asparagus. Some asked me to become a Christian Martyr or a Reborn Again. I politely declined. I knew where my mission lay. And in the late hours of the morning, before I departed from their wonderful homes, before I thanked and thanked them for their hospitality—I snuck a blank check into their refrigerators, sometimes under the coleslaw.

I converted so many to Vegetarianism. In the vast networks of American suburbs, I stood or knelt on immaculately trimmed front lawns and cried out: “Brothers and sisters, crunch and masticate SLOWLY.”

By the time I reached Portland, I was weary but I had regained my pride and dignity. I had lost my girth. I was living on water and fruits and raw vegetables. I’d left blank checks in every household I had visited. I was making America rich!

I hitchhiked down to California. Weighing a mere ninety pounds, I flapped in the wind on the Golden Gate Bridge, stretched my arms wide before the gorgeous sunrise, and vomited. I threw up every morsel and lie, every bit of my beef-jerky past. I felt clean.

And I dove into the shimmering sea.

***

Thank you, Lean Mean Marty, the ex-king of Beef. You saved my life with your simple vegetarian outlook and the wonderful blank check you left under the jar of low-cal mayonnaise. My husband was recently laid off. But now I don’t need to worry about our next meal. XXXXXXXXXXLisa944

Author Biography

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and prose: Avenue C, Cat People, and Anime Junkie (Scars Publications), and Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction (NAP). His latest e-books are You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press and The Truth about Onions from Good Samaritan. His latest collection of prose/poetry is Void & Sky from Outskirt Press.

Burning Man, ’05; “The Tactile Compass” Anthony Bondi

On the theme of Your Very Flesh

Author Biography

Anthony Bondi is an artist native to and living in Las Vegas, Nevada.

On the theme of Rivers

The Timok* That Was and Isn’t II
(Writings from the River Bank)

I want to write from the river bank, but the writing is dead.
Words of sadness and joy lost meaning along the paths in
the steep tea terrace-like park overlooking Macau harbour,
in the gondola of a cable car lift to Mount Whistler off Van
BC, in the undersea tunnel from the Ålesund airport to the
city, in all of which I left a piece of myself, equally lost to
the present as the last feet-first jump into the Timok waters
off the old sluice, the concrete dregs of which are still clearly
visible poking out of red, dead, sand-like pyrite silt.

I want to fly back to the river bank in my memory, but
the memory is all but faded. Once known tastes are jaded,
environment irreparably degraded, privileges annulled,
rights downgraded (in the aftermath of a crisis of capitalism
that devours its own tale) and the Timok is a dead canal,
redder than the Mekong on whose banks buffalos graze.
No grass grows around the Timok’s barren banks, no birds
fly over it, as no bugs hatch in its poisoned liquid that today
might perhaps still be called “water” only metaphorically.
I’ll go to the bank of what used to be the river and I’ll mourn
the fate of the planet whose dying I did nothing to prevent,
and my unfulfilled dreams. And the Timok of yesteryear, of
course. I am not sure I want to, but I think that, after many
years, I will cry once again. Bitterly. I do want to write from
the river bank, but the river is dead. And therefore all attempts
at poetry are a priori doomed to a prosaic mental exercise.
So I won’t write from the river bank, for the river is gone, it
has died, there, at the end — and the beginning — the cradle
and the deathbed of the world.

* Not a particularly mighty river, the Serbian Timok, a variant of Classical Roman Timacus, gave name to the Thracian tribe of Timachoi in antiquity and to the Slavonic tribe of Timocani in the early Middle Ages. Since 1920s it has been turned into a sewer of one of the biggest copper processing plants in Europe, a situation that exacerbated especially after mid-1970s. It rolls so much poisonous sludge into the Danube right on the spot where the borders of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania meet that both Romania and Bulgaria have brought a complaint against Serbia to international monitoring bodies because of it. I was born in an old bishopric see that is a small town now, 7 km from the river.

Author Biography

Miodrag Kojadinović is a polyglot and writes in English, Serbian, Dutch, and French and speaks two dozen other European and Asian languages. His work has been featured in anthologies in the US, Serbia, Canada, Russia, the Netherlands, Slovenia, India, Montenegro, the UK, and Croatia.

On the theme of Your Very Flesh

HENRY WAGGER

Old man Wagger slept in a tree.
He laughed at wasps. He owned a river road.
His daughter chased drunks from his orchard.
He said: squeeze the trigger, don’t chase.

Old man Wagger dreamed like a wall.
Planets could steal. Blackbirds could drag the world.
His first wife poured all the wine in the fire.
The new wife slowed the land.

Old man Wagger feared us alive.
Jets shook a parrot in a cage. An apron burned.
The neighbors worked at him and took his mind.
I see the wife at his skull, reading trees.

JEROME HAWBY

Jerome dug into a burnt stump where a bent nail looked like a coin
that he dreamed could buy a shadow. The shadow burned and burned
against the nail, and then across his left eye, so that his mind fell
into a sunrise with all the worlds tricked loose, a sleeping army far away,
a chopper in a marsh, some gods folded wildly into the lights and walls
where his father must have vanished before Jerome was born.

He hooked the nail into his key chain. It was a rusty life too near
spelled with his mother’s voice, and it slipped into his dreams again
where the metal was forged, where the iron deep-cooled, where
the hammer stared into a pine tree, where an old man owned cattle,
where a young woman screamed and birthed him. His poems
were sunk into a wooden sky with the nail and its splotchy summers
shocked into words. There were frets on a guitar in one dream,
the strings cut into his fingers, they moved into the chords with his blood.
He was Jerome Hawby, and an audience howled through his shadow.

Author Biography

Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, Virginia.  He is a member of Blue Ridge Discovery Center, and environmental and natural history education organization in southwest Virginia and western North Carolina.

On the theme of Rivers

Knurl

The river ascends like an S, a signature
scrolled through bedrock, detour from a minuend
of ocean. Rain claps hands to end the overture.
What more can we endure of this knurled dividend,

this biblical earth? Silence is so accurate,
a featherweight among stones, the lost evidence
that we were here, alive, intense as fenestrate.
Our rivers ascend like eights, infinite accidents.

Author Biography

Jennifer Hill is the author of six books of poetry and two books of prose. She is an editor and designer at Paper Kite Press, an independent press devoted to poetry. When she isn’t writing, she can be found spinning with a hoop, and encouraging others to try. She can be found online at actsofjennius.com.

On the theme of Your Very Flesh

Dark Continent

“Bulimic self-improvement,” is a phrase I steal from my friend;
it satisfies everyone, springs like a trap, surprising my
cynical friends into kind agreement and, caught off guard,
we stop talking.

We talk about our bodies.

Calling the inside of my body a “dark continent” is another bit I pull out
less successfully. No one gets what I mean.
My wife rolls her eyes. “What is going on inside of me?” I say,
repeat it, laugh. Past midnight on my birthday, I ask this of everyone at the bar,
My Father’s Place at 12:37, these good friends gathered here
by my wife, one her many gifts to me.
As I age, I have fewer working bits, repeat the rest until they break (also with satisfaction).
It’s one of those dark, red-lit bars, the kind we all agree is best.
It’s winter and I love the winter because nothing moves me
like a light carried stoic into the dark.

Author Biography

Derrick Martin-Campbell is a writer living in Portland, OR.  His work has previously appeared in places like HOUSEFIRE, Metazen, New Dead Families, Smalldoggies, and Thought Catalog.   You can read more of his work at derrickmartincampbell.tumblr.com.

On the theme of Elvis

And then there’s the night
you were actually Elvis—
not just dressed as Elvis,
not just driving a Caddy
as big as a battleship,
pretending to be Elvis—
the night you really were him,
sauntering around a backyard party,
everyone in their
silly Halloween costumes,
while you lounged
drunk on a patio chaise,
and none of the
goddamned sheep
realized that
THE KING was there
walking among them,
just a normal guy
for a change.
And all the dopey girls dressed as
sexy nurses and Playboy bunnies
certainly didn’t appreciate your
sage-like wisdom, telling them,
“Now listen here, baby…you don’t
wanna fool around with these frat guys,
you hear? Frat guys are all about the
date rape, mama…” and the girls scatter
like a grenade has gone off, and you say
to no one in particular, “Thank you,
thankyouverymuch…”
And you think maybe
they’re right, maybe
I am losing it…
while your buddy
spends a half hour
talking about
cocaine,
“It’s like you,”
he says,
“only
better!”

Author Biography

Hosho McCreesh is currently writing and painting in the gypsum and caliche badlands of the American Southwest.  Books available from Bottle of Smoke Press, sunnyoutside, Orange Alert Press, and Propaganda Press; broadsides available from 10pt Press; art prints can be found at http://society6.com/HoshoMcCreesh.

On the themes of Elvis, Rivers and Salt

Clockwork king

Let us make a mechanical Elvis, a cybernetic emissary
for the city of Las Vegas, twenty stories tall,
a hip-swishing colossus to bestride The Strip
at one end. It will be a ten-year endeavor, with

so many cogs and gears to mold,
so many miles and miles of circuitry,
so many algorithms to puzzle through:
eℓvi ∫ a(r) Ωn = Pr(es) L(ey)

What will you be? No mere mannequin,
so much more than a metonym,
something more substantive,
quintessentially je ne sais hunka hunka,

fueled by fried banana sandwiches,
full of fiberoptic veins,
your neural nets tirelessly knitting
oh one one oh one oh one oh oh oh oh

to mimic an authentic Mississippian
thankyewvermuch while seeping
forty-weight, women weeping
at your feet while their panties fill the air.

Our heroes are famous
for what they were, and legends
for what, in time,
they might have been.

And what will you be, o beacon
of hope with plastic Big-Boy hair, o radiant
rhinestoned desert-dwelling welcomer,
o clockwork king, what will you be?

Arroyo

Your blood wells up,
warm blood unfolding from a deep spring
where the saguaro
knows to sink its roots,
where the coyote
knows to pause
before passing into night.

Some nights there is nothing,
but tonight hot stars
dot your waters,
shining like mica flakes,
and a turquoise moon
rises from the canyon,
sighing on your breast.

Radium girl

I knew her late in life,
when she would salt tomato slices
and eat them on the porch
on Sunday afternoons

The last bit was best,
the leftover juice an acid sludge
dredged up with her fingertips
and running down her broken chin

She’d sit and watch the moon
rise like a dirty thumbnail
overhead, the winter sun too weak
to scrub it from the phosphorescent sky

The moon might
be made of salt –
she said – I don’t know
how they know otherwise

They didn’t know the brushtip
she licked to a point
for every minute hand she’d paint
would slowly eat her up

When she died she left behind
homemade sundresses
and blackened silver serving spoons
and fifty years of photographs steeped in closet air

In one she stood in grandpa’s garden,
a manikin among the sunflowers
with a smile that was still a smile,
a shining half-moon silver smile

Author Biography

Patrick Bahls is Associate Professor of Mathematics and Director of the University Honors Program at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. He is the author of Student writing in the quantitative disciplines: A guide for college faculty and his poetry has appeared in Adirondack Review, Eunoia Review, and Unshod Quills.

On the theme of Rivers

old towne

the more you follow dirt road the steeper it opens down for you until – river. Around this bend and the huge dead old fallen – river. The pickup’s gone ass over – river. I am a shard of shale a pebble of sunward sediment a cloud of mud and moss taken with language making the longest way to the ocean but first the trees that wick the fur in the thirst but first the heat of insects but first we must visit every home but first every mouth every feed all hunger, look, river, I built you this drum. On it you will teach me a song.

Author Biography

Brian S. Ellis was born in Manchester, New Hampshire and lives in Portland, Oregon.