Unshod Quills

On the theme of David Bowie

Editor’s note: I hate to pick favorites, but I’m doing it now. Jenny Hayes, this is a masterpiece. -DRG

Dear Rosie AKA Ro-Ho-Zee AKA Rosarita Refried Beans

October 12, 1981

Dear Rosie AKA Ro-Ho-Zee AKA Rosarita Refried Beans,

HI! Sorry your new school is so bunk. You aren’t missing much here,
everything is pretty much the same except that Erica got a perm and so
did Leslie Stang. I have Ms. Stanford for History AGAIN!!! I thought I
left her ugly face behind in 7th grade but I guess she teaches 8th
too. My English teacher seems pretty cool. Everything else is just
blah.

Hold on I am going to put on a record, wait isn’t it funny that I just
wrote “hold on” when you haven’t even gotten this letter yet? DUMB! I
bought “CHANGESONEBOWIE” at Pellucidar and it’s hella raw. I am going
to write you while the songs are playing and that way it will be like
we are listening together!

SPACE ODDITY – Weird, I always thought this song was called “Ground
Control To Major Tom” or something like that. I don’t think he even
says “Space Oddity” in the whole song. Do you remember at Jason’s
brother’s party last year how we were all lying on the ground outside
looking up at the stars and Miles said he saw a UFO? I think he was a
big fat liar. Or maybe he was HIGH!

JOHN, I’M ONLY DANCING – That reminds me of the other day when five or
six girls started busting a move at lunch, I don’t know them but the
cafeteria ladies tried to grab them so they started to run, and one of
them tripped over something and knocked Sarah’s tray of food all over
the floor. Oh Lordy!  I thought she was going to cry but she didn’t.
We all shared our lunch with her, I gave her an apple and Alexis gave
her half of a sandwich. Oops see that smear? I just smooshed an ant.
Sorry, ant.

CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGES! “Turn and face the strange”, it seems like
everywhere I go that is what happens, something or someone strange.
But sometimes I like things that are strange! Did I tell you that Rain
got together with this guy named Marcus who is 17 or 18 and a punk. He
doesn’t go to Berkeley High or anywhere but I don’t know if he
graduated already or just dropped out. We went and rode around with
him and a couple of his friends in a van and they got us stoned and we
threw empty slurpee cups at some college students, it was hell of
funny! Then we drove past Sarah and yelled “HEY BABY” and she didn’t
know it was us! Then we went to some girl’s house and there was this
guy there who was FINE! Rain said she wished Marcus wasn’t there
because she wanted to jump on him. I talked to him a little, but
nothing really. Later we were telling Alexis and her older sister was
there and it turns out she knows all those people and she knew who the
really fine guy was. She said his name is Chris and HE HANDCUFFS HIS
GIRLFRIENDS!!!!!!

ZIGGY STARDUST – This song is soooooooo goooooood. One time Rain drew
a lightning bolt over her eye trying to make it like Ziggy Stardust
but it looked kind of weird, and it started to smear and then Alexis
told her it looked like a black eye and Rain said maybe it WAS. But it
was just eyeliner, but sometimes she can be way too dramatic.

SUFFRAGETTE CITY. Is that a real city? I have no idea what this song
is about. Except for WHAM BAM THANK YOU MA’AM! I like the piano part,
I’m gonna tell Sarah she should learn how to play it. She takes piano
lessons and she’s really good. Right now she is learning Stairway to
Heaven!

JEAN GENIE. If my name was Jean I would call myself that. Wait, do the
lyrics say good or bad things? I guess I’d have to listen closer. All
the nicknames for my name are dumb. I can’t think of anything to write
so here is a description of what I am wearing: black pegged pants,
light blue “Go Climb A Rock” t-shirt, purple sweat shirt, music note
pin, and black velvet china flats. Exciting huh? Plus I have blue nail
polish on my nails but it’s hell of chipping!

OOPS, I forgot this record player is dumb and it doesn’t stop when the
side is over, it’s spinning around and around with the needle down
going BUP … BUP … BUP … Maybe I’ll just sit and listen to that
for a while. What if it’s like one of those mantra things and if you
chant it over and over it opens your mind and you enter a new
dimension? Like the hare krishnas and the stuff they say, I don’t even
know! BUP… Maybe if I listen for long enough I’ll be in touch with
the consciousness of all beings. Maybe I will become one with that ant
that I smashed on this sheet of paper and then I will be sad. I am
going to close my eyes and see how long I can just listen…

Fuck that! I picked up the needle (it made a scratch, oops) and turned
the record over. Now it’s DIAMOND DOGS! They call them the diamond
dogs, wait WHO do they call that? Some dogs? Maybe next time I see
some dogs I’ll just go, “hello Diamond Dogs!” haha I am so weird!!!

REBEL REBEL, Rain likes this one the best, every time it comes on she
closes her eyes and shakes her head like a big weirdo, but I think
it’s pretty good too. The other day she had cloves and we smoked some
at lunch over by the hole in the fence. Have you ever tried them? I
don’t really like cigarettes but I love cloves, they make your mouth
all tingly and sweet tasting. She told me about this store where you
can buy them and they don’t even care if you have a note or anything.
I want to get some next time I have some money!

YOUNG AMERICANS. This is probably my least favorite, it’s okay but it
sounds like something that would be in a play that my parents would
drag me to and it would be some man going off about his lost youth or
something. And then he would BREAK DOWN AND CRYYYYYYYY…. My parents
had their friends over for dinner last night and they are so weird,
the lady has really long hair like down to her butt but it is going
gray, and she wore this long skirt with bells on it! (that was kind of
cool actually) The man is so funny looking, I wish I could draw better
so I could just show you. He has these weird big teeth and dark framed
glasses and this laugh that is like “HUH! HUH! HUH!” it was driving me
crazy!

FAME …wouldn’t it be neat if someday we got famous? Like if we were
all famous together, you and me and Sarah and Rain and Alexis. I know
you think they don’t really like you but they just don’t  know you
that well. It’s kind of weird how I started hanging out with all of
them after you and me sort of stopped acting like friends (even though
we still were!) at the end of last school year. I always figured
sooner or later you and me would go back to how things were before,
and then we’d all be friends together, but then you moved.

GOLDEN YEARS. Golden years, mwop mwop mwop … I was going around
singing that part in science the other day, just walking up to people
going “mwop mwop mwop”, everyone probably thought I was a super freak.
Have you heard that song SUPER FREAK??? It’s hexa coo! One time me and
Alexis and Rain were singing it on the 51 and some lady was looking at
us like “How dare you sing on the bus!” But then this one guy went
“Gimme five!” when he stood up to ring the bell for his stop. We all
slapped his hand and then he said something to Rain and none of us
heard what it was but it seemed kind of perverted so I was glad he got
off the bus.

Well, it’s over. Ta-Da! (I already took the needle off this time don’t
worry) Well write me back soon or else I will beat-a your-a ass-a!

Love,

Alison AKA Ally-Wally AKA Alisonwonderland

P.S. WRITE BACK!

P. P.S. Another ant just walked on this piece of paper, but I let it live.

P. P. P.S. I saw Mr. Walter in the hall last week and he said to tell
you he MISSES YOUR BUTT!!!!!!!!!

Author Biography

Jenny Hayes grew up in Berkeley, California and now lives in Seattle.
Her work has appeared in Penduline Press, Ampersand Journal, and
Significant Objects, and she co-authors the blog Yard Sale Bloodbath..
http://www.jennyhayes.com

Transubstantiation in America

We were everywhere, sent from here, sent to there, left to fade after the war.

What did you do, coming home from the wake? Did you lay down in the sun, asleep in the eel grass, creeping toward a mourning of that night, a pregnant future, dry light driftwood on a beach under the darkness of a new moon?

We drink hurricane lanterns inside your pink wax, touching each others terracotta dust, glitter and disco feeling the soft inside of cracker lips lumbering towards the west with a change of substance.

I begged that you trust your memory, unlocking the door to let me in from our close distance.

I came like a dwelling wound, eyes removed by the lamp in your iridescent space, I came home from the war, bandaged in your skin.

Author Biography

Mark Brunke lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Alternative bio: Handy Johnson is a pinko communist infiltrator poet going all-Roy-Cohn into the Hoover-hole of America.

Art and poetry on red shoes and rapture. 

Rapture - Mark Brunke

Red Shoes - Mark Brunke

Love and Coffee

on the theme of rapture

I was invited

I remember,

Accepted

Into you again, and

Again, always first

Into your smile,

Then mud-spattered in

Tart tart pale sweet

Watery drags of tired

Love, tiered on down plants,

Down blankets and tear drops

On your June balcony,

Hanging on a telephone

Wire, a memory buzz of

Coffee alone in

A tired scarf while

You turn towards

An intersection,

A receding rail, training

A fading exhaustion.

My fingers, I think,

The left ring finger,

Hurt at the

Distal phalange.

Stiff and bent

For decades.

I was

Thinking of your car,

The pink engine

With its thin chrome

And motherly exhaust. I

Was thinking of your

Lilies, underfed

In their office corner

And I was thinking

Of your brown basket,

A threadbare wicker,

Burning in its hidden

Flourescent shadow.

I was thinking about

Baking in your kitchen,

With its flavored garage

And rising goldfish,

Watching the timer

Expire and listening

To that hideous fountain

Babble

As it packs for winter

Elsewhere.

Author Biography

Mark Brunke lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

Poems from Seattle’s Jason Quiggle.

An Expanding Universe

– Transportation

This is going to lock the doors
keeping the showers out
to let us spray each other
It is not all about our broken hearts.

I am Harvey Keitel
and you are Tim Roth
you’re gonna be okay
you’re gonna be okay
sing
song

this is a little steel and glass heaven
crossing over hell fine
features cut our lips

psychopomps  go before us carrying tiny pieces of steel.

Whiskey is our whore paid not to come,
I stage scenes.

the water is clear that I am the thief,

sympathetic strings
seat
belt and gravity cannot keep us from flying apart.

JQ

I have always been here

– When We Two Parted

You were never here
I have always been touching myself
I still am
over what i have almost forgot from last night
a woman pretending to be a poem
in my hand becoming  a ghost
a ghost
a ghost
ghost ghost
a ghost weeping semen for a sunken mistress

you were never here
i am always touching myself
looking into an empty eye
mistaking the glint of the sun for a hint of  love

JQ

Author Biography

Jason Quiggle was born somewhere in New York, during the blizzard of ’76. He has lived in many places including California, Germany, Texas and Nevada. Folks have put things Jason has written into their publications. The city of Las Vegas etched his words in the cement of a public works project along with other notable Vegas writers. Jason now lives in Seattle, Washington. Contact: jason.quiggle@gmail.com

A poem from a top tier Pacific Northwest writer.

MARE’S NEST

– on mirrors

Gulp down those little pills to dull the ache,
drink until you blur that face in the mirror,
drowse and forget you’re ever an artist.

Hear the snap of crow wing in ghostlit mist
which frames gauze-filtered the gaunt shambling mare
who can’t tell if you’re dreaming or awake.

Author Biography

Sigerson lives in the Seattle area.

Mark Brunke, "Sideways" on Transportation

 Art and Poetry of Seattle’s Mark Brunke

“Border-Captain, I am determined to make you Duke of Lithuania.”

– on Lipstick

Put some sugar on your knife Potemkin, I’m watching you drown in a song.
I equally dismiss empirical
Atheists and mental Christians;
I prefer the misery in mere
Carrots and of love’s first glimpse.
I remember a time before lipstick
and it stays within my nails,
Where all beings clothed in vapor auger in
To a moment of desire’s nothingness,
Where the center of verse
Was godless among us.
Oxygen separated, in midnight’s cruel
Skin, a day’s hunger younger than us,
Oxygen deprived, moonless magic in animal
Skin, laying tasted, in a candy cane dress,
stained with sausage oil and mustard seed.
“S’il n’y avait pas de Pologne il n’y aurait pas de Polonais!” A. Jarry, Ubu Roi

MB

Recursion Problem, these

– on Mirrors

Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

America sends its regrets
as an advance on its rejections,
an historical imperative where
soldiers die for an after death.
Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

Terrorists we call them, cave
artists painting their
violetless particles in the last waves
of a grayscale ocean.
Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

Soldier’s epsom salt of slow incentives
priced in a sickbay decay, the dirt water
smell in the declination of a fading
Earth, drown in a curtain, bathe with a Cross.
Childlike and charred mirrors of war.

The crickets in the field, in the green
grey waltz-twisting body, the pitch on the death of
Mars lays low in bloodrose and disintigration;

lamb mouth. I
do not need to ask how I got to this, the river
Where I am childlike and charred, mirror of war.

MB

Mark Brunke, "Hotel Ceiling," on Mirrors

Author and Artist Biography

Mark Brunke lives and works in Seattle, Washington.