Our needs rage on like a neglected fire. My needs, your needs, the
cashier's needs, the teacher's needs, our parents' needs, the kids'
needs. On and on, our hungry need. Today on the subway in the Bronx,
folks called each other nasty names because somebody demanded a seat and
somebody pushed somebody and somebody else looked at somebody funny and
Hey! Somebody here needs to get his ass to work!
Needs. Oh to
be the little dog that lives above me. As I sit here at my desk I can
hear his mommy climbing the building stairs, calling, "Is that Boo Boo?
Boo Boo? Is Boo Boo going to greet me?" She starts this game when she
gets to the second floor; she lives on the third. All the way up the
stairs she's calling Boo Boo's name and damned if I don't hear Boo Boo's
claws make contact onto the hardwood floor above me. I imagine he's
been having himself a skittish Boo Boo nap at the very moment he heard
the distant call of "Boo Boo! Boo Boo!" The door is opened by a key.
"Ah! It's Boo Boo! Oh my gosh, Boo Boo!" squeals Mommy. She lifts him,
his tail scissors, he licks up a glorious gulp of need.
In
Brooklyn there's no space on the train. Most of us want to sit, but we
don't need to sit, not really. And the guy who won't move his belongings
from the seat next to him knows the difference between our want and our
need; he couldn't give a rat's ass about either. This makes want
elevate to the rank of need, that fire. I mean, the motherfucker hasn't
even bothered to look up from his book to see if I need.
Sarah
Dohrmann has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in
Nonfiction Literature, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, and a
Fulbright Fellowship of the Arts for Creative Writing in Morocco. With
photographer Tiana Markova-Gold, Sarah won the 2010 Dorothea Lange-Paul
Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Work from their photography/writing collaboration has been featured in
The British Journal of Photography and excerpted in TIME Magazine's
LightBox. Sarah has written feature work, travel writing, cultural
commentary, short stories and essays for Glamour, Poets & Writers,
Teachers & Writers Magazine, Bad Idea (England), and The Iowa
Review, among others. She is a member of the text and jazz ensemble
FlashPoint NYC. Her current and anticipated work is a book of literary
journalism titled Lost Girls that concerns the lives of prostituted
women in Morocco. You can read more of her work on her blog, Und You
Vill Like It.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
No News Today - Guest Post - Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Her long nails click on the keyboard. He goes for a beer. Rain or sleet in the streets, depending, and not one church bell ringing, not one. And that for weeks.
Her story spins but she keeps the clicking going and six beers later darkness enters the room. He does too, but the clicking keeps him from putting his hand on her neck, keeps him from speaking. Her story begs for a response.
The tape-recorder in the steeple broke. It can't play its ringing church bells, so the reel spins madly, up there, day and night: Slip-slip-slip. Slip-slip-slip.
People come out of their houses. Did you expect that sleet they say. It's rain, some answer. What about the bells, they ask. Let them be, some say.
She keeps on typing. It's essential, you understand. Her nails shorten. The clicking dims. She hears him say I'm going for a beer. Story of my life, she clicks.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, A New Hunger, published by Ausable Press. She has taught at several colleges and universities, including Sarah Lawrence College and the Solstice Low-Residency MFA program at Pine Manor College.
Her story spins but she keeps the clicking going and six beers later darkness enters the room. He does too, but the clicking keeps him from putting his hand on her neck, keeps him from speaking. Her story begs for a response.
The tape-recorder in the steeple broke. It can't play its ringing church bells, so the reel spins madly, up there, day and night: Slip-slip-slip. Slip-slip-slip.
People come out of their houses. Did you expect that sleet they say. It's rain, some answer. What about the bells, they ask. Let them be, some say.
She keeps on typing. It's essential, you understand. Her nails shorten. The clicking dims. She hears him say I'm going for a beer. Story of my life, she clicks.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, A New Hunger, published by Ausable Press. She has taught at several colleges and universities, including Sarah Lawrence College and the Solstice Low-Residency MFA program at Pine Manor College.
Monday, August 6, 2012
No News Today - Guest Post - Keith Nathan Brown
A Basic Guide to Cosmology and Sexual Reproduction
A vacuum of space and time along a horizon of empty bottles. Lost in a sniffling,cry-ogenic environment of nothing and nobody. A spark, a quick glance—the flash of a smile from across the bar—clumsily followed by a cosmic accident, the Big Bang. The event lasts a fraction of a second. The aftereffects, a lifetime. A seminal cloud—residual of the Bang and indebted to the ballads of dead rock stars—seeds the void with the following dynamics of growth: Frozen grains of space dust; Molecular gases; Heavy metal; Crystal meth. The crystal upon contact with the space dust—aka, angel dust—hits the street like a new phenomenon: “sticky ice”. Instead of breaking up, two incompatible bodies end up stuck together. Violence ensues. Chairs like massive chunks of rock fly through the air. Objects in space—attracted by mutual gravity—crash headlong and grow twice in size. Arrests are made. Yet within the clarity of confinement, as the nebular cloud sobers and cleans up, as the stellar outbursts fade into the past, the bond returns a bit scarred but stronger than ever. An orbit is traced through an illuminating flux of support groups. In the new life-affirming atmosphere, a realization occurs: to see oneself not as a victim of life but a source of life. On that very night, the primal mater bulges at the core and, under intense gravitational contractions, screams out obscenities, grows infernal and feverish, lashes out with blind fury until—rising out of an ocean of magma—a tiny cry emerges like the birth of a new world.
This, our noosphere:
Keith Nathan Brown received a B.S. in Physics from Marlboro College. His essay, “Network Subrealism: Sketch of an Emerging Literary Trend,” published in Puerto del Sol, traces the philosophical and technological origins of a new branch of literature. His hybrid texts and visual poetry have appeared in Word For/ Word, elimae, Unsaid and elsewhere. Embodied is his first book. He lives in Brattleboro, VT.
A vacuum of space and time along a horizon of empty bottles. Lost in a sniffling,cry-ogenic environment of nothing and nobody. A spark, a quick glance—the flash of a smile from across the bar—clumsily followed by a cosmic accident, the Big Bang. The event lasts a fraction of a second. The aftereffects, a lifetime. A seminal cloud—residual of the Bang and indebted to the ballads of dead rock stars—seeds the void with the following dynamics of growth: Frozen grains of space dust; Molecular gases; Heavy metal; Crystal meth. The crystal upon contact with the space dust—aka, angel dust—hits the street like a new phenomenon: “sticky ice”. Instead of breaking up, two incompatible bodies end up stuck together. Violence ensues. Chairs like massive chunks of rock fly through the air. Objects in space—attracted by mutual gravity—crash headlong and grow twice in size. Arrests are made. Yet within the clarity of confinement, as the nebular cloud sobers and cleans up, as the stellar outbursts fade into the past, the bond returns a bit scarred but stronger than ever. An orbit is traced through an illuminating flux of support groups. In the new life-affirming atmosphere, a realization occurs: to see oneself not as a victim of life but a source of life. On that very night, the primal mater bulges at the core and, under intense gravitational contractions, screams out obscenities, grows infernal and feverish, lashes out with blind fury until—rising out of an ocean of magma—a tiny cry emerges like the birth of a new world.
This, our noosphere:
Keith Nathan Brown received a B.S. in Physics from Marlboro College. His essay, “Network Subrealism: Sketch of an Emerging Literary Trend,” published in Puerto del Sol, traces the philosophical and technological origins of a new branch of literature. His hybrid texts and visual poetry have appeared in Word For/ Word, elimae, Unsaid and elsewhere. Embodied is his first book. He lives in Brattleboro, VT.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
No News Today - Guest Post - Luke B. Goebel
Letter to Pima County Sheriff’s Department. State of Arizona. In
response to a summons. (Speeding captured by a Photo Radar Machine).
Written on unlined paper. Also one ½ sheet of lined paper, roughly torn,
written front and back.
Dear Person Paid to Receive this by Arizona,
I am writing to give you the business! We are, whoever you are, as a representative of legal action for the Arizona state, for some district in Tucson, and I as myself, writer, professor, fellow-state-employee from another state, etc, (The Lone Star) we are, I repeat “we are” as so much has passed from when I had written “we are” and where I have “we are” for the second time, above; again, we are engaged in a conflict, you and I, though alike in one facet, surely most unalike in many others. I mean employed by a state is how we are alike in one facet. I disagree with you—-and so here it is, the business!
You are FAMILIAR with the 5 paragraph essay, surely? I am going to tell you what I am setting out now to tell you—-then I am going to tell you (i.e. give you the business)—-and then I am going to tell you what I have told you, from at this onset I will be telling you! This will take some time—-I will likely appeal to three types of rhetoric—-ethos, logos, and pathos. Finally, I will assure you that I am correct in giving you the business! But first, know you are going after my pocketbook, my possessions, and this is wrong! As you have given me no business! This brings me to my point as to why you ARE WRONG and I am vindicated—-and here is what I will be talking (writing) about during the duration of this 5 paragraph essay (So Far You Are On Paragraph One): I am writing to inquire and prove through inquiring (both writing to prove and in inquiring so shall prove) of the last time your machine, your nonhuman photo-radar machine, was checked and calibrated for accuracy! Aha! I am going to prove you must provide record of this prior to convicting me, I.E. giving me the business, i.e. taking from my pocket, i.e. successfully completing the business of taking my money for your state/district. So begin I hereby to prove myself and my case that you cannot do me any business without providing me PROOF of recent testing and calibration of your photo-radar nonhuman machine (within the bounds of the law—-within the mandated time period of testing and calibration) prior to your stealing my photo and assigning an accusation of speeding. This is now paragraph two! As a side note I’d like to acknowledge, given our shared quality of being employed by a state of this nation (I the Lone Star: you the Grand Canyon State), I too have had the desire to slack off at my post. Especially I have desired to slack off while reading five paragraph essays written in a disembodied style, employing used up rote forms of discourse. This is why I’ve included mention of my pocket and pocketbook or billfold, to create a corporeal link through articles, through implied regions and relations of the body, i.e. rear end cheek, i.e. place of billfold, and of course implied is money—-to go further I am 31 years old, six foot four, handsome, long haired, loping, somewhat cowboy, somewhat L.A., big nose, but handsome, flat footed and I kick my right foot out when I walk! Due to the CONTEXT of this letter I cannot share what my ex-girlfriend has said is the physical reason for my doing so. I mean kicking out my right foot while I walk. Anyhow, I know what it is like to slack off but I encourage you not to slack off as this is your business and you won’t give ME the business until I have received proof proving your nonhuman machines were calibrated and checked within the required time prior to my going past and being photographed (without explicit consent). This is my pocketbook.
Paragraph three: None of us were speeding proven by my speedometer being exactly on the speed of the limit posted and no cars passing me, and the speed I was shown being incorrect attest I.
Paragraph four: I have had this happen once with a police radar gun in Hawaii which was improperly calibrated (pathos) and I got off of the business (false business) b/c he had not calibrated his nonhuman machine!
Paragraph five: So you, Sir or Madam—-I’ve been thinking of you as a female person of the state while writing, but you may of course be a MAN trying to give me the business—-but as you now see, due to my request for PROOF of PROPER FUNCTIONING of nonhuman said machine (other people not contesting, or pleading guilty, is no proof as people have grown lazy!). Therefore business is closed until you prove yourselves vigilant in checking your machines—-I.e. my billfold is closed.
Signed Luke B. Goebel 6/5/12
Luke B. Goebel is the author of the prize winning: How Many Lassos To CowboyTown, The Big Eyeball Poke, The Boot of the Boot, and Eat Your Vegetables Kids. This letter is part of a side project. It is from a collection of letters, all mailed through the U.S. Postal Service, the last great institution of the U.S. Government. The book is as of yet, unfinished, and the printing rights are currently available.
Dear Person Paid to Receive this by Arizona,
I am writing to give you the business! We are, whoever you are, as a representative of legal action for the Arizona state, for some district in Tucson, and I as myself, writer, professor, fellow-state-employee from another state, etc, (The Lone Star) we are, I repeat “we are” as so much has passed from when I had written “we are” and where I have “we are” for the second time, above; again, we are engaged in a conflict, you and I, though alike in one facet, surely most unalike in many others. I mean employed by a state is how we are alike in one facet. I disagree with you—-and so here it is, the business!
You are FAMILIAR with the 5 paragraph essay, surely? I am going to tell you what I am setting out now to tell you—-then I am going to tell you (i.e. give you the business)—-and then I am going to tell you what I have told you, from at this onset I will be telling you! This will take some time—-I will likely appeal to three types of rhetoric—-ethos, logos, and pathos. Finally, I will assure you that I am correct in giving you the business! But first, know you are going after my pocketbook, my possessions, and this is wrong! As you have given me no business! This brings me to my point as to why you ARE WRONG and I am vindicated—-and here is what I will be talking (writing) about during the duration of this 5 paragraph essay (So Far You Are On Paragraph One): I am writing to inquire and prove through inquiring (both writing to prove and in inquiring so shall prove) of the last time your machine, your nonhuman photo-radar machine, was checked and calibrated for accuracy! Aha! I am going to prove you must provide record of this prior to convicting me, I.E. giving me the business, i.e. taking from my pocket, i.e. successfully completing the business of taking my money for your state/district. So begin I hereby to prove myself and my case that you cannot do me any business without providing me PROOF of recent testing and calibration of your photo-radar nonhuman machine (within the bounds of the law—-within the mandated time period of testing and calibration) prior to your stealing my photo and assigning an accusation of speeding. This is now paragraph two! As a side note I’d like to acknowledge, given our shared quality of being employed by a state of this nation (I the Lone Star: you the Grand Canyon State), I too have had the desire to slack off at my post. Especially I have desired to slack off while reading five paragraph essays written in a disembodied style, employing used up rote forms of discourse. This is why I’ve included mention of my pocket and pocketbook or billfold, to create a corporeal link through articles, through implied regions and relations of the body, i.e. rear end cheek, i.e. place of billfold, and of course implied is money—-to go further I am 31 years old, six foot four, handsome, long haired, loping, somewhat cowboy, somewhat L.A., big nose, but handsome, flat footed and I kick my right foot out when I walk! Due to the CONTEXT of this letter I cannot share what my ex-girlfriend has said is the physical reason for my doing so. I mean kicking out my right foot while I walk. Anyhow, I know what it is like to slack off but I encourage you not to slack off as this is your business and you won’t give ME the business until I have received proof proving your nonhuman machines were calibrated and checked within the required time prior to my going past and being photographed (without explicit consent). This is my pocketbook.
Paragraph three: None of us were speeding proven by my speedometer being exactly on the speed of the limit posted and no cars passing me, and the speed I was shown being incorrect attest I.
Paragraph four: I have had this happen once with a police radar gun in Hawaii which was improperly calibrated (pathos) and I got off of the business (false business) b/c he had not calibrated his nonhuman machine!
Paragraph five: So you, Sir or Madam—-I’ve been thinking of you as a female person of the state while writing, but you may of course be a MAN trying to give me the business—-but as you now see, due to my request for PROOF of PROPER FUNCTIONING of nonhuman said machine (other people not contesting, or pleading guilty, is no proof as people have grown lazy!). Therefore business is closed until you prove yourselves vigilant in checking your machines—-I.e. my billfold is closed.
Signed Luke B. Goebel 6/5/12
Luke B. Goebel is the author of the prize winning: How Many Lassos To CowboyTown, The Big Eyeball Poke, The Boot of the Boot, and Eat Your Vegetables Kids. This letter is part of a side project. It is from a collection of letters, all mailed through the U.S. Postal Service, the last great institution of the U.S. Government. The book is as of yet, unfinished, and the printing rights are currently available.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
No News Today - Guest Post - Leigh Stein
DEFINITION OF ADRIFT
Adjective. Mapless, does not answer
to her married name, marooned
on a beach on which every night
the tide erases her letters home.
Can never remember what she wrote.
Last night's said: Send a fleet.
Tonight she will write: Send a fleet.
Never anchored. Like some islands,
the ones made of bulrush, or shipwrecked
love that loses its shape inside the ever after.
Distressed. Consumed with nostalgia
for copy machines, a desktop clock,
a postcard sent from one destination
to another: I'm here. I can't speak
the language, but I'm not coming back.
On this island there are no postcards.
Tonight she will write: Send pirates
in the sand. Or tonight she will forget to
write. Tonight she will try to mend the boat,
then go and sit in a grotto at high tide awe-
stricken with oblivion, motherless.
Leigh Stein is the author of the novel The Fallback Plan from Melville House Press. Her first full-length poetry collection, Dispatch from the Future, is forthcoming from Melville House in July 2012.
Adjective. Mapless, does not answer
to her married name, marooned
on a beach on which every night
the tide erases her letters home.
Can never remember what she wrote.
Last night's said: Send a fleet.
Tonight she will write: Send a fleet.
Never anchored. Like some islands,
the ones made of bulrush, or shipwrecked
love that loses its shape inside the ever after.
Distressed. Consumed with nostalgia
for copy machines, a desktop clock,
a postcard sent from one destination
to another: I'm here. I can't speak
the language, but I'm not coming back.
On this island there are no postcards.
Tonight she will write: Send pirates
in the sand. Or tonight she will forget to
write. Tonight she will try to mend the boat,
then go and sit in a grotto at high tide awe-
stricken with oblivion, motherless.
Leigh Stein is the author of the novel The Fallback Plan from Melville House Press. Her first full-length poetry collection, Dispatch from the Future, is forthcoming from Melville House in July 2012.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
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