Bitching with Nin an Nicole

November 10, 2011 Erika Lutzner

I'd like to share a special issue of Scapegoat Review with you—i
it's about a favorite topic of mine; Bitching. . .
captured though a dialogue with Nicole Santalucia and Nin Andrews.

Enjoy!

Bitching with Nicole by Nin Andrews

It began on a Tuesday in October, 2009. Nicole and I were having dinner at

the Café Loup with G, a literary agent,

who told us we should write a book that sells.

We could still write our poems on the side,

sort of like a hobby, maybe like knitting, baking bread, or crocheting .

Nicole immediately responded,

Okay! I will write The Bitch. And that bitch will sell.

But someone has already written a book called Bitch, G. objected.

No, Nicole said. No one has written The Bitch. No one knows the bitch.

Because I own the bitchh. And I will write you the bitch, which will sell like no other bitch has ever sold.

G. grinned and sipped his martini. Yeah? he said. Okay then. Send me the bitch.

Ever since that day Nicole and I have been composing poems and essays about the bitch.

We have sent each other countless emails, poems, parodies, rants, raves,
elegies, essays, comics and laments, all about The Bitch.
Some day we hope to send The Bitch out into the world. Here are some of our opening pages from The Bitch.

by Nicole Santalucia

This would be me but it is so much easier to say it is you and your mom and your dog and
your stupid husband and his brother and their dad and wife and her mom and dad and
your kids are annoying bitches please keep them inside your house where you and
your bitch-face husband made them and please don’t leave your husband we don’t
need another goddamn loose bitch to touch someone who’s not a
bitch you can keep your bitch family to your-bitch-self.

Nicole’s “Bitch”

by Nin Andrews

The title of Nicole’s poem might easily offend you.

Whatever this title means, you might assume it has nothing

to do with you. (After all, who would call you a bitch?)

Maybe you have never read a poem like this

and have never considered the possibility

that you are a real bitch.

So clearly, it’s addressed to someone else.

Clearly it is not compatible with your role of spouse,

good citizen, upright pillar of society.

Clearly you would never be seen

in the company of a poem like this,

a poem that is radical, irreverent, uncouth,

a poem that flings it’s bare arms in the air

and dances like an infidel

in the pristine sanctuary of your mind,

urging you to seize the day,

change your life,

get drunk, stay drunk,

on wine, virtue, poetry . . .

Or bitching,

as you wish.

How To Find Your Inner Bitch

by Nin Andrews

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Then take this precious moment to notice your mind.
Notice your thoughts, your feeling, your senses. Then notice your bitchy thoughts, and
the urge to repress your bitchy thoughts. Do not repress your bitchy thoughts.
Instead accept them one by one. Label them, bitchy thought number one,
bitching thought number two, bitchy thought number three. Notice that there is
no end to your bitchy thoughts. Feel how natural your bitchy thoughts are,
how one bitchy thought always leads to another, just as one drop of water flows into another.
Notice that the bitchier the thought, the more alive, awake, even on fire you feel.
Feel the fire of the bitch within. For this is your true bitch nature. This is the bitch you really are.

The Town of Bitch

by Nicole Santalucia

has one grocery store, one coffee shop,

one hospital, and one library.

All the residence of Bitch

wake up early and drink Bitch coffee

(the coffee beans are from Bitches County).

The bitches go to the grocery store

and fill their carts with cans of Bitch food.

They stop off at the hospital to visit their old, Bitch mothers.

Then they go to the library and read about how to grow a Bitch

from scratch. By the time they get home it is time to cook dinner,

and by nightfall everyone in Bitch Town is lying in bed counting bitches.

They fall asleep and dream only bitch dreams.

In the Town of the Bitch

by Nin

1. In the town of the Bitch, bitching is a sacred art. Everyone must bitch. Men, women, children, infants, dogs . . .

2. But in recent years a new type of citizen has emerged, a serene citizen.

The townies are alarmed by the presence of these new and serene citizens in their midst, and

refer to them only as Mr. and Ms. Serenity. What are they hiding behind their polite smiles?

3. Meanwhile the average person continues to bitch, not only for themselves but also for Mr. and Ms. Serenity.

4. Recent research suggests a correlation between the number of hours one bitches and the integrity of a person.

For this reason, no one trusts Mr. and Ms. Serenity.

5. Sometimes Mr. and Ms. Serenity dream of bitching. They thrash and swear and wake in their beds, sheets soaked,

swear words escaping their lips. But how to make them bitch in public, like everyone else? the medical experts wonder.

7. Therapists call Mr. and Mrs. Serenity les homme manques, likening them to those humans whose essential ingredients are missing.

8. According to The Joy of Bitching, the ability to bitch, like the ability to achieve orgasms, can be lost forever through lack of practice.

9. A lifetime without bitching can render a man impotent, a woman frigid, and both eternally forgettable, much like puffy white clouds on a serenely blue sky.

--

Nicole Santalucia is the poetry editor of Harpur Palate (http://harpurpalate.binghamton.edu/) and is
currently pursuing a PhD in English with a concentration in creative writing at
Binghamton University. She recently received an honorable mention grant from
the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice (http://www.astraeafoundation.org/grants/us-archive/lesbian-writers-fund/lwf-1011).
In March of 2012 she will read her work at the Poetry Center in Paterson, NJ for the the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award reading event.

Nin Andrews is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms,
Why They Grow Wings and Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini,
Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum, and Southern Comfort.
Her chapbook, The Secret Life of Mannequins, is forthcoming from Kattywompus Press.

Bitching with Nin an Nicole

November 10, 2011 Erika Lutzner

I'd like to share a special issue of Scapegoat Review with you—
it's all about a favorite topic of mine; Bitching. . .
as seen though a dialogue with Nicole Santalucia and Nin Andrews.

Enjoy!

Bitching with Nicole by Nin Andrews

It began on a Tuesday in October, 2009. Nicole and I were having dinner at

by Nicole Santalucia

This would be me but it is so much easier to say it is you and your mom and your dog and
your stupid husband and his brother and their dad and wife and her mom and dad and
your kids are annoying bitches please keep them inside your house where you and
your bitch-face husband made them and please don’t leave your husband we don’t
need another goddamn loose bitch to touch someone who’s not a
bitch you can keep your bitch family to your-bitch-self.

Nicole’s “Bitch”

by Nin Andrews

The title of Nicole’s poem might easily offend you.

Whatever this title means, you might assume it has nothing

to do with you. (After all, who would call you a bitch?)

Maybe you have never read a poem like this

and have never considered the possibility

that you are a real bitch.

So clearly, it’s addressed to someone else.

Clearly it is not compatible with your role of spouse,

good citizen, upright pillar of society.

Clearly you would never be seen

in the company of a poem like this,

a poem that is radical, irreverent, uncouth,

a poem that flings it’s bare arms in the air

and dances like an infidel

in the pristine sanctuary of your mind,

urging you to seize the day,

change your life,

get drunk, stay drunk,

on wine, virtue, poetry . . .

Or bitching,

as you wish.

How To Find Your Inner Bitch

by Nin Andrews

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Then take this precious moment to notice your mind.
Notice your thoughts, your feeling, your senses. Then notice your bitchy thoughts, and
the urge to repress your bitchy thoughts. Do not repress your bitchy thoughts.
Instead accept them one by one. Label them, bitchy thought number one,
bitching thought number two, bitchy thought number three. Notice that there is
no end to your bitchy thoughts. Feel how natural your bitchy thoughts are,
how one bitchy thought always leads to another, just as one drop of water flows into another.
Notice that the bitchier the thought, the more alive, awake, even on fire you feel.
Feel the fire of the bitch within. For this is your true bitch nature. This is the bitch you really are.

The Town of Bitch

by Nicole Santalucia

has one grocery store, one coffee shop,

one hospital, and one library.

All the residence of Bitch

wake up early and drink Bitch coffee

(the coffee beans are from Bitches County).

The bitches go to the grocery store

and fill their carts with cans of Bitch food.

They stop off at the hospital to visit their old, Bitch mothers.

Then they go to the library and read about how to grow a Bitch

from scratch. By the time they get home it is time to cook dinner,

and by nightfall everyone in Bitch Town is lying in bed counting bitches.

They fall asleep and dream only bitch dreams.

In the Town of the Bitch

by Nin

1. In the town of the Bitch, bitching is a sacred art. Everyone must bitch. Men, women, children, infants, dogs . . .

2. But in recent years a new type of citizen has emerged, a serene citizen.

The townies are alarmed by the presence of these new and serene citizens in their midst, and

refer to them only as Mr. and Ms. Serenity. What are they hiding behind their polite smiles?

3. Meanwhile the average person continues to bitch, not only for themselves but also for Mr. and Ms. Serenity.

4. Recent research suggests a correlation between the number of hours one bitches and the integrity of a person.

For this reason, no one trusts Mr. and Ms. Serenity.

5. Sometimes Mr. and Ms. Serenity dream of bitching. They thrash and swear and wake in their beds, sheets soaked,

swear words escaping their lips. But how to make them bitch in public, like everyone else? the medical experts wonder.

7. Therapists call Mr. and Mrs. Serenity les homme manques, likening them to those humans whose essential ingredients are missing.

8. According to The Joy of Bitching, the ability to bitch, like the ability to achieve orgasms, can be lost forever through lack of practice.

9. A lifetime without bitching can render a man impotent, a woman frigid, and both eternally forgettable, much like puffy white clouds on a serenely blue sky.

--

Bitching with Nin an Nicole

November 10, 2011 Erika Lutzner

I'd like to share a special issue of Scapegoat Review with you—
it's about a favorite topic of mine; Bitching. . .
as seen though a dialogue with Nicole Santalucia and Nin Andrews.

Enjoy!

Bitching with Nicole by Nin Andrews

It began on a Tuesday in October, 2009. Nicole and I were having dinner at

by Nicole Santalucia

This would be me but it is so much easier to say it is you and your mom and your dog and
your stupid husband and his brother and their dad and wife and her mom and dad and
your kids are annoying bitches please keep them inside your house where you and
your bitch-face husband made them and please don’t leave your husband we don’t
need another goddamn loose bitch to touch someone who’s not a
bitch you can keep your bitch family to your-bitch-self.

Nicole’s “Bitch”

by Nin Andrews

The title of Nicole’s poem might easily offend you.

Whatever this title means, you might assume it has nothing

to do with you. (After all, who would call you a bitch?)

Maybe you have never read a poem like this

and have never considered the possibility

that you are a real bitch.

So clearly, it’s addressed to someone else.

Clearly it is not compatible with your role of spouse,

good citizen, upright pillar of society.

Clearly you would never be seen

in the company of a poem like this,

a poem that is radical, irreverent, uncouth,

a poem that flings it’s bare arms in the air

and dances like an infidel

in the pristine sanctuary of your mind,

urging you to seize the day,

change your life,

get drunk, stay drunk,

on wine, virtue, poetry . . .

Or bitching,

as you wish.

How To Find Your Inner Bitch

by Nin Andrews

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Then take this precious moment to notice your mind.
Notice your thoughts, your feeling, your senses. Then notice your bitchy thoughts, and
the urge to repress your bitchy thoughts. Do not repress your bitchy thoughts.
Instead accept them one by one. Label them, bitchy thought number one,
bitching thought number two, bitchy thought number three. Notice that there is
no end to your bitchy thoughts. Feel how natural your bitchy thoughts are,
how one bitchy thought always leads to another, just as one drop of water flows into another.
Notice that the bitchier the thought, the more alive, awake, even on fire you feel.
Feel the fire of the bitch within. For this is your true bitch nature. This is the bitch you really are.

The Town of Bitch

by Nicole Santalucia

has one grocery store, one coffee shop,

one hospital, and one library.

All the residence of Bitch

wake up early and drink Bitch coffee

(the coffee beans are from Bitches County).

The bitches go to the grocery store

and fill their carts with cans of Bitch food.

They stop off at the hospital to visit their old, Bitch mothers.

Then they go to the library and read about how to grow a Bitch

from scratch. By the time they get home it is time to cook dinner,

and by nightfall everyone in Bitch Town is lying in bed counting bitches.

They fall asleep and dream only bitch dreams.

In the Town of the Bitch

by Nin Andrews

1. In the town of the Bitch, bitching is a sacred art. Everyone must bitch. Men, women, children, infants, dogs . . .

2. But in recent years a new type of citizen has emerged, a serene citizen.

The townies are alarmed by the presence of these new and serene citizens in their midst, and

refer to them only as Mr. and Ms. Serenity. What are they hiding behind their polite smiles?

3. Meanwhile the average person continues to bitch, not only for themselves but also for Mr. and Ms. Serenity.

4. Recent research suggests a correlation between the number of hours one bitches and the integrity of a person.

For this reason, no one trusts Mr. and Ms. Serenity.

5. Sometimes Mr. and Ms. Serenity dream of bitching. They thrash and swear and wake in their beds, sheets soaked,

swear words escaping their lips. But how to make them bitch in public, like everyone else? the medical experts wonder.

7. Therapists call Mr. and Mrs. Serenity les homme manques, likening them to those humans whose essential ingredients are missing.

8. According to The Joy of Bitching, the ability to bitch, like the ability to achieve orgasms, can be lost forever through lack of practice.

9. A lifetime without bitching can render a man impotent, a woman frigid, and both eternally forgettable, much like puffy white clouds on a serenely blue sky.

Bitching with Nin an Nicole

November 10, 2011 Erika Lutzner

I'd like to share a special issue of Scapegoat Review with you—
it's about a favorite topic of mine; Bitching. . .
though a dialogue with Nicole Santalucia and Nin Andrews.

Enjoy!

Bitching with Nicole by Nin Andrews

It began on a Tuesday in October, 2009. Nicole and I were having dinner at

the Café Loup with G, a literary agent,

who told us we should write a book that sells.

We could still write our poems on the side,

sort of like a hobby, maybe like knitting, baking bread, or crocheting .

Nicole immediately responded,

Okay! I will write The Bitch. And that bitch will sell.

But someone has already written a book called Bitch, G. objected.

No, Nicole said. No one has written The Bitch. No one knows the bitch.

Because I own the bitchh. And I will write you the bitch,

which will sell like no other bitch has ever sold.

G. grinned and sipped his martini. Yeah? he said.

Okay then. Send me the bitch.

Ever since that day Nicole and I have been composing poems and essays about the bitch.

We have sent each other countless emails, poems, parodies, rants, raves,
elegies, essays, comics and laments, all about The Bitch.
Some day we hope to send The Bitch out into the world. Here are some of our opening pages from The Bitch.

by Nicole Santalucia

This would be me but it is so much easier to say it is you and your mom and your dog and
your stupid husband and his brother and their dad and wife and her mom and dad and
your kids are annoying bitches please keep them inside your house where you and
your bitch-face husband made them and please don’t leave your husband we don’t
need another goddamn loose bitch to touch someone who’s not a
bitch you can keep your bitch family to your-bitch-self.

Nicole’s “Bitch”

by Nin Andrews

The title of Nicole’s poem might easily offend you.

Whatever this title means, you might assume it has nothing

to do with you. (After all, who would call you a bitch?)

Maybe you have never read a poem like this

and have never considered the possibility

that you are a real bitch.

So clearly, it’s addressed to someone else.

Clearly it is not compatible with your role of spouse,

good citizen, upright pillar of society.

Clearly you would never be seen

in the company of a poem like this,

a poem that is radical, irreverent, uncouth,

a poem that flings it’s bare arms in the air

and dances like an infidel

in the pristine sanctuary of your mind,

urging you to seize the day,

change your life,

get drunk, stay drunk,

on wine, virtue, poetry . . .

Or bitching,

as you wish.

How To Find Your Inner Bitch

by Nin Andrews

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Then take this precious moment to notice your mind.
Notice your thoughts, your feeling, your senses. Then notice your bitchy thoughts, and
the urge to repress your bitchy thoughts. Do not repress your bitchy thoughts.
Instead accept them one by one. Label them, bitchy thought number one,
bitching thought number two, bitchy thought number three. Notice that there is
no end to your bitchy thoughts. Feel how natural your bitchy thoughts are,
how one bitchy thought always leads to another, just as one drop of water flows into another.
Notice that the bitchier the thought, the more alive, awake, even on fire you feel.
Feel the fire of the bitch within. For this is your true bitch nature. This is the bitch you really are.

The Town of Bitch

by Nicole Santalucia

has one grocery store, one coffee shop,

one hospital, and one library.

All the residence of Bitch

wake up early and drink Bitch coffee

(the coffee beans are from Bitches County).

The bitches go to the grocery store

and fill their carts with cans of Bitch food.

They stop off at the hospital to visit their old, Bitch mothers.

Then they go to the library and read about how to grow a Bitch

from scratch. By the time they get home it is time to cook dinner,

and by nightfall everyone in Bitch Town is lying in bed counting bitches.

They fall asleep and dream only bitch dreams.

In the Town of the Bitch

by Nin

1. In the town of the Bitch, bitching is a sacred art. Everyone must bitch. Men, women, children, infants, dogs . . .

2. But in recent years a new type of citizen has emerged, a serene citizen.

The townies are alarmed by the presence of these new and serene citizens in their midst, and

refer to them only as Mr. and Ms. Serenity. What are they hiding behind their polite smiles?

3. Meanwhile the average person continues to bitch, not only for themselves but also for Mr. and Ms. Serenity.

4. Recent research suggests a correlation between the number of hours one bitches and the integrity of a person.

For this reason, no one trusts Mr. and Ms. Serenity.

5. Sometimes Mr. and Ms. Serenity dream of bitching. They thrash and swear and wake in their beds, sheets soaked,

swear words escaping their lips. But how to make them bitch in public, like everyone else? the medical experts wonder.

7. Therapists call Mr. and Mrs. Serenity les homme manques, likening them to those humans whose essential ingredients are missing.

8. According to The Joy of Bitching, the ability to bitch, like the ability to achieve orgasms, can be lost forever through lack of practice.

9. A lifetime without bitching can render a man impotent, a woman frigid, and both eternally forgettable, much like puffy white clouds on a serenely blue sky.

--

Gregory Crosby

August 12, 2011 Erika Lutzner

boysgirls
Katie Farris, Marick Press (76 pgs.)

There is a girl who writes a little yellow book, yellow but not decadent, with a black and white half dust jacket that lets a mysterious compound word float in that sunny yellow. A strange chimera inhabits that jacket, wrapped like a ribbon round a present that’s already been opened; a present that can be opened by anyone, anyone at all. But is a present always a gift? The little yellow book opens its mouth and invites you to inspect its little, straight, crooked black teeth. It doesn’t say anything as trite as not to look a gift horse in the mouth—in fact, it demands you climb in with a grin. Come frolic with bared teeth, says Katie Farris at the end of her introduction; soon, you are grinning with a glee both disquieting and liberating.

If you get past that introduction, of course; the letter to the reader that kicks off Farris’ collection of fables, entitled boysgirls, is perhaps the only wrong note to be sounded in this mysterious but clairvoyant exploration of parable, mythmaking and figuration. When Farris adopts the knowing, slightly precious tone of the storyteller, prefacing what’s to happen, she’s engaging in long tradition but one that’s fairly thin from overuse in a thousand fantasy novels; a voice that says But between these covers you will participate, whether you desire it or not the reader who thinks “Oh really?” must resist the urge to toss this very slight book aside. Because once Farris begins “Mise En Ebyme” with the sentences “People are forever falling for the girl with a mirror for a face. And why not? They think, not unaware of the irony. Of course, one has to be careful in direct sunlight…” the reader quickly falls for Farris’ tone. Her language is poised between a fantastic, fairy-tale generality and concrete rhythms of the everyday that serves these tales well.

Farris uses this fairy-tale tone to cleverly explore, via metaphor, the transformations of girls: those that they rush headlong into, those they cannot escape. They are pitched somewhere between prose poems—at least, the kind that turn their faces to the wall when that hybrid is invoked—and universalized vignettes that reflect, through a mysterious distorted mirror, some very private but apprehensible situations. When she describes how “Her mother’s mother was a machete” in the story of the same name, she conjures a whole range of personality without explicitly exploiting personal history: “On such occasions she made the girl turn her in front of the mirror, murmuring ‘Aren’t you delightful. I used to be a beautiful blade. Look at me now. I used to be beautiful.’ After they watch the moon rise, the girl carries her grandmother back to her bedroom, lowers the blinds, pulls the covers up around her shoulder’s blade.” It’s little details like that “shoulder’s blade” that gives these tales their poetic punch.

This little book, interspersed with complementary drawings by Lavinia Hanachuic, ends with a longer parable about the meaning of being an artist and the burden that places on love, featuring the Boy With One Wing and the Inventor of Invented Things, both of whom linger after the reader has closed this curiously affecting volume. Katie Farris’ boysgirls is slight, but it’s slight the way a blade of sunlight forces a crack in the wall.

Gregory Crosby was once an art critic, until he got over it. His poems have appeared in Court Green, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Paradigm, and Ophelia Street, among other nice places.

Caroline Gerardo

August 12, 2011 Erika Lutzner

Entropy

“I stop carrying your ocean on my back like a block.”

The garden hose syphoned the dank water backwards from the fountain into the house.

“Well I guess that is one way to clean up.” She rubs that one hair on her chin. She plucks

the one coarse wire avoiding the tip at Happy Nails. She fills the upstairs tub. To kill

bacterium, she adds Epsom salts. This theorem has no scientific basis.

Soaking on her back Annmarie announces, “The sky blue sheets are in the recycle bin.”

The children sleep. Behind the door, the dog whines believing there was an

announcement for second breakfast.

Anxiety grabs her toes out. The girlish pink glaze is cracked. The universe in rapid

entropy rises from the milky lake.

“What number of moons have the linnets gone unfed?” She attempts to relax.

The doorbell rings. She jumps for a cozy towel. Would it not be more civilized to own a

hotel towel warmer?

The Cavalier’s claws scrape wildly to protect the hardwood ground. The bulging eyes

protect the nest. She slides around the animal.

“Who is knocking at six A.M.?”

The triple slide locks clatter. Her turban head and Chinese phoenix robe face the sunlight.

She looks up and down Pacific Coast Highway. It is not Federal Express, there is no

sticky note with the routing label. It is not the Sherriff with a summons either. Half nude,

she gathers no attention.

The glamor of her morning is all falling apart.

She thinks of the ordained importance into the thread count. No more Saturday morning

ritual love sheet washing. The anointed grew a flaw. A ladybug hole spread into the

Los Angeles River. There is no sewing back. The comfort replaced by a cheaper brand.

A cold measure of disorder, not expressing sorrow, concern or regret, she picks up

a ‘Rock’em Sock’em Robot’. His arm is missing.

No fur coat can insulate the children from breaking.

Passive aggressive motions forward, she locks the door twice, her hand pulls away as if

burned.

The fingers do not smell like bacon.

You are not a reversible thermodynamic force.

Caroline Gerardo lives in Laguna Beach California and Hoback Junction Wyoming. She writes novels, poetry and flash fiction when she is not in her garden with her three children. Her next novel, The Lucky Boy is in final editing to be released in the fall. She may be found on twitter as @cgbarbeau and blogging at http://carolinegerardo.blogspot.com

Kiely Sweatt

August 10, 2011 Erika Lutzner

Sequence Number 1.

In the first paragraph

the reader understands

her intention. A string

of liquor blues. Lover

walks out of a movie,

and daylight makes her fall.

The second paragraph

ends with him. Understand

this wasn’t meant to string

together like this. Over

decades, sexes make moves,

change like leaves in the Fall.

But this, he ended. Graphed

it in a map while she stands

in a question. A string

hung from the table. “Love,

at what rate do thoughts move?”

His head and gaze, empty, fall.

The ending paragraph

he will not understand

as she pulls the long string

from the table to her lover’s

neck. His eyes turn. Movie

ending. Watch the man fall.

When instructed to write a poem about owls

All I could come up with was the old man
following me home from the Erotica reading.
Eyes like espresso beans. Sidewalks glazed
with a trail of street light and women
in pulled petticoats opening maps
resembling their placentas in ruin.

While the man from Mexico city swirls to night
shadows like white gas
I think, why he couldn´t be the Frenchman from the night before
who spoke metaphysically about my physical body.
If so, I’d be a ball of dough walking backwards
into his trousers, pushing past the playground
teetering back and forth on jungle equipment.

Alas, I’m stuck with the albino bald eagle
flying into the crag my of my back.

The trouble is the nights
just go on and on and on and on…

Kiely Sweatt has been living in Barcelona the last three years teaching English, translating and writing poetry. She started up the Prostibulo Poetico, in partnership with the Poetry Brothel, Poetry Society of NYC. She has since helped to start working on branches in Madrid, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia and Venezuela. She is co organizer of Tri Lengua, a multi lingual reading series in Barcelona, which looks to promote overseas writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She holds a degree in Spanish Literature from WVU and an MFA in poetry from The New School. Her work has appeared online and in-print through such publications as The Why and the Later by Carly Sachs, Best American Poetry blog, Shampoo, Sawbuck Review, BCN Ink, and PSEUDÒNIMS.

Beth Myhr

August 8, 2011 Erika Lutzner

javelin in 4 pieces

while the ticket-seller wakes up

from his dream of glorious blood and tourists

and polishes his shoes

a bored crow picks at the edge

of a crumbling rostrum its beak scratching out

the eyes of arum and calendula

can you imagine the twenty-first century

without the friends who murdered my laziness

my indifference to you

they forced me look for my fingerprints
and in one of them they saw your face

then made me search library after library

for instructions on how to tune the gorgeous instrument

*

I am not part of the mob that needs
the goring beyond the jeering I bring
this lance a final souvenir and hurl it

at your easr your eyes your
eyebrows your tongue
like a madwoman’s kiss

but it drifts and knits itself
into a white wing
brushed with violet

and brushes your forehead

when you feel the downy bone
and its quick heartbeat
be still for me

*

the crow has stopped scratching at the stone
and petals and flown
down to pester a young traveler
tuning her guitar

the ticket-seller more dutiful than enchanted
has taken off his immaculate shoes
and goes barefoot among the tourists
blessing their wrists with soft dry hands

Elizabeth Myhr lives in Seattle and doesn’t mind the rain. Her first book the vanishings & other poems will be published by Calypso Editions in September of this year.

Jillian Mukavetz

August 7, 2011 Erika Lutzner

I know a notch

a game of hair pull

dread

down the back

cowboy has a garter slung garter behind his neck
.

cut from a night dripping blue

tough sisters with watermelon hips say friend wants to grab a drink with us

.
let her shes dead

cowboy tells me

sitting bones scratch

inside
.

I can’t sleep anymore i say hanging needles from the surface of a dress

ghost blue

ma told me to fuck.
fuck you till your mind turned soggy mess. simmering, in the rain, those blue front porch steps.
everyone’s aware, yes, of the ghosts wrapped empty in yarn and broken tailgates.
.
so daily I prepared. dropped food in fire ants
caught that channel changer fallin’ fallin’ breakin’ muscle into disks.
.
young man living in the attic of the ballroom tells me of trampled herbs growin’ in the ceiling.
it was then I knew if I ever dressed, we would go to the park and play some fetch.
.
I felt the anarchy when you wanted to climb from my belly
adored those freckles slowin’ in low, rows
a gamble with eternity has me on house arrest.
I wanna ask you if you meant to resemble my lingerie list.
.
that grime beneath glass. fallin’ winged wing wax
was that I you kept from falling. that soil made of the dying! breath that fucks with foreplay’s identity.
.
It is because I forgot to mention it was that heavy petting I really wanted. hot bones chipped in lettuce.
thorns of pink cactus glue. pits of deviled eggs and busted piñata moons.
.
baby sweet baby, show me your marrow soon. that ghost’s still hidin’ blue

slant snow white

i ambulance hash, strut sequins and stumbles
baby
bird letters and home grown thighs
.
you like the sky. mamas boy
here your tongue, rib roast, daffodils
.
look, you lying in the pool there baby i aint harpooned for you.
.
a magnolia molt mandarin in notes.
slant snow white my straight cake thighs.
.
call my cake cunt darling, its that
tongue. that black bee that rum.

Jillian Mukavetz was born and currently lives in Denver, Colorado. She earned her BA at the University of Denver and is pursuing her MFA at New England College. Her poems have appeared in delirious hem, Thirteen Myna Birds, Otoliths, and a video poem published in Prick ofthe Spindle. She also plays the fiddle and runs an online publication Women’s Quarterly Conversation that features interview profiles on 21st century women writers and their aesthetic diversity.

Tim First

August 6, 2011 Erika Lutzner

Migration

Late November gales buffet the shore.

No longer wholly sea, land, or ether,

foam sails across wet beach.

Chill wind sucks warmth from human core.

Aerosol sand stings raw faces.

Following charcoal skies, bay side to sea side,

Winter pushes in.

Prayer flags aloft above the shore.

Immune to chill, shadow, or sting,

rainbow kites soar over wet beach.

Cheer laughs pump warmth to human corps.

Aerosol sand scrubs raw smiles.

Reflecting sparse sunlight, bay side to sea side,

Winter rushes in.

Nearby, atop a pole in the bay side marsh,

an osprey's nest waits empty,

the sea hawks are fishing the tropics now.

Together they will return to rebuild exposed aerie.

Fertile water blooms raw life.

Nourishing warm breezes, bay side to sea side,

Spring touches in.

Work days, Tim Furst plies the streets of Washington, D.C. with a wrench. Other days he plies the beaches & river banks of the Mid Atlantic with rod, reel, & saute pan. Once, after adding the proviso of anonymity, Tim fulfilled a gallery director's request to hang one of his poems in an art show.

Gregory Crosby

August 5, 2011 Erika Lutzner

Vox

I am drinking a glass of water called song.

Each syllable is clearly understood:

my heart in my throat, carved out of wood.

To ask who is speaking just gets it wrong;

every dummy must trade on his mystique.

In nightmares, I’m the one who comes to life,

but he’s the one who’s married his own wife.

Some virtuosos make a table speak,

but all I can do is declaim a soul

I cannot prove. I am at one remove,

like you. It’s all the same from where I sit,

chair or knee. I am the remote control.

It’s cut into my smile, deep in the groove.

Something threw its voice & you, I, caught it.

St. Valentine’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane

Everything is beautiful, & then it goes off.
Every kiss is you’ve made your own bed.
All the bombshells are blonde on blonde,
until they dye themselves red.

Hold me in your mind, O Venus,
for I know your arms are gone.

Everything goes off; wrong wire, always cut.
Every kiss is shrapnel, working its way out.
All the bombshells are red on red;
only their roots show blonde.

Hold me in your arms, O Venus…
for you know my mind is gone.

Gregory Crosby was once an art critic, until he got over it. His poems have appeared in Court Green, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Paradigm, and Ophelia Street, among other nice places.

Dawn Coutu

August 4, 2011 Erika Lutzner

Crumbling Conditions

He had worn his loafers today, she noticed,

and they were soaked. She gaped, her jaw hung

by hinges of ligament.

Had embraced bone, muscle, fiber.

Mist rose from the ridges where

her eyelashes would have been; eyelids already

turned inside out. She glared at his slapdash fashion,

the clothes that undesirably draped his body.

She displayed her shaky hand at arm’s length.

Tucked her threadbare nails where

she didn’t have to think about the spears

of bone pincing tender breast.

Her heels dug into the eroded soles

of her pumps, she winced.

Each attempt to coerce conversation

had transformed into a downpour, an infection.

She refused to accept his nonchalant lust.

She endured the pain in her heels,

straightened her posture, and strode toward main street.

Before the Bridge Detour

At Dusk

The owl eyes prey,
while squatting
in my lane. I swerve
because there are no
oncoming cars.
The river surges.
I look away, then at the owl,
still in the same spot. In danger. Not
flapping its wings,
not once. It doesn’t bother
fooling itself. When
animals have the ability
to fly, should they?
Must they soar?
Either way, the owl
does not move.

Dawn Coutu is a wordsmith. She received her BA from Chester College of New England and is working on her MFA in poetry at New England College. Her articles and poems have appeared in Today, Ad Hoc Monadnock, So Good, Compass Rose, The Henniker Review, The Tower Journal, and Big Lucks.

J.P. Dancing Bear

August 3, 2011 Erika Lutzner

The Rabbit and The Moon

The rabbit is leaving

the safety of his brother's body

He emerges from

the man's heart

A full face pulling up from blood

Those lower to earth

believe the animal spirit is rising

Scientist will tell you this is how

the moon was born

A little guardian to take the hits

Something about gravity

is left unspoken

The brother sees his kin, eye

to eye and cannot get away

We Form a Line
after Siegfried Zademack’s “Eerie Lane”

I.

Each measured step forward
is met with the crunch of graveled stars.

Our bodies and the shadows of our bodies
build our own long staircase
to solve our loneliness.

We walk a deliberate pace
with our heads bent slightly forward—
one eye on the promised heavenlight;
one eye on the flicker-dance of flame—
crimson candles to match our robes,
bright enough to make a garland
of dull suns on the wall

—another vow as a reminder of vows.

II.

Sometimes I get lost
in my thoughts while I stare
at the cast stardust
we stride upon.

Each step is a whisper

among the exploded galaxies.

III.

When my lips move,
I love you like a shroud,
slips out like a dove from my eaves.

Now I am sorrowful
and aware of myself
beneath the wrappings of traditions;
in love
with another shroud
who has never turned to look
back.

IV.

Behind me I feel all the love
in my life building
and unseen
as though I was Orpheus
holding onto a vow
against certainty
but still silently climbing
the long steps
out of darkness.

I needed to speak
to whisper those words
against the building line
of love.

V.

I want to lessen my devotion
to the candle and the perfection
of measured counts, rhythms
and vows; reach
one hand forward from beneath
these robes
and touch the flow
and ripple
of her shroud.

Does she not also
feel the weight
of a line?

VI.

Would we not spiral arm
and arm together?—
become a dance.

Would we not speak
to each other?—
lost in the sonorous tones
of our voices.

Would we offer ourselves
to music?—

unleash creation
in ourselves.

Would a line break
into dust and gravel?—

become a gorgeous
event.

VII.

This deliberate pace—
each step in our stairway
a year passing under our feet.

The measure of our bodies,
our candles, our flames

deliberately paced
forward to a promise

of something better than
the visible starry heaven;

a step closer to that
blinding light of belief.

Feeder

My mind is a bird feeder;
kernels and seeds in a state of waiting;
what falls to the ground is patient for rain.
The beak is a clasp of a feathered pocket book.

I wear a suit of roots—
squashes and eggplant intertwined.
I wear a red cabbage on my sleeve, or so
everyone tells me.

Fingers slip out of the cuffs green as jalepenos,
and in dreams I run with kitchen utensils
through a patches of broccoli and milkweed.
I tell myself the strangest things:

The heart is a potato in winter;
Put your best leaf forward; My love
is a salad tong; Keep your secrets
on the dark side of the peach pit moon.

Bookmark
with a line from May Sarton

She sits at the end
of his long body.

She believes
all secrets reveal themselves

in the study of a falcon.
She notes this in the margins.

Naked in the sun, he reads
from a book planted above his groin.

He reclines like a guest on her
snowy chaise—the back frames him

like a halo. She studies the plumped
chest of the bird, its head moving

to each stimulation of sound and sight.
He mouths the words from the page

Better to stare the senseless wind...
she barely reveals a smile.

The dog waits to be noticed,
watching the pencil scratch,

the page turn, the falcon swoop.
It would nuzzle his drooped hand,

but prefers a patient reward.
The hips and thighs of the hills

distract no one but possibly
the falcon hunting its lunch—

the turning of a page, the pencil
undulating do not pretend to be mice.

He wriggles his fingers and the dog
moves in for a rub. He twitches his toes

and she makes another note.
Disinterested, the falcon moves on.

In these tight shadow hours
love might be the speck of bird,

the floppy ears of a setter,
the shade within the crook of a book—

another note on the margins,
and a delicate bookmark for the return.

Get and Give

You feel the stars within your reach
on a string, wavering in the wind,
gold as summer grass. Pollen rises
in a streaming galaxy—mini milky way.

You stand facing the pie plate moon
on a crooked stick, beneath
a smoothed ladder. You are transfixed
on a broken rung that seems to sing

a partly cloudy blues. The wind brushes
your cheek, the memory of a girl
you’ve fantasized might love you
in this way. You stand there

with one hand grasping a rope
on a lassoed star, the other hand
holding the housing of this gift you
hope to give—a crumpled box

but the wrapping intact and untorn.

J. P. Dancing Bear is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently, Inner Cities of Gulls (2010, Salmon Poetry). His next two books will be Family of Marsupial Centaurs through Iris Press in 2011, and Fish Singing Foxes through SalmonPoetry in 2012. His poems have been published in Mississippi Review, Third Coast, DIAGRAM, Verse Daily and many other publications. He is editor for the American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press. Bear also hosts the weekly hour-long poetry show, Out of Our Minds, on public station, KKUP and available as podcasts.

Priscilla Atkins

August 2, 2011 Erika Lutzner

Diary

Nearing the end of James Schuyler’s diaries,

I fan the corners of the last pages, knowing

there is only a year of intermittent entries left;

I copy one of his tender descriptions of the cat:

Barbara lies stretched against the radiator

as if she has found her long lost mother.

And this quirky weather report: Deliciously

overcast, it is the kind of day in August

that makes you think of a day in autumn

which is like a day in winter, everything

simplified. A ghostly apple wedge presses

my throat—I know in six months the diarist

will be dead. Like the edge that wakes me from

every Mike-dream, that double-world, where I know

my best friend is going to die—in fact, is already

dead. Yet, just now, here, blond, dreamy-eyed,

he was ordering autumn bulbs for the front garden,

choosing William Morris green-on-cream

sun-flower wallpaper for the foyer,

absentmindedly jotting a dinner date—

Jim and Jim—on October’s pale blue calendar.

How Can It Be that I Have Not, Myself

The woman I pass on the street is beautiful in a classical sense:
the kind who motionlessly hands strangers a parcel of her self
wrapped like a new book in brown paper.
(I cannot imagine her on a cell phone:
holistic, gestalt, she is knowable as raw pearls.)
I recognize her browns – eyes,
skirt, jacket, scarf.
Later, I figure it out:
her eyes-mouth remind me of the woman at the bookstore
(every three months or so I drop in
to buy a magazine, a collection of the year’s best, a
newspaper). In turn, the bookseller channels the spirit – the quiet
sorrow – of a teacher from my middle-school years.
A substitute? No, a student-teacher.
But, atypically, not young. Who was there a month
or two. Who gave more than most
in the “new” informal learning style; that is, in moments
paused by each student’s shoulder. (In this way, she encouraged
my poetry about the Brontë’s; dear soul.)

Presence without pressure. A woman-spirit
charged and translucent
(memory confabulates; she’s Charlotte and Emily).
Veering forward to the recent street scene,
I realize the passerby is the bookstore-woman.
And the long-ago teacher.
Every molecule. Without
presumption; which is to say: without need, without
burden.
In all the years I have known, in one incarnation
or another,
those eyes, chin, slender shoulders,
how can it be that I have not, myself, become clearer, kinder?

The Bow Carver’s Daughter Teaches Her to Make Borscht

One of them, older—her house; the other, a junior pre-med, daughter
of a Ukrainian woodcarver hired by string players. Hot at science,
watercolor, one year she played Olga—her namesake—in
The Three Sisters.
All afternoon it rains. They turn off lights, light candles.
Olga lays a bunch of beets, four relaxed puppets, on the counter, asks
for a sharpener: “The blade,” she explains, “makes all the difference”
(her mouth doing that extra “ush” with the “S’s”).
Side by side, holding craggy heads firm, they eagerly chop
stems, commence peeling, and slicing. Fingers, wrists, cutting board
streaked magenta (“Lady Macbeths!”); the girl’s “bea-u-tiful” carving
new shapes in the other’s world.
Later, almost dark, they bow to crisp white flowers—
invisible nod of a traveler to a woman’s lush hours among vases and
books; raspberry-centered, orchid-like. “They’re real!” Olga retracts
her fingers: “Als-troe-meria” the other softly offers.
Then, crossing herself, twice, ending right-to-left, Olga christens
a glistening demitasse of finely chopped garlic “small as Caspian
caviar,” and the two lower spoons into steaming broth.
After, she lifts an album from her bag. Flips
to berry-and-leaf sketches—a violin—arrives at a full length photograph
of a girl, six or seven, unmistakable heart-shaped face. Pale, dark-edged
irises. Already herself, one arm loose at her side, the other raised, grasping
tendrils of birch.
Strands of green serrated hearts. Wisps of hair. Eyes pouring
forward. Lashes. Thirst. All there, coming out.

Priscilla Atkins lives and works in Michigan, where there are blueberry fields, a big lake, no traffic jams and plenty of time to remember childhood in Illinois, college in Massachusetts, teaching in the San Fernando Valley, and shipping a small white car to Hawaii (where she and that very same car lived for ten years). She holds degrees from Smith College, the University of Hawaii and Spalding University (where she earned her MFA). Her poems have appeared in Poetry London, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, Raritan, Southwest Review and other journals.

Introduction

August 1, 2011 Erika Lutzner

Fall seems to be time of the year when many of us turn inward. Some of us settle down to write and many of us curl up and read those books that there hasn’t been time for—books, poems, short stories—almost anything that has been sitting right in front of us.

We at Scapegoat are thrilled with our Fall 2011 issue. Our feature poet is J.P. Dancing Bear. His work is breathtaking and touches one’s heart. The entire group of poets is simply put, amazing. It’s been such a pleasure to read these pieces, and we know you will all enjoy the work as much as we have.

In reading and rereading poems, one always seems to rely on the great ones when searching for something that addresses an enormous range. “To Autumn” by John Keats is one of those perfect poems that speaks to history and immortality and resonates within forever.

TO AUTUMN.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats (1795-1821)

- June Coleman Magrab

Scapegoat Review Fall 2011

August 1, 2011 Erika Lutzner

Introduction by June Coleman Magrab


Priscilla Atkins Diary How Can It Be that I Have Not, Myself The Bow Carver's Daughter Teaches Her to Make Borscht J.P. Dancing Bear The Rabbit and The Moon We Form a Line after Siegfried Zademack’s “Eerie Lane” Feeder Bookmark with a line from May Sarton Get and Give Dawn Coutu Crumbling Conditions Before the Bridge Detour		Gregory Crosby Vox St. Valentine's Hospital for the Criminally Insane Tim First Migration Jillian Mukavetz I know a notch ghost blue slant snow white Beth Myhr javelin in 4 pieces Kiely Sweatt Sequence Number 1. When instructed to write a poem about owls

Caroline Gerardo Entropy		Gregory Crosby boysgirls - Katie Farris, Marick Press