The Fence 2022 Art + Object + Experience Auction
with Deluxe Zoom Events
October 6th 2022 through October 26th 2022
https://app.galabid.com/thefenceauction2022/items
Opening night and Closing night at 8pm EDT Fence will be hosting two astonishing events. Please RSVP to fence.fencebooks@gmail.com.
October 6 8PM EDT: Wayne Koestenbaum, Mark Wunderlich, Erica Baum, Jonathan Lethem, Tyrone Williams, Kathryn Davis, and entomologist/essayist Elizabeth Bernays.
Fence Issue #39 Spring 2022
◊ ◊ ◊ F E A T U R I N G ◊ ◊ ◊
POETRY: Alyssa Perry • Samuel Amadon • Ron Silliman • Jun Tsuji (trans. Ryan Choi) • Cal Bedient • Joe Wenderoth • Jennifer Kronovet • Nick Flynn • Justin Vicari • Cate Marvin • Navid Sinaki • Tomaž Šalamun (trans. Brian Henry) • E. Briskin • Peter Myers • Ben Jahn • Nancy Klepsch • Eileen G'Sell • Kelly Clare • Leena Mahan • Benjamin Paloff • Annelyse Gelman • Lucas Gonzalez • Donald Platt • Mick Kligler • Raymond Luczak • Matthew Dix • M. Cottonwood • Trey Moody • Taylor Portela • Francesca Preston • Jen Frantz • Rebecca Lilly • Riley Ratcliff • Emma Catherine Perry • Kirstin Allio • Nick Rattner • Hazel White • Jesi Bender • Marshall Woodward • Jan Clausen
FICTION: Darina Sikmashvili • Jasmine Dreame Wagner • Lori Felker • Hugh Sheehy
A PORTFOLIO OF WRITING BY NURSES: TABLE OF CONTENTS • Tina Carlson • KD Seluja • Sally Helmi • Christine Riley • Jane Slemon • Renata Bubadué • Diane Kraynak (pictured on back cover of the issue) • Geraldine Gorman • Charles March III • Mary Ann Thomas • Sarah Comey Cluff • Brenda Beardsley • Shirley Stephenson • Nicole Aicher • Amanda Reilly • Angela Todd • D. Liebhart
In Issue #39 and here online, we include the resulting portfolio of essays, poetry, and witness across the nursing specialties. The work offers us hard fought wisdom, raw emotion, beauty, and no easy answers. This is a Covid-era Fence space of encounter between the art of nursing and the art of literature, for literary writers and nurses to meet, learn from each other, and cross-pollinate through words.
"One of our keenest and funniest Leftist poets. . . a project director at the Labor Institute, he’s been working in the trenches of [union struggles]. . . for occupational safety. health, and the environment for more than two decades . . .Toscano’s poems can be elated, despondent, theoretically sophisticated, savagely critical . . . [and] wildly funny."
Fence
Books
2022
The Charm and the Dread by Rodrigo Toscano
& Maafa by Harmony Holiday & Coming December 2022 MOPES by Kenneth Reveiz
—Publishers Weekly STARRED REVIEW
"The difficulty of doing a catastrophe justice is entwined with the further tragedy of its potential co-option . . . the book oscillates between Ancient Egypt and 'Fenty / Beauty ambassador”' Sonic ancestors: Lena Horne, Sun Ra, Al Green, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony . . . are the points of contact by which a stolen history might be clawed back: 'black music is the music of forensics // all my dead friends come to me as songs.'"
—David Wallace, The Paris Review
Essential listening: Harmony Holiday, Fred Moten, improvisation, conversation, and music immersion.
A not-for profit corporation, Fence is mandated by its board to make decisions in keeping with its mission to maintain this venue, in print, aural, and digital forms, for writing that speaks across genre, socio-cultural niche, and ideological boundary, as accessibly as it can such that Fence publishes largely from its unsolicited submissions and is committed to the literature and art of queer writers and writers of color. Fence encourages collective appreciation of variousness by inhering collectively outside of the constraints of opinion, trend, and market.
welcomes new members. Joining means you receive books, magazines, a tote or other memento. We also welcome your ideas about what you would like from fence in exchange for your support.
Become a FENCE subscriber, including both print issues and access to our complete digital archive. Become a sustaining MEMBER of Fence at any of our levels, ensuring Fence writers and readers will continue to meet in print, at events, and online.
Ask your local U.S. & UK newsstand or bookstore to order a print copy of the issue.
The Limited Edition 2022 Fence Totes
. . . . were crafted from discarded cotton and recycled PET bottles by the good people who work at Enviro-Tote in Londonderry, NH. The Tote is 14.5" tall and 18" wide.
Donations of ***$40*** and over to Fence will be reciprocated with one of these fine, spacious, soft, and sturdy Totes AND a one-year (two issue) subscription. You can also earn a Tote by purchasing a sustaining Fence membership.
The 2022 Tote was designed by sculptor and textile artist Jim Drain, based on a series of oversize tooth sculptures. You can visit his studio here. These lines on the Tote come from Daniel Brenner's Fence Books poetry collection June, the follow-up to Brenner's tour-de-force debut, The Stupefying Flashbulbs.
MY TREAT
Garielle Lutz | October 18th, 2022
What else is left for me to come right out with other than a simple list of everything blood has turned out to be no thicker than—viz., both parents, an ex-spouse, my daughter and her selectively unhappy brother?
Ike
Daniel J. O'Malley | October 4th, 2022
The only friend I ever heard about was Carl. They played golf on Sundays, out around Wentzville. It happened once, maybe twice a year that Dad would win, and then he’d hurry home and drive me or my mom over to Carl’s office to get our teeth looked at. That was the bet, a free checkup. Almost always, though, Dad would lose and have to follow Carl home and do yard work for a few hours. He’d cut grass, scoop out the gutters, prune hedges, chop wood. One summer, week after week, he was up on a ladder painting Carl’s house.
Hansel and gretel
Kevin Maloney | September 25, 2022
We didn’t have enough money for first and last month’s rent and security deposit, so we moved into the guest bedroom of my parents’ house, which doubled as a doily-infested showroom for my mom’s first edition American Girl doll collection. Under the glassy eyes of Samantha, Molly, Kirsten, and Felicity, Wendy and I lay next to each other, not making love.
Our Earthly Dilemma
Amanda Bloom | September 24, 2022
It’s the first weekend in March, and my boyfriend and I are in Provincetown, a fist of northeastern land holding fast to the Atlantic. A terminus of earth. A red fox has crossed our path, trotting down a residential yet deserted street and into someone’s yard . . . .A man is in the yard watching the fox. They seem to know each other, which is why my question makes some kind of sense. The fox is big, the size of a petite Border Collie. It is sitting upright on its haunches. Its legs are jet black. “She just had kits. Her den is in my yard.”
The Tintype of Billy the kid
Pamela Ryder | September 7, 2022
Ezra Dodson had wrapped and bound the bodies of his wife and daughter during a snowstorm in February, the month the Apache call the Moon of Sleeping Bears, and had sunk them beneath the ice of the Rio Hondo. He watched the hole he had hacked close over as clear as any lens, and with the coming of spring, he awaited the arrival of the itinerant tintypist while the river still ran cold enough to keep them.
spartakiada
Nicolette Polek | August 23, 2022
I flip through a folio of 112 color photographs. Thousands of acrobatic women, pyramids of men in the mud, stars and fountain shapes created by dancing children, words discernible only to those with a bird’s eye from the stands. Spartakiada—a mass gymnastics event, initiated by the esperanto enthusiast Jiří František Chaloupecký—was held in a stadium in former Czechoslovakia. I am trying to find my mother at the banquet of the collective.
decoherence
Dashiel Carrera | August 9, 2022
I am alive but not alive. Sister in the kitchen, searching for what we lost. As soon as Mother is home, that will be the end. The lilies on the sill in soft decay. In hushed voices, the fence unlocked. Her words soft, slow, precise. Sister is quiet. I hold her in the light.
NANAY IS DEAD
Kiley Mclaughlin | July 26, 2022
Aileen had bitten his lip nearly in half, the EMT. As she shimmied his pants and boxer briefs down to just below his hips, she took his bottom lip between her teeth. At first gently, so that she could feel his excitement rise, but then with decisive force, hearing the crunch of his soft tissue. She tasted metal as he gasped and tried to free himself, messily pawing at her chest so that his lip stretched even further and he gagged. She waited to release the grip of her jaw until she felt a small chunk of his lip tear off and come with her.
From Error to Error: On Dysgraphia
Noah Eli Gordon | Republished from Fence Issue 24 Fall Winter 2009-2010
The OED defines dysgraphia as an "inability to write coherently." What sort of coherence is this? What does coherent writing look like? What does coherent writing read like? Barthes, justifying his tendency to employ fragmented brevity, quotes from Andre Gide: "incoherence is preferable to a distorting order." ln Canto CXVI, Pound pulls down his own vanity with the admission, "I cannot make it cohere." Obviously, one can write without coherence; one can orchestrate constituent parts without making explicitly clear the relation of each to the whole.
The Love Language of Nathie Marbury: Celebrating Black Deaf Leaders
Delicia Daniels | July 17, 2022
Primarily guided by five American Sign Language parameters: handshapes, palm orientation, movement, location, and facial expressions, Marbury’s ASL Stories insert vigor into a linguistic culture torn from a diminished and violent past.
Vacation
Jordan Castro | July 12, 2022
The academic from Paris and the self-described “gypsy,” who had met at some kind of literary or maybe linguistics conference, ruined the car ride to the restaurant; they ruined the view of the beautiful hills; they ruined the cows and the word—one of my favorite words—suckle; they ruined the sunshine and the new Young Thug album I played quietly as we drove; they ruined the concept of community, their grating and unwelcome blabbering in the backseat of my rented Ford Focus assaulting my sensitive ears; they ruined “clause” and “the left” and “adjunct” and “blowjob” and “opportunity” and “Caravaggio” and “santa”; they ruined what should have been a perfectly wonderful drive up a mountain, but was instead a most ugly descent into hell.
Federica
Molly Dektar | June 28, 2022
She told me, “If a dog likes treats it doesn’t mean the dog is stupid. The best dogs love treats. The best dogs will do anything for a treat.”
Desire didn’t make me stupid. Desire made me sharp, and good.
The Lunch Lady
Shy Watson | June 12, 2022
Mom never fucked quiet. Every few nights I’d wake up the same way, with the framed velvet art poster bouncing over my bed. Men’s moans varied, but Mom’s stayed the same—short and panty, then long and yowling. I would have rearranged my room if it weren’t so cramped and the window drafts cold year-round.
Want Not
Alan Soldofsky | June 10, 2022
No matter how I try my hair
won’t grow back. The power’s
gone out, someone saw wires
arcing down the block.
We find a lantern in the garage
that still casts enough light.
The time is never right but this
is probably not the time to say it.
White Rainbow
Amy Roa | June 9, 2022
The army held the baby in chains. It broke free. It was quite easy. At 158 feet high, it towered over the army and its tanks. It tore the metal wrapped around its wrists and legs with its eight baby teeth.
The baby wobbled toward the freight train yard, as it liked trains, liked the sounds made by trains.
The Bureau of Hards
Alyssa Pelish | June 9, 2022
One year at summer camp, I met a girl who told me about all the different things she’d managed to send, unpackaged, through the US Postal Service. I sorely wish I remembered her litany of unexpected items. The one thing I do recall is that she had once addressed a shoe, a Converse All-Star, she said, and it had made it across town to its designated destination. The postal system was amazing. I can’t confirm the absolute truth of the story, but whether it’s apocryphal or not, what struck me at the time was the miracle of the handwritten address: how a name, a street number, a city and state, and a zip code, Sharpied on the rumpled canvas of a sneaker, was enough for a system as vast as the USPS to locate a particular person and deliver to her a message as cumbersome and unconventional as a shoe.
Welcome to Warehouse
Crow Jonah Norlander | June 9, 2022
Fingerprinting was straightforward: there was a small taupe box with a wire snaking out the back, off the padded mat on a table in front of a wall made up of what I assumed was two-way glass. The scanner’s cord ran through a hole in the wall at floor level. There was no instruction given, but the device was fairly intuitive, emitting a pleasant synthetic chime and vibration after each digit I offered. It was disappointing to find it unattended, as I remembered the intimacy of my last background check, the stranger officiously manipulating my hand against the instrument, hasty but tender.
Cat
David Hansen | May 25, 2022
The cat drags herself into the room where my husband and I are talking about what’s to be done. When she drags herself away, my husband hangs his head and weeps. I hear his tears smacking the hardwood floor.
“Oh, baby,” I say. He apologizes and I say he has nothing to apologize for which is not true.
He asks me why I’m not crying and I say, “I am crying,” but, touching my face, I find I’m not.
Years later, while describing this day to my sister, I will discover my husband’s cruelty.
from And Yet by Jeff Alessandrelli
Introduction: Claire Donato | May 20, 2022
“When Jeff Alessandrelli handed me a copy of And Yet (Pank, June 2022) this March, he noted the book was a work of speculative fiction. I recently described it to someone as Boy Bluets. When a digital editor at Fence read an excerpt he said: ‘I love this. Is he for real?’ …. These questions are less interesting to me than the question as to whether all romantic relationships are speculative fictions, and whether the experience of romance—‘oftentimes [a] vast [source] of alienation and oppression for both those invested in [its] illusion and the wider world at large’ (Alessandrelli)—is always ungrounded in reality. Or, to quote one of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms: ROMANTIC LOVE WAS INVENTED TO MANIPULATE WOMEN. And us all. And yet.” — Claire Donato, Amtrak Quiet Car to WAS via NYP, 4/28/2022
Fence Sounds podcast episodes include the published journal's contents read aloud by the authors, conversations, music, and other audio adventures.
We are seeking fiscal sponsorship for The Fence Modern Poets Series and the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Please contact the Editorial Co-Directors Emily Wallis Hughes and Jason Zuzga with questions and ideas.
Multimedia electronic poetry, fiction, and hybrid works that reify the emergent “thingness” of the digital
