Original and Timely Content Published Exclusively at fenceportal.org.
Below is a complete list of contents linking to of all the works
that have thus far appeared in Steaming.
Fall Poetry Album
December 6, 2024
Work by:
* Kaitlyn Airy
* Stephen Danos
* Haley Joy Harris
* Tommy O'Rourke
* Eric Pankey
* Max Schliecher
* Ken Walker
Earth To You
Sara Jaffe | October 25, 2024
An unseen hand reels the window open and delivers a chord like a boat with a hole. The sound sparks every point on her body. At the edge of the lawn she’s a pin on a map, the lawn is a plane and the sound is a loud line across it. The line reveals the distance between the open window and Helen.
Oracle Portraits
Mary Zhou | October 16, 2024
Notes
Oracle bone script is one of the earliest written forms of Chinese.
Diviners would write characters on an ox bone or turtle shell, place it in fire, then use the cracks to interpret a fortune.
Ode to Mud Season – A Vispo Journal
Melodie Reay | October 2, 2024
Morning Walk By Admissions In Middle Age
The cracks in the pavement
I understand to be growing.
Healthy Lamoille Valley says
I can win
with a strong mind and body!
white clouds cast grey spots on
green mountains.
Stars Amid Rubble
Sibelan Forrester | August 11, 2024
The US always thought of the USSR with all its Soviet Socialist Republics as Russia. Before the Revolution and after as well, Russian was the power language, and for most of the Soviet period the “regional” languages were suppressed or not taught; in the Ukrainian SSR, teachers of Russian were paid more than teachers of Ukrainian. Not teaching Ukrainian language in institutions of higher education in the US was a byproduct of this attitude...
from A seam of electricity
Ian U Lockaby | August 6, 2024
What is a house unelectrified, situated on a continent-wide grid of electrical possibilities? Failure in the interiors of modernity— keystone limber in the going logics of domestic illumination? Is it even legible by the tools we have of reading houses, grids— of reading settlement?
Does it even exist in the eye of utility?
DOLLY
Ben Voigt | July 11, 2024
The original copy.
The first cloned mammal, grown from the mammary glands of a Finn Dorset.
Now on display in a glass box at the National Museum of Scotland.
Specimen form: mounted skin and skeleton. Materials: organic material.
Looking into your tired eyes, what do I hope to see?
Hook, Scalpel, Clamp, Hole
Stevie Belchak | June 27, 2024
I am sitting at my kitchen island, my hands floating like two pale moths over two sheets of printing paper. Atop the sheets is a standard hospital logo printed in jeweled tones. On the first sheet falls clearly numbered post-surgical instructions, the phone number of a physician. On the second, there is a series of frames of what appears to be a strange and grotesquely beautiful flower.
Selections from ** *******
Patty Nash | June 20, 2024
Three PATRICIANS sip from pearlescent flutes. In a surprise turn, BRAD has been dumped from the Island. The PATRICIANS reflect on the hand they have been given. / There’s a homunculus inside you. Its name is your name. / It arms and predates you. It’s a whitish and phlegmy creature. / Sometimes it intuits things that aren't there. Or that things are terribly wrong, when they aren't, everything’s fine, PATRICIA.
Mommies all the way down
The screaming parlors were places where wealthy people could pay to scream at poor people. They came in on their breaks, before, or after work, in their suits with their briefcases. Sometimes the men took off their ties so they could really get comfortable. The women took off their high heeled shoes.
MONTEVIDEO
A few hours before dinner, Dad walked into the restaurant and placed a bomb under the table. He armed it, set the timer and walked out. Our reservation was at six.
FROM THE TALE IN GRAY [SECOND LIGHT AFTER DEATH]
school closed. your teachers jumped on and off stage like monkeys on a hot tin roof. hands banded behind their backs, they were kneeling down before a crowd that circled the school auditorium. a photo of the sick old great man was hanging high in full red, which they could not see and were not allowed to glimpse. you did not see the four men with spread legs and hands behind their backs . . .
Three Hybrid Prose: Séance, Herbivore Omnivore Vector, River Horse
Abigail Frankfurt | April 22, 2024
You want to set a date to visit Fossil Hall, but neither you nor I can keep a plan. I wait until you bathe, and your skin is raw and red to scratch "see t-rex" into the side of your lower back. Nothing is as fragile as this. The road we walk is made of used dental floss. Look, my gums are bleeding! And I swear you rinse your dick in the sink, but some things I don't want to be confirmed. After one-two-three-four beers you cradle my head in one hand and call my occipital condyle your favorite of all condyles . . .
From And Yet by Jeff AlessandrellI
Introduction: Claire Donato | April 19, 2024
“When Jeff Alessandrelli handed me a copy of And Yet, which was reissued by Future Tense Books in April 2024, 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, and Brooklyn, NY, 4/17/2024
Five Essays on Mold While We Wait to Be Cleaned
Dennis James Sweeney | March 2, 2024
I feel sadness for the mold, a decayed reasoning, swimming pool drained and left with only the scum, but it is a living scum, scum that emanates an urge, the urge to keep living, inhabiting our lungs
But Also This—Correspondences for Etel (Excerpts)
David Buuck | March 1, 2024
And then came the arrests. Came the tear gas, the percussion grenades, the pepper spray, the wooden bullets, the LRAD declaration of unlawful assembly, the kettling and the batons, came the bicycle scouts having returned from recon to sound the alarm, into the sidestreets, over the fence, be like water, the mad rush of those escaping and those holding the line, shields to the front, came the unmarked vans, the snatch and grab and the zip ties, the whole fucking apparatus, came the smoke from the fire inside the museum gift shop, came the press...
From "The Violet Hours"
Annabel Evitts | February 24, 2024
From the point of view of love, look at this: a bank of purple irises, petals hanging like narrow tongues, the chipped tooth of a lover after tripping in the garden, the blood that rushes between the teeth like a tidal wave.
When We Were Young
Mohamed Abdulraheem | February 23, 2024
Salim, Obaid, Prakash, Usman, and I: five tough boys. We rolled our shirt sleeves up to the shoulders, hurled stones at pigeons, bulbuls, air-conditioner compressors. We were invincible, unpredictable. We saved our greatest mischief for the grocer.
You Came Back / 回来了
Tyler Carter | February 14, 2024
From the outside looking in, the way I look is the most obvious thing about being foreign; that I am most obviously foreign to others here in China. Some people will stare at me when I walk down the street, ride the bus, or walk around the grocery. Some will stare boldly, non-stop, and when I look back at them, they keep staring. I wonder if they are being confrontational, rude, oblivious, amazed, or some combination therein. Some folks look more slyly from the corners of their eyes and when I look back, they stop.
The Listening Rooms
Sarah Minor | February 13, 2024
The title is the wall upon which hangs the placard. The title wears a prominent hat. The title surrounds the orifice, the velvet tongue extended. Every title contains just one invisible ellipses. The title is a collar. The title acts as underline. In every title there is listed one word none of the characters in the book recognize. The title is a lighthouse undressing you with its eye. And in the technology of the book, a durational form that folds, the title arrives between pauses—in some books, in every upper margin—a rhythmic parallel, beam-repeating. Books are books whether they are closed or open, but not so for essays. When the book closes, the essay is disinvented. The essay will not exist again until its gaze is met.
Afton Montgomery | January 31, 2024
When I was a Still Life, I wore a parka under the masonite table on my shoulders for trick-or-treat. Plastic flowerpot with the bottom cut off, rim resting just under my eyes. Silk
flowers framing face, tablecloth made of purple quilt. Ruby shoes. October is snow here, and ghosts. Aunt brings out paintbrushes and tiny jars of glaze to spread broken glass . . .
DUTY SO GREAT
| January 3, 2023
On the basis of what I took to be his vandalized spirit, he could have been my father. “Can you help me?” he said.
“Follow me,” I said, absent the intonation of a leader.
THE ESCOMBROS BUG
| December 13, 2023
It was November 1999, 78 degrees, and dust clung to each drop of sweat that seeped from Gloria’s forehead as she forced a shovel into stubborn earth. She felt like Pete’s lackey, digging for the bomb shelter. The site reeked of ammonia–her husband had softened the caliche with buckets of his own piss before taking the jackhammer to it. Gloria spritzed a purple bandana with Clinique Happy and tied it tight around the lower half of her face.
The Representation of Light Penetrating Mud
A collection of poems by Rocío Cerón translated from Spanish by Dallin Law | November 22, 2023
Genuflection. Skin in a symbolic state. The brow performing in a muscular cavity. Bird song between each fold.
In a corner the vestige fades: body caught in winds, nostalgia for matter.
Featuring an audio recording with poet and translator alternating reading.
KINGDOM OF THE WOUNDED
| November 1, 2023
TWO STORIES
| October 17, 2023
Katherine says we should tell the world the Gold Coast is beautiful, a real find, and I say Paris too, we should tell everyone we know, and she says we should also tell them about Rome and Florence, and I say München and Berlin, we should definitely tell everyone we know about those 2 cities, and she says Madrid and Barcelona, delivered so well it sounds urgent.
Photowali Didi
| September 23, 2023
If you listen closely, you can hear a frail ringing noise, like when the television would run out of programming late at night in the ‘80s. Only much softer. It keeps me up. At two in the morning the choral music starts again. My mother complained about it at lunch yesterday. She said, ‘the mosque is just too much.’ She said this in Bengali, “bodo barabari korey.” Her lips are thin and pursed as they are when she goes out to a meeting wearing dark red lipstick. She reminds me of a headmistress then.
THE SWARM: A CONVERSATION BETWEEN NEIS AND EZELL
| September 12, 2023
Dalia Neis and emet ezell are artists living in Berlin. This summer, they sat down to speak about Neis’ book The Swarm, recently published by The Elephants.
The Swarm hums to a music all its own. Set between the gurgling baths of Budapest and the Western Carpathian Mountains, Dalia Neis bends narrative into fog and mist. The Swarm is part film-script, part poem, part narrative: A filmmaker reflects on their relationship to desire.
AMPLIFICATION
Stephanie Anderson | August 1, 2023
H has a childhood memory of lying in bed at the farm listening to a soft, high pitch cut into the slow quiet. It’s a little like feedback but purer, like feedback’s crystalline cousin, and it gets louder until it’s directly behind her eyes. She lies still but begins to panic as it gets louder; the stillness seems important because she’s realized that the panic is the sound and the sound is her panic.
ALL I HEARD WAS THE HUMMING OF MACHINES
Some of the cabin doors had numbers on them. A sign directed me to the cafeteria where the night workers were eating dinner. I could see into the cafeteria through a glass partition. Night workers in their coveralls. I tried my key card and the sliding glass door to the cafeteria didn’t open. Workers continued eating and watching. I tried my key card again. When the door didn’t open this time, I walked away.
changes
Steve Anwyll | July 11, 2023
The hooker slips his shirt off. In the moment where he can’t see me I steal a glance at his chest. His ribs. The lines of muscle showing abdominals. Not an ounce of fat.
Year 2089
Luis Othoniel Rosa, Translated from the Spanish by Katie Marya | June 23, 2023
...The inhabitants of the Anthill pose as ascetic Greengrocers disconnected from the Pumpkin and from syntax, so that they can experiment with The Animal’s mind without the disruption of the rest of us. Some say people who are terminally ill come here for healing because they have no other chance or hope in life...
THREE POEMS
Alan Semerdjian | June 15, 2023
THE DESIDERIUM
As in, a day without time or waking
without hesitation. The way the song
for the lover becomes for every love
and future now a tall gray building
thing. Everyone must surface in a
photograph intentionally faded
The Emperor
Ari Braverman | May 30, 2023
When I was younger, I worked for some years as a tutor for a little boy who was the scion of a very wealthy family with its own peculiar culture and a whole battery of customs I never fully understood. I lived in a little cottage on the family property. Besides me and the boy, the other residents of this compound included the boy’s mother and his father—whom I saw but rarely, and always from a distance, as he was driven off to the city in a luxury car, or as he ascended the foyer stairs after returning from a work trip abroad—and a medium-sized but durable staff: groundskeeper, cook, and a house manager who had been the boy’s nanny until he turned ten and the family had hired me, and who despised me for taking her place and stealing the boy’s attention from her. And it was true: he was as cherishable and nice to look at as a little pearl.
Anglea Lives
Arthur Boyle | March 16, 2023
Angela lives in a house on W. 83rd St. Angela is thirty-one. She has mid-length brown hair. She’s on the taller side of average, and her face is relatively thin. The house is large, and quiet. It has a dark wood interior. Many windows let cold light enter. Angela lives in the house, and it is autumn.
Fumarole
Isaac Zisman | April 25, 2023
The vending machine cast a fluorescent triangle into the darkness of the hotel lobby, a glow that seemed not to illuminate the floor but rather to float millimeters above it. We stood in the empty doorway. No other lights were on, inside or out, and the night sky behind us was a wash of black against black mountains. The space was completely silent. Hefting my bag, I crossed the lobby and bought a packet of chicharrons and two beers.
Angel of Death
Brian Evenson | March 14, 2023
FENCE is happy to be collaborating with The Blight Record Project in sharing "Angel of Death" by Brian Evenson, read by the author himself and scored by Nathaniel Heuer and the band Hello Death.
JELLY FUNGUS
Katheryn Brock | March 7, 2023
The first time I saw orange coral fungi, I thought of orange marmalade, jelly fingers, waxy sebaceous plugs, and sea anemones. Their neon orange pigment was like nothing in nature that I knew existed, it looked bracing and synthetic, like pop art orange, or California ab-ex orange. That fluorescent orange is actually an earth tone, as much as umber, or siena, or brown pink, that from compost, orange flares of jelly fungus are born. Coiling, rasping earth tones.
Beached
Cameron Martin | March 7, 2023
There’s a picture of myself I’ve remembered wrong for years. In it, I imagined, I am standing next to someone (at a football game, I think) who was never quite more than an acquaintance and putting on an overeager smile. I have shocking streaks of dark purple and deep rich red in the hair just above my forehead and only there (needless to say, this looks stupid), my keys are around my neck on a black lanyard “decorated” with the Five Star brand logo, and I am much fatter than I am now.
Composition December '64
Balraj Manra, trans by Haider Shahbaz | March 3, 2023
I’m dying! Uff! This wind is killing me! Uff
The story is simple:
it’s hard to live in
these times. I say, it’s
freezing cold. Mister,
go home, rest. Home?
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.
Parenthood
Mariel Cupp | Feb 16, 2023
We came up with it while driving home from dinner. The sky, I remember, had that early morning brightness, though it was nearly ten at night, and there was a full moon without any tricks—no superpowers or strawberry hues or harvest indications. Just light that shone everything into blue. It looked like the world when you’re leaving early for somewhere, and it gave us the feeling that we had a long way to go.
SKAZZ
Jake Marmer | February 14, 2023
Skaz is a form of writing that channels the presence of the oral storyteller. Someone puts their spoon down and tells you a story, in real time, without the endless digestive backtracking, without rubbing the life off the over-edited clauses. The story doesn’t exist until it is being told because its memory is dormant until the circumstances of this occasion, and this encounter, rouse it. It’s anti-nostalgic, anti-diaristic, and so is its medium. See, there is no way to tell a story like that, a real story, without invoking an extinguished method of communication. The meaning needs to be passed through the machinery of a forgone accent, to be spit out and to position itself at a post so remote from itself that it could actually be seen. Paths to elsewhere open mid-way, people think you’re getting distracted, but what you’re really doing is walking, the borders, of the story – the one story – and you want to know the border, but you’re too afraid, least it ends, and you end with it.
Warmer and Farther from the Windows
Cole Phillips | Janurary 18, 2023
I rise the stairs to find her but she is not in the bedroom above the living room now. The stairs are narrow coming up and the ceiling, here, is low. My childhood bedroom is really only a side-closet, filled inside with a disused sideboard placed too closely to the window, this one not just cold but letting in water from the snow built up below it along the dormer, and so molding along its edges.
EXPERIENCE ERROR / HARMONY IN RED
The street in front of the site conflagrated with cabs, moving vans, electric bicycles, masses. It is said that the first traffic jam on Broadway was precipitated by the excitement over Henri Bergson’s lecture “Spirituality and Liberty” at Columbia University. “The essence of pity is thus a need for self-abasement, an aspiration downward,” Bergson had previously written, hopeful.
Ten Poems by Tone Škrjanec
Translated from the Slovene by Matthew Rohrer with Ana Pepelnik | December 22, 2022
I had lacy underpants
lowered to my knees and I was running
back and forth among prickly bushes.
It was night and I could hear
lots and lots of mysterious noises.
Endless shining eyes
who twinkled in the twilight like stars
were strolling over my silky
skin without shame.
Touches that I experienced...
Featuring audio recordings of Tone Škrjanec reading each poem in the Slovene.
Plastic Adventure
Theodore Anderson | December 20, 2022
TRI
ME
LLove me?
IT doesn’t have to be hard.
It
Can be easy, it should be.
Another
New
HYDRa
I
Desire to be for you.
Elephantine proportions, endless cantilever, elastic caviar. enamored.
Excursion
Vi Khi Nao | December 13, 2022
Defi’s left knee was torn out from a ski accident. Sitting in her own apartment, she waited for her friend, Han Solo, to come and help her move. When he arrived, standing in front of her front door, he looked up and down at the boxes of clothes, her laundry basket, her table and chair, and her suitcases, her orchid, her jugs of water, her jasmine 25-pound rice bag, her kettle and night table lamp, her boxes of books, a bucket, and its mop and he decided he was going to sit on the sofa. He sat there for three hours straight, not moving or lifting an inch of his athletic body.
TWO POEMS BY EDMUND BERRIGAN
Edmund Berrigan | December 2, 2022
Listen to Edmund Berrigan's voice as you read his two poems, "Perseids and Leonids" and "Poem (after Chantal Akerman)."
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. An exploration by Fence Poetry Editor Delicia Daniels.
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.
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.
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.
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
SELECTED POEMS FROM DESIDERATA BY MERCIER DESCLOUX
Translation: Emma Ramadan | April 7, 2022
New translations of poems by post-punk legend Lizzy Mercier Descloux. Courtesy of Emma Ramadan, whose full translation of Descloux’s “Desiderata” is forthcoming from Inpatient Press. From a full profile article from Pitchfork: "Descloux was never jaded about her lack of recognition. For her, music was not about success but rather a refusal to accept the limitations of genre, geography, or any other convention. She chose to live like an endless seed of mystery on the breeze."
Splitting Fire
Sean Williamson | April 5, 2022
Flat asphalt right into the sun, where the road curves at the foot of the granary. To submit to the silo, broken skull ruins. Organic, rotten artifacts of the countryside. The sun beyond the cornfield. The scene of an almost certain drunk driving rollover. Before we reach the theater, I pull over so my oldest, Theodor, can take a piss on the side of the road.
Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania, America
Alec Neidenthal | April 5, 2022
"...Light fell on everything, shifting his attention from his long-distance relationship to the erotic motions of trees and flowers beyond the window: lilac, jack pine, sumac. What was it Spinoza said? Sex, God, and nature are all the same. Well, Spinoza didn’t say that, but it was heavily implied in his work. “Is that my handsome nephew?” asked his aunt when they met him at Penn Station—the one in Philadelphia, its scale that of a cathedral, pew after pew after pew. “No,” he said..."
A RUSTED BIRDCAGE IN AN OTHERWISE EMPTY FIELD: VIDEOPOEM AND PROCESS NOTES
Patricia Killelea | February 16, 2022
Although we’re not yet living in a “postalphabetic environment,” the emergence of the videopoem carries with it all the possibilities of pushing beyond the page into the future of poetics, while simultaneously bringing language back to its origins in speech and sound.
THE LONGER IT DRAGS ON, THE LESS IT’S ABOUT YOU
Nat Sufrin and Tom Haviv | January 4, 2021
Over a few months, while Tom was in Vermont and I was in Brooklyn, we recorded four separate phone conversations, which meandered from A Flag of No Nation to my own manuscript Sky Access to our broader thoughts on art-making, trauma, and other spiritual matters. Those conversations, edited for length and clarity, form the mutual interview that follows.
DEEP TISSUE
by Claire Donato | December 27, 2021
Two housesits in Hudson, NY; two mysterious scratch marks; two bats; two cats; two multimedia art installations; two concerts at Knockdown Center in Queens. Youtube clips. Instagram posts. Lyric meditations. This is a lucid new hybrid essay only partially containing an interview with queer punk troubador Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, who is writing a book about childhood abuse and adult sexual misadventures, while the author of this piece is writing not only this essay before you but also a book about cracking eggs into a bowl until she finds a double yolk.
Caddy
by Katie Kane | December 17, 2021
Starla and Ashley were in the back seat of the Bronco II talking to each other. Starla who is Blackfeet was talking to my niece and daughter Ashley Rose who is Salish and Irish and also Chicana. Starla said “Oooks! Did you see that caddy purple jacket Sheila had on? She was standing by the door with Chaw Felix and them.” Ashley Rose who lowkey disliked Sheila said “Fuck her caddy.”
THREE POEMS FROM MARE'S NEST
by Holly Mitchell | December 15, 2021
Chair
They’re not bedsores if it’s not a bed
Spoonfed
I feel dolled
& nightmare about
a piebald suit
of old curtains
RASPUTIN
by Michael Chang | December 13, 2021
"i may have a hog body but at least i’m a strong-willed pig [ !!!! ]
|
if u see someone w/ the exact same face kill them
|
for instance kirsten dunst
|
lube via lather—intimacy via stand-in—ice floe via polar bears..."
FAITHFUL INTERPRETATIONS OF WONG KAR-WAI’S IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
by Tan Tuck Ming | November 28, 2021
In the film, her husband is seen only once: his back at a table, playing mahjong. Otherwise, he is said to be traveling. His wife is seen twice: her back and a green telephone, through an oval-shaped window. She is said to be working late. Other ways they appear: as disembodied voices in a doorway; imported rice cookers, handbags, boutique ties brought as gifts.
LAWN CARE
by Casey Haymes | Nov 27, 2021
"Pale thorns reach from emerald wings. I kneel in the clay-dirt and pinch the root stem of bull thistle. Exhume. Blood drops gather and wash my calloused fingers. I twist at the wrist, and the outdoor faucet beneath the window screeches. Water traverses the slight hill via hose, a green snake with a yellow stripe and coiled metal skin, up to the bent rim of a mouth..."
BEING IN PUBLIC IN LOS ANGELES
by Craig Willse | November 30, 2021
I am in Los Angeles, hiding from winter and rethinking my life. Or maybe I am rethinking winter and hiding from my life. I have been coming back to this city for twenty years, its ugly beauty beckoning. It is a cliché in conversations with displaced New Yorkers – Los Angeles is wonderful, but lonely. I am more scared of being lonely than being a cliché, and so I commit to living in public as much as possible.
MADONNA OF THE MASTER BATH
by Lauren Westerfield | Nov 27, 2021
"All of this revolves around my body. This dream, the narrative, too vivid, bright—more real than bone. Teeth are barriers. My mind assaults the bone to keep from feeding on itself. Plastic does not work the same. The dentists warned me: this thing inside my mouth won’t stop the grinding. It only mitigates the damage. I do not want to lose my teeth. I also do not know if he and I share understandings of this word: DAMAGE..."
DISINTEGRATION F_ACE
by David John | November 28, 2021
"A face equals an approximate half-second.
"A face looks to be ever on the edge of death, ha.
"A face met repeatedly reforms itself into visual static.
"The face composed of polemical chant. Observational riff. Trivial blather..."
FROM: LIKE A DOG
by Lauren Samblanet | November 27, 2021
"dear h,
right now my sex life is made up of only dreams, both waking and dreaming. i see m, and occasionally f, quite often while sleeping. you don’t know them and don’t really need to know them or our backstory in order to hear about this dream..."
THE ENTRANCE OF THE ARTISTS
by Wil Weitzel | November 28, 2021
"More often than not, by mid-afternoon, the great structure of the cathedral became unmoored and began to float above its bustling quartier. The tops of the domes gave up their anchorage. An upwelling occurred, as in a nocturnal sea. Once, I saw the ochreous flare of a monk’s robe shifting from one high portal to the next, the dome itself cut off from earth by clouds. Far below him, swallows rafted through the air..."
“So-called Sappho” and more poems
by Francesca Abbate | November 20, 2021
"Halfway to the opulent hotel for his friends’ wedding, Not Baby, who can’t tell if the engineer’s attracted to her despite the scar or if desire veils it the way daisies—or any leggy wildflower—will a rut, nearly missed the enormous yellow crane that had fished a boat from the river and left it to pasture in wakeless blue..."
ME TO MY FACE (AS SOMEONE OR I FORGOT WHO)
by Chris Campanioni | November 8, 2021
"Later on, or in another book, there’ll be a video of me walking around the Musée d’Orsay & you can click play to roll the footage & you can watch & you can listen to the everyday sounds of a museum as you read this & in that way, you will have gone further than the text..."
JANUARY 1ST (RUBEN A)
by Dominic Jaekle and Hoagy Houghton / October 9, 2021
The first in a series of 36 photographs and correspondent texts in a collection titled 36 Exposures (forthcoming from Dostoyevsky Wannabe). Over the course of a single year, Houghton would send Jaeckle three photographs a month from his archive; Jaeckle would respond with an accompanying prose-work for each image...The texts number fragments, at turns essayistic and anecdotal; short stories, prose-poems, and assimilated citations. The images are largely personal: snapshots; familiar faces; passing objects of interest and attention.
Badlands is a 1973 American crime drama written, produced and directed by Terrence Malick, starring Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, and Warren Oates. The story is fictional, but inspired by the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in 1958. In the film, fifteen-year-old Holly Sargis lives in South Dakota with her father, a sign painter and widower who has strong opinions on Holly’s interactions with the boys in town. When Holly meets Kit Carruthers, a twenty-five year old greaser who works as a garbageman, she falls head over heels, much to her father’s chagrin. After Holly’s father kills her dog as punishment for spending time with Kit, Kit breaks into Holly’s house and demands she run away with him. When her father protests, Kit kills him and the couple cover their tracks and flee to the badlands of Montana. Then ensues their life of crime together on a mission to escape police pursuit, which Holly is not so much complicit in as captive to. The following poems are written from the position of Holly after she has turned herself in.
____________
I had a feeling today was gonna be the day
In the psychological hours
when blocks of light
& river crash down
between twin stone faces It’s so wonderfully tragic
as the disco of our union
rattles through the canyon Though I can’t imagine
the fear you must feel
losing it all.
…
You waltzed into my life
a seething incident
with hands full of cipher. A convergence of selves
interrupts the desert’s loneliness –
Rock towers thrust up
from the desert floor. A river is our dirtiest enhancement
slamming saloon doors
across our youth & repetition. Eileen tells me a tumbleweed
is not any specific plant,
but anything that tumbles.
…
I have to be very sure where I am
inside my knowing you might die.
The doors of perception
are turning me to stone.
…
Huge oysters and petrified trees
exhibit the drama of the canyon
as it came into being – shaken down,
turned over, blown up, & set on fire.
Fugitives & prisoners take sanctuary in its thickets
tree-clad peaks & beds of ocotillo flowers.
Here’s the scene where I kiss you
as the coyotes take their census.
I consider the joy a nest of loons supplies.
…
Existential gridlock
as noon smudges into place.
The railroad & paved highway
form the bowstring & northern boundary
while the patient river
bends many times beneath the eye.
Vertebrae of speech bolster the air.
Something inhuman locks into place
in a moment of broken brush.
In moments of hesitation, I tell myself
to expect is to limit
the wingspan of the not-yet-here.
…
In the dream, rattlers,
scorpions adorn the carpet
of my parents’ dressing room.
I wake to know you
guilty of my waking pain. The parade of stars
shimmers out on the Rio Grande
as gar rush the stream. Around me, oaks, pinyon pines
& junipers occur. Granite outcrops
& limestone on the plain.
The shim of your ambivalence – These crude calculations keep you alive
with those burials on your hands. Smacked out on resurrection fern
the view is worth all it costs.
…
Each day I bear your death –
its possibility & methods of cruelty
bloom all over me,
the year having dispensed
with friends & loved ones.
My fortune: having been so lucky as to escape
the sharp confines of our lovingness.
The rains it raineth differently
in a stand of quaking aspen
out on Emory Peak.
…
Down in this phosphorous night
I had only the dawn to rein me in. Desert weathering emphasizes the grotesque –
giant fish buried under talus slopes a jumbled mass of marine & lake deposit
canned laughter in the pleached trees. Oases may occur in the riparian zone
jammed between two collapsed persuasions. When he died, he donated his body to science
without a girl to scream out his name.
____________
Screen Shot is a space for writers to investigate the relationship between language and film. We are committed to discovering writers who use words as a tool for exploring the event of cinema, video, and the spectacle of our lives. To submit, email screenshotfence@gmail.com
Back when Suez was a hot topic, it was
the Gladiator of Tennessee vs. the Alabama Murderer,
and my fella took a few blows but knocked out the champ,
defeated in Montgomery, in record time!
The amateurs all came looking.
If you want victory, I said, you must train like him, eat like him, and then you must become him, the way Daniel Day Lewis
became Christy using only his left foot.
Millard Fillmore asks for your medical history.
Working the counter of the desert saloon, you must water
the cowboys yet move in Slushies, think in shorts,
cargo and bermuda. From here he will locate you with his gun, whose shadow is being danced
to itself, and you must envision yourself among difficult droughts, unclassified coursers,
the pony and her thrushy stream
of urine leaving traces through the land.
None of it’s on the maps.
___________________
Screen Shot is a space for writers to investigate the relationship between language and film, from narrative viewing experiences to Zoom meetings and Instagram stories. We are committed to discovering writers who use words as a tool for exploring the event of cinema, video, and the spectacle of our lives. To submit, email screenshotfence@gmail.com
THE MENTAL DISLOCATION IS A WONDERFUL FEELING
by Carly Stone | October 7, 2021
"I wish I had something funny to say about the garlic clove but all I can think about is how small and happy I feel when I hold it. Look at the picture of the old man again. Something inside you has shifted and now the onion isn’t very big at all. Through some cognitive miscalculation, the onion becomes normal-sized, and the old man becomes very small. This is good. You feel like your head has come off your body. Let your mind rearrange the proportions of the world. Let your body dissolve into the soup of reality..."
INTERPOLATED VISIONS @ INDETERMINATE INTERVALS: MOTH, THIN NIGHT, BRILLIANT SKY, DENSE NIGHT, TEAR GAS, & SHROUDS
by Brenda Beardsley | October 6, 2021
"[Interval] moth: A moth flusters at the screen, needs to be in, while I yearn to be out. Cool air carries a far-away voice. Across the road, reedy, pubescent bodies gather in what is left of the light: nowhere to go, because of the pandemic, not even supposed to be together. While dusk slips into night, they pass an ash-laden cigarette from one pouty mouth to another..."
THIS VIEW UNCOMFORTABLE / A VERGE
by Hazel White / October 7, 2021
Marin Headlands, Pacific Ocean
"Colonel in the U.S. Army greets me one morning. He enlisted in 1984, knows the 'armpits of war.' I sidestep to our view—'In Afghanistan, there was hardship. I was engaged with the terrain, we had to move supplies through it, the view of the mountains there was enough,' he says. This view, 'a place where I should feel, . . . oddly uncomfortable...'"
WINDOW PORTRAIT
by Nathan Dixon | October 5, 2021
"I heard what sounded like a muffled scream as we unloaded beach bags from the car. 'Did you hear that?' I asked Caroline. 'Hear what?' she responded. 'I don’t know.' I couldn’t tell from which direction it had come. I sometimes hear things that are not there—songs in the static of sound machines, whispered conversations in brewing coffee pots—a trait perhaps inherited from my father’s father, who in his final years complained of a baritone singing 'Silent Night...'"
CAN ESTADOUNIDENSES WATCH A 'FOREIGN FILM?' ON CUARÓN’S ROMA
by Whitney DeVos | September 2, 2021
"For me, on that particular night, ROMA had been, above all else, a film about all the quotidian ways in which men are de mierda cagado by/under/a causa de/debido al patriarcado...how it is the particular social world into which we are born, the particularized enmeshment of power relations, that sets the conditions of possibility for the extent to which we are able to reach our creative potential—y/o externalize our own inevitable suffering onto others..."
EXCERPT FROM SEAL/WOMAN
by Katie Schaag | September 2, 2021
an erasure of Ronald Lockley's novel Seal Woman (1974)
An undulant fantasy for fanciers of Wild (female) Things who make the heart sing even underwater, as does that of the narrator who pursues the smooth Pinnipedian form of Shian, the seal-woman...
grief_place.txt (15)
by William Lessard | August 8, 2021
"When Mike Kelley strung thrift store rag dolls and stuffed animals from a canvas, he was mapping the territory of abuse. Each doll a tiny parcel holding the sweat and tears of their former owners. Bodies sewn head to toe, toe to head, between a scream of blanket. Like Rauschenberg’s Bed from a generation prior, More Love Hours Than Can Be Repaid (1987) unspools yellow tape around the scene, marks the spot where the victim anticipates nocturnal recurrence..."
BIRD OF ONE
by Leah Umansky | September 2, 2021
"I take out the stones and sit there, imagining a new wall, a new way and then I quiet it. I am not an escapologist. I can’t escape. I’ve actually been grounding myself in earth, in trees, in birds and blues. I’ve been returning to nature, to the body and the body of the world. Sometimes, I lose myself in fear, but then I return to rebuild. Sometimes, I take myself out of it all. I take out all the I’s, and then I put them back in."
METROPOLIS: SCRAPS FROM ACCRA, GHANA
In Ghana, the air is thick with equatorial heat. Two seasons dominate the year: rainy and dry. I think of them as Wet Hot and Dust Hot. In Wet Hot, raindrops puncture the air so persistently that the holes they make in the grey sky seem permanent. Umbrellas are geometrically impractical, as the rain draws itself as a dotted line parallel to the ground, and perpendicular to the person standing upright...
FROM THE BETWEENS
For a long time I practiced Vipassana with a meditation teacher who talks about the relief he feels when he opens up his mind to nothingness. This kind of meditation brings me a lot of relief when I have anxiety. I did wait a long time wondering if he was going to say something to address the post I made on his Star Wars page. He says nothing. I say nothing...
I was in my mid-twenties when I immigrated from Pakistan to the US, landing in Manhattan. Fresh off the boat, as the saying goes, I never expected to be attending a mushaira in New York, yet there I was, in the packed, smoke-filled conference hall at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, giddy with excitement […]
After our mother died, The Father began to go through his reporting papers and the heaps and hills of family documents kept in a large wooden chest from Mexico, locked with a giant iron lock and key. The chest, part of the spoils from their years abroad, smelled of candle wax and toasted wood. He […]
* * An attractive figure rounds the corner. Is he? Yes, very. Your gaze locks in his. The moment dilates. Take in the hooded eyes, the aquiline nose. Zero the body. You feel a flush of arousal, a stirring below. Your pulse grows palpable. The mouth wets but you can’t swallow. * * […]
Missionaries (1962) The doorbell would ring, and my mother and I would slink into the living room trying to muffle our giggles until, peeking out the kitchen window, we’d see the backs of their white short-sleeved shirts as they walked toward the street and their next stop. We’d been on their list my whole life, […]
1 In April everyone involved in, or touched by, independent publishing saw a flare go up: Small Press Distribution launched a GoFundMe. SPD is looking for $100,000 to help cover its losses during the covid-19 crisis. To state the obvious, the crisis has profoundly disrupted bookselling nationwide—even and especially by Amazon.com, which has suspended and/or […]
The headache is the limit, the circle, the disk. The black horizon. Sometimes it’s a dull, red glow, soft latitudes of pain. Or a field of searing, orange craters. They burst open through the dark. Or, with a gentler hurt: tall, blowing vanes of magnetized color. Sometimes it’s still. Maybe then, it sleeps. When it […]
“It is not tiring to count dresses.” GERTRUDE STEIN 1 This dress I am wearing in this black-and-white photograph, taken when I was two years old, was a yellow dress made of cotton poplin (a fabric with a slightly unsmooth texture first manufactured in the French town of Avignon and brought to England by the […]
Oonseentia. I go out into the city and find a tulip tree, the tallest tree I can find, the tree called oonseentia by the peoples native to this land, the tree these native peoples use to build their canoes. I intend to build a canoe of my own. I wait for lightning to strike and […]
He touched me, so I live to know That such a day, permitted so, I groped upon his breast. —Emily Dickinson[1] One of the first texts I had assigned for my 2020 spring environmental literarture course, Climate Emergencies, was E.M. Forster’s shocking visionary tale “The Machine Stops.” The story is set on a future […]
Astroturf eats sun like a late meal. The heat greets my left cheek, right cheek rushes with soiled roadway breeze, I reconcile two or more feelings. The astroturf at the Women’s World Cup in 2015 was reportedly 120 degrees at kickoff. Hot surface for the hot […]
