From February, “Blue Alyssa And The Sad Gray Crab.”

1. What would you do if you ran into yourself?

Jump out of the car and make sure myself was okay. (There was a time when I would’ve joked that I’d’ve made sure no one saw me and peel off into the night, but I saw the dead head-bleeding victim of a hideous hit-and-run a year or two back, and no longer consider such things funny.)

2. Where would you go in time? What would you do?

I would find the time between 6:21 and 6:22 in the morning and open it up and crawl inside, and find its middle and divide that middle and pull it open and climb inside, and again and some more, until I found Zeno’s peanut girl at the center of the nesting dolls of time, and she and I would lie in the grass firing arrows at the sun mid-rise.

3. What question would you ask the future version of myself? How should I answer?

What question would I ask the future version of you? I would ask you, am I still alive? You should tell me the truth.

What question should I ask the future version of me? I would ask me, was it worth it? I should tell me what I need to hear. Continue reading →

Devan Goldstein’s wonderful piece, “Five An Hour,” appeared in the February Issue. This hour Devan answers six questions.

1. What factory would you work the line? What would be the fringe benefits?

The Dream Factory. I imagine that working the Hollywood line makes even the lowliest production assistant feel somehow special, which seems like a nice benefit for one’s job to confer.

Also, I often miss teaching composition.

2. What would a whale bitch about?

Whalers, giant squid, the danger that increased oceanic acidity presents to the global plankton supply. First-world whales would probably just complain about shitty iPhone apps like the rest of us.

3. What would we find if we cracked you open?

Billions of teardrops, a love letter that constantly rewrites itself, shockingly few memories, and a taxonomy of all possible affronts. Maybe one of those parasites that eats half your food, too. Continue reading →

We loved this story, “Babymaking,” in February and we love it now and also we love this interview with Brittany.

1. Why doesn’t anyone make an abortion pact?

Nobody would give you any presents.

2. What movie has people having sex on top of dead fish, other than Cabin Boy?

Forrest Gump,  Gone with the Wind (in which sex on top of dead fish is only implied), and The King’s Speech are the first movies that come to mind. I didn’t know about Cabin Boy. I’ll have to check that out.

3. Which R&B star will you name your child after?

R. Kelly. Whatever the R stands for, that’s the name I want to call my love child. Continue reading →

Remember November, when the temperature was turning and the snow was just starting? Now that those things are gone, remember these Five Poems from Christopher Citro, from the November Issue.

1. What happened the last time you ventured out beyond the searchlights?

You know that old Twilight Zone episode where the drunk ventriloquist loses his mind and in the end winds up trapped as his own dummy’s dummy? Something like that, only more unsettling.

2. What made you call these poems, despite being in the skin of prose?

This is an unexpected question. The simple answer is that I call them poems because that is how I wish them to be read, as prose poems, as members of that mongrel family. I hope that they do at least some of what one expects a poem to do, only without line breaks. Rather than tap dancing to the various rhythms available with lineation, I hope these poems play with the rhythms of different  types of prose, in this case neighborhood gossip, love letters, artist statements, fairy tales, etc.

Rather than being “in the skin of prose,” I prefer to think of these poems as having the bones of prose.

If their form is their bones, the words themselves maybe are their muscles, syntax their tendons, punctuation their body piercings, and their published existence online one of their many possible skins. (Admittedly, the metaphor breaks down at this point. I’m beginning to feel a bit like Dr. Frankenstein, which is an image I am entirely comfortable with.)

3. Who would you free and why?

Minds. Because the asses will follow. Continue reading →

These Three Poems from Eugenia Leigh were published in the February Issue. Eugenia enjoyed answering all our questions.

1. What would be the first thing you did when you get out of prison?

Lie down in a field. Or seek out rain, then lie down on the field in that rain. With spicy Korean fried chicken. Alone.

2. What would your stick father figure wear?

Basketball shorts and horrible, musky cologne.

3. How has spatial perception influenced your work?

I obsess about form and spatial aesthetics in my poems. In fact, I can probably go through every poem I’ve written and explain why it looks the way it does and how form accentuates meaning. For instance, in “Upon Living with a Man Newly Released,” each stanza dwindles by one line so that the first stanza consists of seven lines (the number of completeness) and the seventh stanza holds a single line. The speaker in this poem rids herself of her father’s memories through drawings, which she ultimately feeds to the moon. At the end of the poem, she’s finally alone. Hence, the single-line stanza.
“Still Life,” which fixates on the inability to remember (illustrated by the “black hole” in the brain), is pockmarked with white spaces to visually represent that memory loss. Before you read the poem, you see that the story will have holes—literal holes. Hopefully, this creates the anticipation of an unreliable narrator who will leave the story with figurative holes as well. The speaker in “Testament” struggles with the dichotomy of her parents’ “tragedy” and the truth about her impossibly joyful mother, which explains why several lines in the poem appear to be split into two columns.
Poetic form is one of my favorite elements of the craft, and I owe Laure-Anne Bosselaar a huge thanks for sowing that passion into me. Continue reading →