From the February Issue, this great little piece from Christine Fadden, “Little Rubber Houses.”

1. What food would you sit on naked?

I’ve always got at least five boxes of different cereals in rotation. If I’m staying somewhere and they have Lucky Charms, I’ll eat the entire box in two days. Those marshmallows are kind of slimy in your mouth, you know what I mean? But I love their psychedelic colors. That cereal is so fake. I don’t allow myself to buy it. And Cap’n Crunch will scour the roof of your mouth until it bleeds. It’s the sandpaper of cereals.Cereal: That’s about the only thing I have in common with Seinfeld.I don’t have the balls to do stand up, but people do laugh at me. Continue reading →

Do you remember December? Remember December by reading these poems from Mary Kovaleski Byrnes and then reading this interview.

1. What does it take to rattle your world?

That weird, alien sound pond ice makes when it’s warming up.Tomatoes that don’t taste like anything. The repetition of the numbers 926 I have been seeing everywhere since I was about 16 (I should really play the lottery). A thunderstorm in winter (and that’s a good rattling).

2. How is a bed groggy?

I don’t know about you, but I usually wake up and do a few can-can kicks and yell “hello, world!” In seriousness, bed is where things are always half-way reality and half-way dream-world. That foggy, groggy place.

3. What would your bi-plane look like?

1940’s retro flamingo pink please, and with those things that let it land on water, too. Continue reading →

“Say When” from Sophie Klahr was published in the February Issue. You should read it now.

1. What animals, real or otherwise, is a woman made out of?

Sneaky ones.

2. Which crime would you prefer not to contain?

I contain all possible crimes.

3. What question should I contain? Why?

What else is possible? Why this is a good question should be self-evident. Continue reading →

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 →

In the February Issue, there was this great piece, “Sex Education,” from Stephen Mills.

1. Why is it always funny when a guy gets raped in a tv show or a movie?
 
Watch a few episodes of HBO’s Oz and you might feel differently, but I know what you mean. Male rape is often used as a joke or a funny fear that straight men have. The real answer is that those jokes and fears are mostly rooted in homophobia and probably hatred of women. Going back to Oz, there are some very interesting discussions of male rape in that show that highlight many of the complexities of how we view rape differently depending on the victim’s gender. When it comes to humor, I’m all about pushing the boundaries and laughing at things you aren’t supposed to find funny, but you have to be smart about it. 
 
2. How do you sneak in journalism in poetry? Is that your responsibility as a poet?
 
I don’t necessarily like the word “responsibility,” but I’m sure I’ve used it many times to describe what I think poets should be doing. In many ways, I write what I feel is missing in the poetry world or what I want to see more of out there. I like poems that truly engage with real life and real issues, but frame them in a personal way. My book, He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices, relies heavily on various news stories like the treatment of gay men in Iran and the story of Jeffrey Dahmer. We are bombarded every day with “journalism” and it filters into us and through us and into my poetry. As young kids, the media is often the first place we hear about horrible things like rape or murder, which is partly what my poem “Sex Education” is all about. What I like about using news in poetry is that you aren’t held to the same idea of “truth” as some other forms of writing and, in the end, you often get at a bigger more useful “truth.” 
 
3. Do you like what I’m wearing?
 
I have the same underwear, so yes I do. Though, I thought you’d be wearing pants for the interview. I don’t mind. 

Continue reading →

In January, “Letter To Iredell From The Yucatan” by Mike Dockins.

1. What made you choose the stanzaless structure of this poem?

This was not the first of what is now a collection of 21 epistolary poems, making up my second (and so far unpublished) manuscript. The first few I wrote were stichic, which felt right, and the rest of the poems followed suit. I remember showing one to my friends Tom Holmes and Michelle Bonczek, and Tom asked why there were no stanza breaks; he felt the poem needed such in order to breathe. But by then I was convinced that the stichic form presents a relentlessness that echoes the relentlessness of the speaker–who is me, but not me. I can’t remember who’s the author of that great quote about the first-person persona being not me but someone who knows me very well…. In any case, the entire collection is stichic, and on some level I like to think of it as a poem-cycle, one long and relelntless controlled rant.

2. How has being a singer-songwriter influenced your poetry?

They say that poetry is all about rhythm and “music,” and I think that’s true. But in fact if anything my studies of poetry and of language in general have done more to influence my song lyrics. I feel like I’m a better lyricist these days because of that. As a rule, I’ve tried to keep those disciplines separate, but of course there’s overlap, both conscious and unconscious. Meantime, I do try to pay close attention to rhythm, even with erratic-lined free verse poems such as this poem.

3. What Mayan deity would you summon? What would you have it do?

When I first saw this question, I almost fell over laughing. What a terrific and unexpected question. The first to come to mind was Quetzalcoatl, but that is in fact an Aztec god. But there is a Mayan counterpart known as “Q’uq’umatz *PV*
Feathered Snake god and creator. The depiction of the feathered serpent deity is present in other cultures of Mesoamerica. Q’uq’umatz of the K’iche’ Maya is closely related to the god Kukulkan of Yucatán and to Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs.” (good old Wikipedia) When I was about 10 years old, I saw an ad for a movie called “Q.” I was dying to see it, but never did. Years later, I watched clips and it turns out the movie is horrific. But I liked the image of Quetzalcoatl terrorizing Manhattan from his roost atop the Chrysler Building. Continue reading →