wunderkammer

Another Distraction

by Gloria Frym

    Suddenly I’ve got friends, not mail, friends waiting to be friends, waiting to be verified as friends who have friends who are friends with other friends who I might already know and some people I want to be friends with are pending which is to say they haven’t accepted or rejected being friends perhaps have so many requests for friends they can’t keep up or are friends only by special invitation.  People want suggestions for friends and make clever remarks or simply write what they’re doing right now which ought to including writing but are more like Mary Contrary is wondering why day old coffee heated up tastes like pencil lead or Dick says early rain we’re having or Jane says someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah, ya ya.  These friends often sneak weird pictures of other friends, write messages on their walls, post pictures of their babies instead of themselves so that the face you’re writing to is way too young to read.  Some new friends are very new and want you to send them more friends.  Then there is a “friend” who somehow got into your group.  She’s posted a drag or photo-shopped image and she belongs to several computer game groups that have Blood in their names is always posting her progress and inviting you to blood events.  In this case blood is not thicker than water, so you hit Ignore.  You’d like to dump her as a “friend” but worry about hurting her feelings which aren’t virtual though who knows.  Fortunately, this site actually does not notify friends that they are blocked.  How does this work?  Here she is thinking she’s still your friend and you don’t get anymore of her invitations or karmas or messages.

    So-and-so has just joined the I-for-This-and-Not-for-That group.  Another friend writes on your Wall, Hey, this is old Greg, watcha doing in my waters?  You write back, I just had a double burger hold the bread.

    I thought the most important thing I’d heard recently is that the “common” grave which contains Federico Garcia Lorca, resting in duende, and several other victims of Franco’s slaughter is about to be dug up on account of the new Historical Memory Law in Spain which supercedes the Forget History Law.  Some relatives of Lorca’s grave-mates, not Lorca’s, want to check to see just who is really there and have the peace of knowing.  Lorca’s niece, who speaks perfect English and has the wonderful last name Garcia Lorca, says the family is opposed.  However, they will respect the wishes of other implicated parties.  But she’d like her uncle to be reburied in the same spot with the same mates who suffered the same fate.  So I posted online, I hope Garcia Lorca is returned to the same spot, but no one responded.  What kind of friends do I have here? 

 

Telephonic Etiquette

by Shawn Huelle 

 

Our artists worked hard to capture every detail of her black fabric shade and the eeriest eyes to ever ever wrap around your tree. Whether you display this or choose the piped version with included recirculating pump, this timeless art zombie will claw his way out of Brussels for more than 300 years. Please bear in mind that our quality designer resin accepts your 60-watt bulb, attaches to your tree, arrives in three pieces, and will bring the rich palette of Egypt to your home, garden plot, office, or family room corner! Act now, and we’ll include chic knee-high boots, a trendy cocktail dress, and accentuated curves, all the while pleading for assistance!

 

Titanium Flashlight

by Shawn Huelle

Somewhere, she thought, somewhere there is a photograph wherein people are baring too many teeth, convinced for whatever reason that this moment is the happiest—No, she thought, it isn’t happiness that people show with their teeth, at least not always—sometimes, yes, that she had to admit, but not always—no, what people usually showed with their teeth was what they thought happiness might be. 

She didn’t believe, like many of her more cynical friends, that most people were desperately unhappy; rather, she was quite convinced that people simply didn’t know what happiness was—not something lasting, but brief moments, which, now that she thought about it, could probably only be captured by a camera—and what she wanted, what she was looking for, was a photograph where too many people were baring their teeth at a singular, central character who had come to them to elicit this very facial expression. He would, of course, be wearing white gloves. 

What, she wondered, do white gloves have to do with happiness? But these are my desires, she though, I’m the one painting—no, composing this photograph which must already exist somewhere in the world.

What else? The color red? Supple leather? Yes and no. Both of these things and something more. Three shades of red, and something blue. The leather, upon further rumination, seemed inconsequential.

Fleece? Garlands? Warmth and merriment? Overhead bins? A fat man?

Then she found it. I’ve found it, she thought. In the photograph, just above the center point (which, she thought, is occupied by someone baring his teeth at something the viewer can’t see), just above, there is a balding man who hasn’t shaved in two days. He is not baring his teeth, but the corners of his mouth turn up slightly anyway. The viewer can only see his head, and he is staring directly at the camera.

 

Janice-Katie and the Concerned Mad Scientist (part 1 of 4)

by Sarah Eaton

Janice-Katie, Both Fruit and Flower.

by Jac Jemc

Janice-Katie, Janice-bright, Janice-blossom turned to fruit.

Every day Janice-Katie is cross-pollinated, self-surprised, she stays the same and comes undone.

Janice-Katie, at twilight, can feel herself turn waterless, feel her bones bend into beams of ghost and question, can feel the transformation occur, a little backwards shipwreck. 

In the dark of night she is the ruins of ancient artwork.  In the morning, she is a mystery, even in full-light.  As the afternoon turns to evening though, she can feel herself become the ultimate skeleton fiction. 

It’s at twilight that Janice-Katie can feel the buzzing of the day embed itself in her, change her.  It’s at twilight when her stamen feels the hunger, and her pistil feels full; the sticky tip of her stigma pulling the full day deep into her.  That is when her body begins to make the apple seeds.

Janice-Katie, on the stage, under the gas lamp of faithless vision and the panic of crushed myth.  She drums closed arguments with faint questions.  She cannot shake it out.

The petals of the blossom fall as she plumps, her skin growing thinner, building layer on layer, until that epithelial first coat has knotted itself into a core at the start of her. 

Janice-Katie rising round the neck of the dying spring, shining from within like startled death, her vivid veins rushing like nothing when compared to the famous, clean poetry of the fresh curse of fruit. 

Untitled

by Olivia Cronk

Is it too untoward to say Please Go Back to Normal Life? Janice-Katie’s radio plays untimely. I have tired entirely. Of my spying. At night, she photographs the objects of despair. I think that things are quite complicated. I think that sometimes the world feels like a million sadnesses coming out as a coughed-up fly. I think that, when it comes to Janice-Katie, when it comes to her, that, they, all the mutually exclusive private worlds of habit, that they, are she. They are she in a window. They fight over one black glove, the licking of its top, worn finger while standing in a moldy mansion up on over across from the lake.  They are she in window-frames. I believe she eats wrongly. I believe she is consumed by stiff curtains. The smell of nail polish. She is red at the windows. She catches the bus like a fox finding its mausoleum, finally. Have you ever adored a corner of a room? In sleeps? In true and awful ink? Janice-Katie’s radio plays untimely. I have tired, friends. I think they are she. I think that a mirrored wall has been set up to reflect a video-player and on it is Janice-Katie in her underpants, drinking minty concoctions out of deadly jars. And I think that something is wrong when she tries, in the video, to reach across her coffee table to adjust a dripping book. It does not drip right. The video seems corroded. Janice-Katie even looks around, like she’s being seen in the many mirrors. Can you smell that mint going wrong after she leaves the dishes for days?

*****: Ghost

by Four Worn

I am a ghost moving through our home.

This is not a metaphor.

You may feel me sometimes

in the prickle of arm hair

in the shortness of breath which comes

in the presence of other who is not other.

You may sense that I am here

but you do not see me.

I am a distant memory, an echo,

a summer’s day you turn in your head

was it real?  was I living?  was it just a dream, again?

I stand in line with Krishna and Lennon

proof of my existence has been grandly overstated

and you go on washing the dishes, combing your hair

as I pace from one room to the next. 

******: What I have to say

by goosebeard

Help helps helping helper

Fuck fucker

Fucking fucker

Shit shits shitting

Shitter

Everything down the shitter

Down down down

To chinatown

Town towns

Townie

Downer

Drowner drowning

Drown drowns

******: Oprah is Dead

by beardluv

Oprah is dead. You close your Oprah’s Bookclub book. Close your eyes. Think about Oprah surrounded by light on the cover of O Magazine; Oprah triumphant, pulling a wagon of fat in her highwaisted jeans, the gentle way she embraced children, handled human organs, fondled luxurious bedding and bathrobes. You tell yourself: Oprah's in a better place now, and it's only a matter of time before she's Skyping us from heaven. 

 

You turn on the the t.v. -- Oprah's dead on every channel, so it must be true. At the televised funeral, Sidney Poitier gives the eulogy Toni Morrison wrote. Jamie Foxx sings "Ave Maria" a la Ray Charles. Suze Orman sings along, and her teeth look a bit smaller and far less bright. Then Tina Turner and Beyonce dance to a rousing "Rollin on a River,” because this, Nelson Mandela claims, is the way Oprah would have wanted it. 

And the solid gold casket (adorned with amethyst, to reflect her love of The Color Purple) is lowered into the ground. John Travolta embraces Rachel Ray, who cries and says she really does feel fat.

A strangely composed Gail interviews a shell-shocked Nate Berkus, who reveals his reactions to Oprah's final moments: "When she collapsed, I had flashbacks to the Tsunami." 

Then Bono removes his sunglasses. Then the earth's orbit staggers. That's what Ted Koppel says, "staggers," and he shifts his toupee, clears his throat, and everyone just knows that behind his journalistic indifference he's frantic, and a nation is frantic right along with him.

The president declares this a day of national mourning. Airports shut down. Schools let out early. No one tells the children they'll never receive a dream from Oprah's Angel Network, but they must sense this in our eyes. 

 

The State Street Preacher, some shoeless kid in Africa, some mom in Topeka, that white teacher who worked in the bad part of the city -- you know, that one they made a movie about -- and some burn victim from your hometown are left small islands and suburban bookclubs and Pontiacs, as specified by Oprah’s will, and upon learning this, all of America smiles simultaneously at her posthumous generosity, and then mid-smile, all of America grimaces, realizing no one will ever again be that kind. 

*a****: 30 precious milligrams

by Benjamin R.

sleep

turned those capricorns inside 

out. 

the first great seizure

singing to an empty room

pen-promised and smooth as ink

a non smoking lounge

wonder world of borders. 

my forced punctuation, healthy

reproduction, 

amazing race to the bottom.

 

with all my loved ones on leashes.

if i had known the devil's details before swallowing them.