Sarah Bitter

Excerpt from Survived By

*this piece is best experienced on desktop

 

 

Blue, 1982

A robin’s egg sky arches over my young father. He’s got one big change in him, but I can’t see it as I watch him bend to pull soil and roots from mower blades.

I don’t know yet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

The influence of John Berryman is everywhere in this piece. Also, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of inspired me to begin manipulating family photos, including blurring and cutting people out.

 

 

 

Sarah Bitter writes poetry and prose from the home she shares in Seattle with her partner, daughter, and dogs. Sarah has an MFA from the University of Washington. Her work has appeared in The Seventh Wave, River Mouth Review, and Slipstream.

Allyson Paty

 

Premise

 

Having woken from the dream of riding on a flat tire

 

Having carried the scrape and-a-one-two, scrape and-a, scrape scrape onto the train

 

Having surfaced in a heart of commerce, closed

 

Having taxed the muscles in a pack of women

 

Having paid to

 

Having creamed our faces in a crowded mirror

 

Having walked a mall-like stretch of a famous avenue

 

Having passed two men caked in dust, one

 

Having aimed a miniature leaf blower at his chest

 

Having turned it on his companion, who

 

Having swept his arms dramatically

 

Having pushed the tool gently away, both men

 

Having laughed, somewhat cleaner

 

Having caught my reflection in the windowed façade of a bank

 

Having admired the ranunculus in a garden box of a white-brick building one block long

 

Having held a low opinion of this architectural style, but that vision of modernity

 

Having become passé

 

Having come to a kind of charm in it

 

Having blushed at nostalgia’s dim revision

 

Having turned left at the park

 

Having been too early for students, their habitual swarm

 

Having drawn the emptiness across honeycomb pavement into suspense

 

Having been the site of a parade ground, a public grave, and farmland

 

Having, in a time of resistance, formed a border between New Amsterdam to the south and the Lenape to the North, the plots

 

Having been parceled out by the Dutch West India company to eleven men

 

Having been enslaved by the charter

 

Having petitioned for freedom and

 

Having attained a conditional version, the terms of which

 

Having not extended to any children living or future

 

Having required annual payments of grain and livestock and occasional service

 

Having included a lot on this acreage, which grew over centuries into an enclave of freemen despite

 

Having under British rule been stripped of their deeds to the land

 

Having been cleared from forest, a stream rich in trout

 

Having coursed and—polluted, used as a sewer, and finally buried—possibly coursing

 

Having nodded good morning to a woman’s request for a dollar like I don’t understand the ask

 

Having pulled the heavy institutional door

 

Having flashed ID to George

 

Having read yesterday’s memo

 

Having ridden the elevator to eight

 

Having forgotten already—one man’s shirt was neon orange, but was the leaf blower’s matching or green?

 

Having gone to the desk and turned on the Dell

 

Having eaten a yogurt purchased on the famous avenue for $1.79

 

Having gone to the kitchen to recycle the cup, despite

 

Having seen the bins emptied into a common dumpster

 

Having nodded to the assorted labors, human and bovine, past and to come

 

Having said internally bon voyage

 

Having read that plastics remain 450 to 1000 years intact

 

Having greeted a coworker Good morning, Good morning

 

Having typed 1569 into the browser’s search bar

 

Having wanted 450 years to feel real or specific

 

Having read Wikipedia’s list of deaths in that year, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

 

Having been among the names

 

Having turned to the tasks that constitute my employment, e.g.

 

Having volleyed a quantity of emails

 

Having projected into that near-future space where I hope this finds you well

 

Having chanted internally from Alice Notley, All day you have to in the lough

 

Having read the line on the morning train

 

Having said it alternately law and loff

 

Having consulted circa 1:00 p.m. merriam-webster.com

 

Having thought, But in a lake, I never feel that I “have to”

 

Having retrieved lunch from the fridge

 

Having emptied the container onto a plate

 

Having spoken with coworkers: media, food

 

Having listened partly while replaying internally the dust exchange

 

Having cast both shirts as orange

 

Having recalled in your orange shirt you look like / a better happier St. Sebastian despite

 

Having pictured that shirt not florescent like the tulips O’Hara goes on to mention but something more like sherbet, the men this morning

 

Having cleaned via pantomime of cleaning

 

Having slid tenderness inside a macho exchange

 

Having rendered the image of a rough touch via a light one

 

Having returned to my desk

 

Having typed wedding dance into the browser

 

Having encountered a field of photographs showing formally dressed white people on lustrous floors

Having realized my mistake

 

Having added bruegel

 

Having seen this painting at the DIA

 

Having been in town for a wedding

 

Having gravitated to the reds, the reveling peasants

 

Having been painted happy and plump, Antwerp

 

Having operated refineries for the quantities of sugarcane imported from the Americas, the city

 

Having become rich, Flemish merchants presumably

 

Having wanted to admire a cheerful image of their commoner countrymen, their carousing

 

Having been read as a celebration of local customs at a time of Spanish rule but

 

Having also been read as a moral statement against the underclasses, Flanders

 

Having been in the throes of the Reformation, on the brink of the Eighty Years’ War

 

Having typed an associative list:

Having rendered foremost a picture of an education, the present

 

Having ground a myopic lens

 

Having looked through or only at it

 

Having glanced to the corner of the screen: 1:37better get back, but

 

Having typed into the search bar 1019

 

Having recognized only names: Song Dynasty, Kyūshū, Manchuria, Kiev, its Wikipedia entry

 

Having been less than half the length than 1569’s—gross distance or the contributors’ skew toward a Europe (then “dark”)?

 

Having tried too the Met’s digital collection

Having saved a screenshot: Glaze Clump, 11th–12th century, no image available, not on view

 

Having felt a personal affinity

 

Having scrolled chronologically, the object dated closest to 1019, a single gold dinar (A.H. 419, A.D. 1028, made in Iran (modern Afghanistan), bequest of Joseph H. Durkee, New York, 1898), the coin

 

Having one smoothed and slightly cracked edge, the details

 

Having been effaced, perhaps

 

Having sat unevenly under heat or weight or water

 

Having felt the air in the office suddenly thick, the skies

 

Having opened, I was certain, despite

 

Having been nowhere near a window

 

Having thought the rage of the gods despite

 

Having not once considered divine emotion as

 

Having shaped the observable world

 

Having inherited instead a humanism in which there are natural forces and people who act and

 

Having felt that worldview scrape and-a scrape, metal rims

 

Having bent against road

 

 

 

Allyson Paty is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Five O’clock on the Shore (above/ground press, 2019). She is co-founding editor of Singing Saw Press, Associate Director of NYU Gallatin’s Writing Program, and a teacher in NYU’s Prison Education Program. Her poems appear in publications including BOMB, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Tin House, among others and are forthcoming in The Yale Review.

Amy Bobeda

 

Disposable

Amy Bobeda

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disposable:

                  that which may be done without

                                            free to be used

                                                                 as the occasion my require 

                                                                                           to be available.

 

Designed to be discarded after one use.

                                                                        A desired surplus of income—

A pipe dream springs a

leak; a loss of water—

 

 

 

 

 

Dispose:

                       From disposen—

                                    Set in order, place in a particular order.

                                                               Arrange, control, regulate, disposer—

 

Dis

                     Pose

                                            Air—another oxygen monitor sings twilight. Goodnight to

                                            another moon who will not rise tomorrow.

 

 

Ponere, to put or place, haphazardly among the leaves, two by two in unmarked graves.

 

To incline the mind or heart of—

 

 

 

 

 

Disposal:

                     Like a daughter by marriage, of waste—our material matter—

 

“You do not make a billion dollars,” NY House Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez say,

“you take a billion dollars.”

 

In the 1620’s, dispose + al,

                       Power to make use of, right to dispose of or control.

 

 

You do not take a million lives, you neglect them.

 

 

 

 

“We hear you. We hear you. We know we’re wrecking the world, but we don’t know how to turn this around. The system as so much momentum now. What can we do? Can you help us?” – Humans respond to humans masked as plants and animals in the work of Joanna Macy

 

 

Displace:

          Remove to a different place, put off usual place; remove from any position, office, or dignity.

The sugar maple becomes a legless climate refugee. One degree Celsius.

 

La Camp de La Lande: the memory of the Jungle tents, one small theater, library, St. Michel’s with a cross—demolished after a fire coincides with the Paris bombing.

 

                             What comes by chance—

 

                                                          The story is the story of the story we see on the four

                                                          cornered          screens          censored, the story is

                                                          never the body, whole.

 

                                                                                                                   We correlate; convenience

                                                                                                                   for a good story: product

                                                                                                                   means.

 

 

 

In 1944, displaced person became refugee—

                                                             the atom bomb a viable idea.

 

 

A false face

        May never decay in our lifetimes’ memory—future archeologists ask why we grew to amass a land of plastic, so vast stone become indistinguishable from straw.

 

 

You do not take a place, you neglect it.

 

 

You do not take a place, you displace it.

  

 

The scene shifts, a different mask appears, and the ghost of the tormented dead person speaks, recounting the manner of his death and

describing the tortures of hell. – Carmen Blacker on Nō theater

 

 

 

 

How to Wear :

          Be sure to wash your hands before putting on, do NOT touch the mask while wearing.

          Not an accessory for necks, foreheads, chins, noses, dangling from a single ear.

 

How to Remove :

Untie, unclasp loops, handle only by strings, like a tampon—cleanse or dispose, wash hands again. 

 

How to Dispose :

Is not included in the CDC guidelines. Neither is how to dispose of our loved ones and land.

 

 

If the memory of an event is a “trace” in the land, the actions that took place long ago are “etched” there, but “long ago” may become tomorrow at any time! –Cecilia Vicuña

Often a man fails to differentiate between his essential identity and his persona, becoming only the mask.

–Nancy Qualls-Corbe

 

 

 

 

 

We tied our masks in strings of many colors.

Blue the flavor of water,

Red the season of blood, inextricably braided,

                                                              purple beyond our imagined borders,

                                                                                                    the time of now, cut

through remnants of liquidity.

 

 

 

Wounded water, agüita herida,

Water of the deep aquifer, subterranean water of dreams, hear our song. – Cecilia Vicuña

 

“Our lives are the enactment of our dreams; our case histories are from the very beginning, archetypally, dramas; we are masks (personae) through which the gods sound (personare).” – James Hillman

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the day after the 2020 US Presidential Election, colors masked the country’s official leave of the Paris Agreement—the little spoken of five-year anniversary of a global initiative towards sustaining life on planet Earth. Amidst the largest surge in COVID-19 cases since the virus introduced itself as our newest cohabitant, Americans watched the news, protested, counted ballots, waited for answers, remaining people of America––the second largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I blame the cows,” Katie Holmes’ character says in a movie about a tropical storm in Louisiana that blows a tree through her roof.

 

“It will only get worse with global warming,” her mother-in-law says.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1976: Mikhail Budyko says, “a global warming up has started.”

 

1983: The modern “human induced” climate change enters discourse.

 

2006: An Inconvenient Truth is released, six years after Gore loses to Bush in the Florida recount for President.

 

2019: Canadian Cree, Shawn Wilson says something along the lines of, “if scientists could communicate to the public climate crisis, we would have done something by now,” in a lecture on Youtube.

 

2019: The Guardian changes its climate phrasing to global heating, and climate emergency.

 

2019: Swedish teen Greta Thunberg says, “It’s 2019. Can we all now call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency?”

2020: COVID-19 circulates the globe, calling for rapid change in public health policy, including recommendation and demand for reusable or disposable facial masks worn in public. 55,000 tons of disposable face masks are produced within 3 months of the pandemic’s onset.

 

2020: 1.25 million people die from COVID-19 by early November. Face makes become a US point of political contention, rather than a public safety measure.

 

2470: The proposed year microplastics from 2020’s face masks will decompose.

 

 

 

Inconvenience: from the 1400’s meant harm, damage; danger; misfortune. From Latin inconvenientia, lack of consistency, incongrucency. An improper act of utterance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amy Bobeda holds and MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where she founded Wisdom Body Collective, an artist collective rooted in the sacred feminine. Her work can be read in Humble Pie, Vol 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. @AmyBobeda on Twitter.

Benjamin Zellmer Bellas

 

OBITS

 

Benjamin Zellmer Bellas’ work has been published in The Pinch, Cadillac Cicatrix, and Drain Magazine. His combination of writing and visual art has been exhibited internationally at venues including Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 1a space, Hong Kong, and the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki among others. He is the recipient of a Franklin Furnace Award, and his work has been written about in Sculpture Magazine, FRIEZE, New City Chicago, and Washington Post. Zellmer Bellas holds MFAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Bennington Writing Seminars.

Olivia Muenz

 

my graine

 

my graine ii

 

Olivia Muenz is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Louisiana State University. She received her BA from NYU and is currently the Nonfiction Editor for New Delta Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Hill Journal, Anomaly, The Boiler, Pidgeonholes, Heavy Feather Review, Timber Journal, Peach Magazine, Stone of Madness Press, and ctrl+v.

Madison McCartha

 

Drone Render_08

 

“Drone Render_08” includes text excerpts from McCartha’s THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE that have previously appeared in The Spectacle.

 

Madison McCartha is a black poet and multimedia artist whose work appears in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. Their debut book of poetry, FREAKOPHONE WORLD, is forthcoming from Inside the Castle in 2021; their second book, THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE, is forthcoming from Black Ocean.

Sarah Minor

 

A Most Certain, Strange and True

Discovery of a VVitch

 

Seen on the Wing

 

Sarah Minor is the author of Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press 2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press 2020) and the digital chapbook The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press 2016). She is the video editor at TriQuarterly Review, Assistant Director of the Cleveland Drafts Literary Festival, and teaches creative writing to artists and designers at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Lucy Zhang

 

Sapling

 

Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Third Point Press, SOFTBLOW, Atticus Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and elsewhere. She is an editor for Heavy Feather Review and assistant fiction editor for Pithead Chapel. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.