Selected Poems

MONGOLIA, SOUTH DAKOTA
Elinor Nauen

THE DAY AFTER THE ELECTION
Doug Dorph

NIGHT & ITS TRAINS
Christien Gholson

Selected Prose

HOME #34 - MARGARET'S PLACE
- AMSTERDAM - 2 WEEKS
Sharon Kwik

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ISSUE NUMBER FOUR

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ISSUE NUMBER FIVE

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ISSUE NUMBER SIX

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ISSUE NUMBER EIGHT

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ISSUE NUMBER NINE

GIVE ME MY LITTLE SKULL –
PHOTOGRAPHER JOEL PETER WITKIN, MEXICO CITY

Witkin’s greatest artistic accomplishment may be the deal he was able to work out with a hospital morgue in Mexico City which allowed him to sift through its daily supply of anonymous corpses picked up from the street and cavalierly manipulate them into ‘art.’

from Salon.com

What are you hoping to see at death’s distance?

Frida Kahlo’s miscarried infant
served in pieces on her broken
pelvis' s cracked plate
death happily dined on,
licked clean then returned
to its shelf.

You’d eat off the plate if you knew where to find it

here, picking through body parts
till the morgue is a dumpster
you can rifle.
In silence, words settle
into the flesh. Bypassing the tongue, the hunger
for death – muerte inked into a mouth.

* * *

You’ve come for the rind
peeled away
from the soul: the unclaimed

dead: no skeleton
tableau, they hold hard
to their tattered flesh. Their bones, still none

of your business. Too fresh
to have anything to do

with Day of the Dead, with deaths
made entirely

of sugar. They see
how you love

to eat with your fingers,
that you will always

take your meat raw.

Yellow press, bloody news,
la nota roja – the city squatting
to shit
once a week
on many small, glossy pages,

and you, resting
your gaze on faces
not even the tabloids adopt.

* * *

You were six
and you wanted the pet

to take a liking to you –
It laid something it killed

at your feet: severed head of a girl
rolling away from a car wreck,

a little dirt inside her blue, blue eyes.

Death arching its back, purring close to your ankles.
Death arching its back: now scratch it.

* * *

Your words jump in Spanish
from another man’s mouth.

You only use English
with the dead – Limp dolls,
cabron, dead weight
in your hands. News balled up
in place of a brain.

If there’s heft to a soul striking out on its own

the man you wrestle
into a chair
weighs barely the light and shadow
of himself. He’s there

sinking in the stitch
of heavy black thread
knotted from neck to groin,

in his blood your hands static
into background noise,

smeared aura on a plastic sheet.

* * *

You work your lens slowly
through the day’s fresh kill –

They hold tight
to the little they possess: Needle

and tire tracks. Razors
to the wrists. Handprints
circling a neck. There’s a noose,
a knife in the back, a bullet
just grazing the brain. Cracked
heads and crushed skulls. Ground
glass in the gut. A murder
most resembling sleep.

But the bodies you love: always discreet –
They keep cause of death to themselves.

Next of kin locked
in the muscles of their tongues.

Bodies emptied of souls
for no reason at all,

for no good reason you can think of.

* * *

If the city’s long arm
sweeps the dead into drawers,

it’s your dollars that pull them back out.

Pay the living enough

and the dead mostly do
what you want them to do. They come

small fry and pieces through your lens:

man’s head in a bowl,
torn legs, severed hands,
infant tucked among berries the texture of gore.

What’s captured on film when there isn’t a soul? Rot

you distance in silvers and silky grays.

In black blood reflecting

the light of dead stars (third-hand,
ornamental –
light weighed to fall short – ): dim streets of the dead
with the streetlamps shot out –

destiny trimmed of a few constellations.

Catherine Sasanov