Spork Press 2018

working copy

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SPRING 2018

Paul Legault, Lunch Poems 2 Dorothy Chan, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold

Dalton Day, Spooky Action at a Distance Kathleen Rooney, The Listening Room

Abraham Smith & Scott McWaters, Tuskaloosa Kills Gary J. Shipley, 30 Fake Beheadings

FALL 2018

Daniel Altenburg, Flight Rae Gouirand, Glass is Glass Water is Water

David Welch, Everyone Who Is Dead Meghan Lamb, All Your Most Private Places

Joshua Bohnsack, Shift Drink Jennifer Juneau, ÜberChef USA

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POEM

J-Law has collapsed!I wasn’t even watching the Oscars.It started as a dressand ended in stairs,but who has time to eat? It’shard to wear Dior Haute Couture.Rain can make you fall in love.Today you’re like a whiteout.Was the storm lined with goldand silver? Suddenly I see thatJ-LAW HAS COLLAPSED!There is no country for angels.There is no fire to catch onto.I have been to many themed partiesand gotten both tarred and feathered,but I never looked very swan-like.Oh, Jen, nothing’s funny. Never die.

Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 as Number 19 in the City Lights Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O’Hara’s freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry. That’s what it says on the back of his book. Fifty years later, Paul Legault clicked the refresh button. This expanded and enhanced version was written by Legault during his lunch breaks. Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has opened a window on his laptop to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened dive or gay bar to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, co-existence and depth, while never forgetting to eat Lunch his favorite meal. . . .

Paul LegaultLunch Poems 2

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Poetry, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo April 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available

Forthcoming

Four volumes of Paul Legault’s poems have previously been published: The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn Publishing), The Other Poems (Fence Books), The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s Press), and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 2 (Fence Books).

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THE RABBIT AND SNAKE COCKTAIL

When the Rabbit meets the Snake, there is true happiness. – Chinese proverb

According to the Chinese Zodiac, Rabbit and Snake walk into a bar, and it’s love at first sight, the Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine moment. It’s their true happiness falling in love in beautiful places: entering the void in Japanese love hotels, grinding against each other during the last dance at the gay club, exchanging more than words in the backseat of the cab where the driver averts his eyes, reminding himself it’ll be only ten more minutes until they’ve reached the destination. Rabbit wants to take Snake to Prague, where they fall asleep on the other side of the world, or as the Surrealists say, I can only be wild with one person, until Snake and Rabbit with their fire argue during movie previews, sitting in silence once the film starts, and she starts sobbing until he puts his hand on her knee, the I’m Sorry, until Snake and Rabbit with their fire fight when the waitress at the Sichuan restaurant brings their Kung Pao chicken and spicy scallops, and she apologizes, thinking she caused the fight, when in actuality, Snake and Rabbit were fighting over a Russian play

about rhinos sitting in a café.

These poems are steam punk on steroids. They’re plutonium-powered and neon-lit. These poems describe the world as it should be, as we want it to be, as we fear it will be, as it is every morning between 3:00 and 5:00 when our dreams are invaded by Godzilla, Tarzan, Wonder Woman, King Kong, Sinatra. If Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold were a holiday, it’d be Hallowe’en for grown-ups, Christmas for space aliens, and the Fourth of July for everybody, because each of these poems is a little present, and like the best presents, they don’t just please us—they set us free.

Dorothy ChanAttack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold

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Poetry, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo April 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available

Forthcoming

Dorothy Chan is the author of Chinatown Sonnets, winner of New Delta Review’s 6th Annual Chapbook Contest, selected by Douglas Kearney. She was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and her work has appeared in Blackbird, Plume, The Journal, Spillway, Little Patuxent Review, The McNeese Review, Salt Hill Journal, and others. Chan is the Assistant Editor of The Southeast Review.

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SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE

I’m paraphrasing, but: uh oh. The pockets of time we share

with one another are coming loose, thread-wise. Pennies all

over the damn place &— look. I don’t know why we associate

luck with Abraham Lincoln. Most of our bones are useless,

if not hollow, like, you know, birds. The facts aren’t helping.

It’s not a problem for you to admit that accidents exist, that

the reason hearing your voice played back to you is so not- right is because a seance must occur modestly. I hear you, too.

Spooky Action at a Distance is a repeated attempt to reconcile the absurdity of loss. Dalton Day uses their signature cause-and-effect “logic” to jump from Laika the Russian space dog to Deborah Sampson to Dennis Gabor to Bruce Springsteen, all so they can ask: how are we supposed to look at a space that was once occupied? These humorous yet desperate poems couldn’t sit still if they tried, and, if their narrator is to be believed, that’s all they are trying to do.

Dalton DaySpooky Action at a Distance

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Poetry, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo April 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available

Forthcoming

Dalton Day is a recipient of a James A. Michener poetry fellowship and the author of Exit, Pursued (Plays Inverse), as well as several chapbooks, most recently Alternatives (Bottlecap Press). Their poems have been featured by Matador Review, The Offing, ColumbiaPoetry Review, PANK, and The Art Institute of Chicago, among others. They live in Atlanta.

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LA REPRODUCTION INTERDITE

When Loulou peers into the full-length mirror on the closet in the hall – the only one he can reach because of his smallness – he sees his sleek Pomeranian face reversed, but he sees his face. This portrait of the master’s friend Edward James shows the back of the man’s head twice and a book by Poe. Les aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym reflects correctly, but James’ eyes, nose, mouth, etc. are not reproduced. Poe himself called the novel – his only one – “a very silly book.” Loulou has to agree, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. An important pre-condition of creativity is a feeling of weirdness. Loulou, unlike Poe, doesn’t have many experiences at sea to draw upon, but that’s all right. Like the master, he’s quite capable of traveling in his mind. Like the master, he finds what he needs right here in the apartment. James will hang the painting in the ballroom of his London home, another place Loulou will probably never go. He pictures himself there, counting out a waltz, dancing to a song of his own composition: I’ve been to the moon. It’s not that great. I’ve been to the stars. They were okay. I’ve never been dead, but it’s probably fine. The back of the moon: we never see it. The back of your own head: you never see it. You don’t have to go far to find the unknowable.

The house is haunted but nobody’s home. Only us chickens, standing still as sculpture while Loulou, the immortal Pomeranian, & Georgette, Magritte’s guardian angel, take us on a tour of the asylum. The rooms in Kathleen Rooney’s The Listening Room are always listening, always watching. The walls have ears. The tears have eyes. Sometimes the screams are silent. Sometimes the silence is deafening. Stark & hard-edged as the paintings themselves, this novel in poems and flashes inhabits a world much like our own — suspended in a glazed animation of doomed hope & hopeful doom, where the virtual is realer than reality, where the muse & the bemused are confused, where the funny is wedded to the sad in unholy matrimony. “Mystery,” Magritte wrote late in life, “is not one of the possibilities of reality. Mystery is what is absolutely necessary for reality to exist.” Take a load off. Escape is not an option. There are no windows & no doors, only holes through which the sky or an oncoming train pours in. The stairs dead end. The clouds are voodoo dolls, sweet enough to eat. But who, Georgette & Loulou forever wonder, will devour whom?

Kathleen Rooney The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte SP

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Fiction, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo April 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available

Forthcoming

A founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). With Eric Plattner, she is the co-editor of Rene Magritte: Selected Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Married to the writer, Martin Seay, she lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul University.

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MARTYRS 2

I could see this whenever I want, but I’m choosing now. No use in waiting till the movie is actually made. I’m looking to find my inner child in its accumulated abuse: in the malnutrition of my soul, in the dehydration of my brain, in the hypothermia of my senses. I’m looking for something to give me permission to kill myself. To be this sequel’s Mademoiselle. Or else I’ll be the American remake and hope will come maul me back to life at the last hour. I could do that standing on the head I don’t have. I’m treating it like a medical experiment. I’m treating it like an industrial accident. I’m treating the paediatric ward like it’s the entire hospital. I’m remembering how nobody goes into medicine to keep the dead alive. I’ve chained myself to the chair to stop me shitting out. Not even through the titles and already it’s like I’ve been raped by a truck. My wrists are turning themselves into ribbons. I’m bleeding orange juice from my eyes. The infection is no nice people in the world ever. It’s pain that never redeems. It’s having no one else to talk to but yourself and only hours of darkness in reply. It’s remembering who you are by remembering what it is to be afraid. See how poorly I’ve become. My nerves are breakfast in every time zone. The screen is warning me that I’m going to hear what Mademoiselle heard. I’m going to hear more than she heard. There’ll be details that’ll touch my insides till they hurt. I see Anna preserved in a glass case. I see her move. I see how it is euphoria displaces death. How I’m the worst. How I can’t touch her for trying to listen too hard. How it’s my looking that’s the gross out not her skinless body. I want to show her how ill with myself I am. I want in the fewest words to convey how decomposed with humanness I am. So I ask her, ‘Are you happy?’ And the look in her eyes tells me it’s none of my business. It tells of all the effort it takes to exist without your skin, how much it costs to be like her, how I can’t expect to fall over and find myself there. I suppose I wanted to hear what’s unheard of. And that’s the point. Only, being forced this low just isn’t my thing. It’s not the same as not caring yourself into a stupor. It’s not the same as sharing God’s address on Sunday mornings and watching your parents rot. It’s not the same as the foulest stench making a voice of itself in your head till it aches.

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ry J. Shipley 30 Fake Beheadings

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Fiction, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo April 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available

Forthcoming

Gary J. Shipley’s most recent book is Warewolff! (Hexus Press). He has pub-lished in Spork, Sleepingfish, Gargoyle, The Black Herald, Action Yes, Vice, Fanzine, 3:AM and many others. He is the founding and managing editor of Schism Press.

30 Fake Beheadings imagines 30 unthinkable sequels to 30 sui generis movies. Drawing on decapitation theory and the post-cephalic nature of cine-matic experience, it documents a viewer’s repeated decollation as a way of docu-menting the invented films. But as the films themselves are also documenting the viewer, each is ultimately feeding on and inventing the other. However unique a human head, its coming off demands a sequel.

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from TUSKALOOSA KILLS

…I’ve lived my whole adult life by semesters. There is a micro-wave backstage where the stripper heats up a hot pocket. I think about being washed up like a starfish and having a kid test her pocketknife on my arm. Colorful dreams of Vegas and the big time leeching into an everyday routine of 64 ounces of drinking water. Got to make the desert seem fertile if you want to take their money. Las Loosa wouldn’t have been the smart choice if you’re intention is to strip people of their cash, but the poet’s decision must always be for inconvenience sake. We are all losers. Dropping out with no credits but still getting stuck with the bill. And an ankle tat. An ankle tat of the frat he pledged. A free advertisement every time he doesn’t wear socks with his penny loafers. And a slight addiction to Adderall. Blackout loss of virginity. Memories of college to take back home and make epic. And a record. A minor in possession of what? I know. We the teachers know but rich parents won’t listen. It’s all got me talking about Ricardo’s knot, it’s got me talking again about how amigo would start hanging and purring with certain amigas and those amigas would start to jangle like amigo. A damn familia sound. And it wasn’t just amigas, it was also some estudiantes speaking with a hickish lilt. Catatonic tone come down from Jonathan Edwards having intertwined with Emily Dickinson. Puritan husbandry in a cold pastoral. Classic. Tuskaloosa going all glossolalia on me. Rollo. Nothing that lives is symmetrical. Like the Boobie Bungalow. Cause once you say it, you can’t take it back. Spoken words fluid like fluids in an unleaving verbal genetic stain.

Tuskaloosa Kills has the teeth of a saw. And the eyes of a wolf. It’s a patchwork prose back-and-forth—it’s a heady screwloose brew of marblemouth and jughead musings upon a famous football town with a clandestine literary history. Tuskaloosa Kills is a soapbox upon which McWaters and Smith howl of how humans make community and community unmakes humans. Think threads and scraps, interlaced and unraveling: how a yarn isn’t bellyached from one voice but through a spice-cabinet of voices—heard, misheard, remembered, misremembered, and echoing for one more round.

Abraham Smith and Scott Mc Waters Tuskaloosa Kills

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Fiction, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo April 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available Forthcoming Abraham Smith is the author of four previous poetry collections. In 2015, he released Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press), a co-edited anthology of contemporary rural American poetry and related essays. Destruction of Man, his book-length poem about farming, is forthcoming from Third Man Books. Scott McWaters fiction has appeared in Caketrain, Carolina Quarterly, New Orleans Review, NANO Fiction, Relief Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Pindeldyboz, Madison Review, The Florida Review, Quarter After Eight, Rio Grande Review, and Yemassee.

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APOLLO MISSION

For my next transmission: I will be a white male and destroy broken women with broken words. I will need an assistant for Frank to split with a planted flag. Don’t worry: Tomorrow, you’ll be a girl and I’ll be a rabbit. Tomorrow, you’ll be a girl and my wrist will still crane a snifter. You’ll be the girl tomorrow out searching every hole in the oak through the feather grass and cicadas, saying, “I told you I’d be back.” But I’m now approaching lunar sunrise, marching my mouth along its ridges and eating her over-ripe nectarine. Serene, I can no longer pull myself from this hat; the flag doesn’t flutter from wind and there’s proof. That Frank hadn’t photo-imposed crosshairs on you. You say, “But you haven’t a star in the photo.” ‘Honey, adjust your shutter speed. They’re there.’ There, there. There. Clap for my disappearing man act. I applauded your flight. Through the static, Esmé, ‘Yes, I live you too.’ God bless all of you. All of you on the good Earth. And I will end with a reading from Genesis.

Daniel Altenburg

Flight

FALL

Poetry, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo October 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available Forthcoming Daniel Altenburg is currently pursuing his PhD in creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he teaches English and works as Co-Editor-in-Chief for Rougarou: A Journal of Arts and Literature. His work has most recently appeared in Caffeine Dirge, The Offending Adam, Deluge, Yalobusha Review, and BlazeVox.

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BLOOD AND STONE

What if: stone is what you get. A gun of stone. What if the table beneath it were: & the walls catching the sound. What if no one knew: you were around. If people came: from stone & found only that. What if stones were: deaf & mute & cold. What could be warmed. What word would you hurl. At what would you point your blood. Of what is a stone: composed: what holds what to itself. What is there to break it & why when it goes does it go only: to smaller ones. A stone has no center but itself. It only breaks; it does not change. It only goes from one to many. Stones always exist. Stones always exist. Stones always exist. Stones always exist. There is no way out of this.

Rae Gouirand Glass is Glass Water is Water

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Poetry, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo October 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available Forthcoming Rae Gouirand’s first collection of poetry, Open Winter, was selected by Elaine Equi for the 2011 Bellday Prize, won an Independent Publisher Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, Audre Lorde Award, and California Book Award for poetry. She is a lecturer in the Department of English at UC-Davis.

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THE RIVERBED

The fox inside me carries two white frogshidden in the sleek fur of its tail. Neither is an angel. Neither seeks to ride the fox’s left shoulderand suggest to sink a tooth against my lung, a tonguealong the spiral stairs of my spine. Curling inside me,the fox resembles a new organ below my liver and beside my spleen. Were it not for the frogs, singing nowtheir low, evening songs, I would be more concernedwith the function of the fox, what it takes from meas I drink my water near midnight, how it ingests something only to return it into the dark riverbed of my marrow, which must by now be banked by stones. Were it notfor the fox, I would imagine the frogs an infantry,their skins quivers for the darts they seekto lay as arms against me. But together they knowonly harmony. Now the frogs’ songs areslowing to the rise of the fox’s chest in sleep.You and I are here watching them to thinkhow loudly they were once in peace, their throatspuffing beneath a tree. But we know better than that.We are none of us such hidden things.

David Welch

Everyone Who Is Dead

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Poetry, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo October 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available Forthcoming David Welch is the author of a chapbook, It Is Such a Good Thing to Be In Love with You, and the recipient of the PSA’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches at DePaul University where he is Assistant Director of Literary Programs & Outreach. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Cincinnati Review, Greensboro Review, and VOLT.

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AN OPEN ROOM

I’ve barely left my bed for three days, now. My hair sticks together. I open and close my fingers. I look at the sad pinkish sunlight that filters between them. I look at my fingers and roll on my stomach and groan. I imagine my insides, your voice. My hands feel slow and charred. The bell tolls, and I hear the distant, muffled screams of children. Somewhere, somewhere real, there are dunes of white sand and black water. I have seen them. From the kitchen, my tea kettle steams. I ignore it. Somewhere, somewhere real, there are volcanoes that just sit there. Maybe waiting. Maybe not. I haven’t seen them. There is a lake in here the size of my life, blue-green. What I haven’t touched, drowned, is the real story. I bite my lip. My teeth ache. I bite harder, think, why bother. I know where things are. I get in the rhythm. It whispers, why bother, why bother. If you were here, you’d hold me down beside the lake. You’d bend my knees and bend my arms around behind my back. You’d hold my head down in the water. I would strain to hear you. I would listen for you, like the ocean trapped inside a shell.

Meghan Lamb

All Your Most Private Places

FALL

Fiction, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo October 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available Forthcoming Meghan Lamb is from Chicago. She is the recipient of an MFA from Washington University and the 2018 Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing. She is also the author of Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017).

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WHISKEY SOUR Ingredients:

- 2 oz choice of Rye Whiskey - 1 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice - ½ oz simple syrup - ½ oz egg whites

Preparation:

- Separate egg white from yolk by cracking the shell and transferring the yolk from each half of the shell, draining the egg white into a container below.

- Mix all ingredients into cocktail shaker, without ice, and shake for adequate frothiness.

- Add ice to the shaker and shake again. Hell, shake one more time.

- Strain contents into a high ball over fresh ice. - Garnish with a lemon twist. * For a New York Sour, float 1 oz of a high tannin wine (such as

a Petite Sirah or a Shiraz) after shaking. This will add a layered effect and add a robustness to an otherwise, sweet drink.

I think Brian Wilson is telling me to kill myself. “What good would living do me?” The sentiment seems pure

enough, but hear me out. I wasn’t always the best at loving you. You are doubting it now

that the stars are light polluted and, I guess, I made you unsure. What would I be without you? I always thought it was “do

without you” and I don’t know the answer to either. You’ve left me, other lives are going on (yours), I believe it, but

I don’t see them (you) in my room between alleys. “What good would living do me?”

I meet all of his qualifications. I’m going to get a bottle of rye, swim in the lake, and go out like Dennis.

God doesn’t know a goddamn thing, but Brian Wilson seems to.

Joshua Bohnsack

Shift Drink

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Fiction, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo October 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available Forthcoming Joshua Bohnsack’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and others. He is an MFA student at Northwestern University, the founding editor of Long Day Press, and is the author of the chapbook Burnt Sienna (Throwback Books 2017). He ran an ice cream shop in rural Illinois until he moved to Chicago.

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from ÜberChef USA

“Well?” Chef said, unable to wait. “I’ll give you a hint. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the best. It was the worst. Which was it?” This sounded familiar. But knowing the judges, it was a trick question. I took a stab at it. “It was the best...and the worst?”Chef shook his head slowly. “Best and worst,” he said to Slick, “have you ever?” “Buttonhole,” Slick said. “You ought to brush up on your ages, your epochs and your seasons, Greta. But I’ll accept, why bother. Come here.” Chef and I stood face to face. He was about three inches taller than me. “Greta,” Chef said, “do you like butter?” I pictured all that dry toast I ate. Butter was costly. I gave Chef an overzealous ‘yes’ hoping I’d win tubs of butter for giving any answer. He reached into his pocket. A voucher, a coupon, an IOU... but he extracted a tiny yellow flower. He held the buttercup under my chin. “You’re a liar,” he said, and held my gaze. “And—stop!” the Lighting Tech said. He walked up to Chef. “Why did you say that? Best and worst of times?” “To get viewers to think,” Chef said. “They don’t want to think. They want to turn on their TV sets and be entertained.” “You’re getting good at this directing thing,” cameraman Jim said. “Did you ever eat caviar in the back of a Ford pickup?” Chef said. “What’s that supposed to mean?” the Lighting Tech said. “Right.” Chef said. He turned to cameraman Mike, “And—go!”

Jennifer Juneau

ÜberChef USA

FALL

Fiction, xx pages, 6” x 9” Perfect bound, letterpress cover, $xx.oo October 23, 2018 Ebook Available Forthcoming Limited-Edition Hardcover Available Forthcoming Jennifer Juneau is the author of More Than Moon, a finalist in The National Poetry Series, forthcoming from Is A Rose Press. She has been nominated for the Million Writers Award, Sundress Best of the Net, and twice for the Pushcart Prize in Fiction. She lives in New York City, where she has featured at venues such as KGB Bar, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Parkside Lounge and Three of Cups Lounge.