"Actually Partially Dead Inside, but Figuratively Dead Also"
featuring blood-salt, adopted voices, hot tweets, pruned names, burlesque props, and a nod, or perhaps several, towards the end-times
/ New at AC: “SWEETH♥RT” by Rachel Zavecz
Salt-rim trim like anything else martini under club lightning the delicate glass stem morphs fluorescent into rose gold and violets flowering up the dusty current of Moonᵀᴹ’s slender wrist, glides soft and marbled with her brilliant veiny metallic glitter and formaldehyde mix injected only hours before this and any celebrity appearance All cameras zoom out to frame the exhibition space flickering across television screens four celebrity children dusky under light representation of the lurid cinematography is melodramatic and mechanic and the spotlight through the youthful racks of meat on silver-wire skeletons youthful meat on silver racks skeletal meat on youthful silver wire and silver-skeletal racks & racks & racks of meat
“Do you know how they make blood-salt?” melancholy Moonᵀᴹ sliding one chrome-plated nail down the crystalline flute of her synthetic designer drink, Sweet
Hart the suggestion unique to spill heart’s blood in red through sharp gold-capped superstar teethDarkest figure answers, “Not a fucking clue,” adjusts steel joints into her semblance of interest, whirrs “tell us Luna Luna”
“They breed all white-tipped harts in corporate factories carefully manufactured, small wire-bound bones under velvet moonlit fur it’s
Look, if you know the kind of thing we like, you already know whether you should be wild with excitement about reading this (you should). Read “SWEETH♥RT” here.
/ From the Archive: Nik Slackman, “‘Ted Bundy Hot’ Tweet”
I come home and find it interesting. I find what I find. I come home and find it interesting. Years in a hole have swallowed me, turned me into something I’m not. Always distracted, uncertain of the code of waiting, of its disguises, where it hides. I find what I find. Thought becomes an algorithm inside the hole—everything becomes whatever the mechanism translates it into. It can translate “waiting” into “home,” or anything, really, I mean I’ll buy it if the words are convincing. I come home and find it interesting. What’s wrong with that? Well, everything is interesting, interest is passive, a disguise. Years in a hole have swallowed me, turned me into something I’m not.
Twitter: It was good while it lasted.1 Read “‘Ted Bundy Hot’ Tweet” here.
/ Elsewhere
ON NAMING
There is a drive
inside of our most selfish, human
organs
to carve the world apart
at the joints. Our carnal drive
towards mastery. I admit. I have a needto separate things from other things.
Six new poems from AC Issue 5 contrib Nora Hikari, out today (yes, today!) in the tenth anniversary issue of DREGINALD, along with (oh hey) a story by today’s own AC contrib Rachel Zavecz. We did not plan this.
(This issue of DREGINALD also includes work by Mike Lala, who is not an AC contributor, but is a great guy and an outstanding poet, so you should probably read those too)
(You know what, what are we even doing here, just read the whole issue)
“Barn on a Hill,” a new work by AC contributor Don Television, who possibly has the greatest name of anyone we’ve published, in addition, obviously, to being a fantastic writer, is at ergot.
“Origin Story,” a new long poem by AC contrib Javeria Hasnain, appears in the inaugural issue of Lakeer Magazine.
Over at Action Books, Coco Picard talks with AC contribs Jess Alexander and Vi Khi Nao about their collaborative text That Woman Could Be You:
Part of the experiment is to map how it feels to write in the afternoon in an aisle in target, etc. But in terms of the voices–we adopted each other’s voices at times. That was also another experiment. Sometimes, Vi would begin to write about her day and stop–so I’d continue. Sometimes we would remember and relate moments from each other’s past or from each other’s day in the other’s voice.
Are you in Glasgow, or planning to be in Glasgow, say around the beginning of November? AC contrib Elle Nash will be reading at Bonjour on Friday 3rd November at 8pm, along with a wealth of other lit folks. Free entry, promises to be a good time. Say hi for us, if you go.
/ Today’s Soundtrack
Have we already used this for a soundtrack? The days are blurring together, man. See you at the end of the apocalypse, I guess. We’ll be wearing those masks from Infinity Pool.
(citation needed)