"What Is This, Alexander Nevsky?"
Featuring Teutons and Tartars, midnight screams, logics transgressed, multi-Mike, pages intentionally left blank, simile brains, and incapable little loaves of meat.
/ Now at AC: Glenn Shaheen, 3 Prose Works
ZEROS SLAMMING THE HULL HEAVEN
A million dollar idea for a horror movie. I know, a million dollars isn’t a lot when you’re talking show business, but hear me out: a murderer who specifically targets babies. People would hate that, it would freak them out and everybody would be so scared. Could you imagine?
Poetry friends online plugging away on their novels, it’s easy to make a switch if it means money, big money, big money for a poet.
Maybe the killer is a babysitter who’s changed one too many diapers.
Fame and fortune so eluded the poet they turned to anything that’d give ’em a hundred bucks and a thousand extra online engagements. The agent told me they don’t take nonfiction books unless the author has “a significant online presence.” Me, I don’t want a presence. I just want a little hole, a cave with a nice sort of moss as a carpet and maybe a mouth to shout out of every now and then.
Major studios wouldn’t even dare to show a baby get killed, what is this, Alexander Nevsky? Teutons and Tartars at each other’s throats and I forget who I’m supposed to root for until the music kicks in. Here in my movie you wouldn’t root for the baby killer, come on. The protagonist, idk, would have maybe recently lost a young sibling or cousin and takes this all personally. They’d probably make it so maybe the hero herself is unable to have a child despite years of trying, the abject failure of movie womandom, the worst possible outcome for a woman in America to face, no children, no soiled diapers and midnight screams.
Ha, no, I love babies, incapable little loaves of meat.
Glenn Shaheen has spent much of his career brilliantly strafing the already fuzzy line between poetry and prose. Are these three pieces poems? Stories? Weird transmissions from an alternate brain? In any case, they swing not only between prose and poetry but also from hilarious to morbid to something which someone, perhaps Shaheen, might describe as a “classical sort of dread state.”
Read all three now at Always Crashing.
/ From the Archive: Stephanie Yue Duhem, 2 Poems
THE BEETLE
With his slick green
insect mouth, his
clicking mandibles, he says:
“It’s too late.”The obstetrician has become
what he collects summers:
some anomalous beetle.
So I stick him throughwith a nickel-plated
needle. Screw him to cork,
sit back. Dress his name
in the gamy gownof Latin—
Duhem’s “The Beetle” starts in a mode I’d describe as “early Charles Simic”1, gets steadily stranger, and ends with something like a precise and beautiful explosion. Read “The Beetle” and “DMS” in our archive now.
/ Elsewhere
“Constructed from parallel worlds and people, their boundaries crossed and their governing logics transgressed”: Theodore Sovinski reviews AC contrib David Leo Rice’s The Berlin Wall at Full Stop. Rice’s “Jakob at Mass MoCA” appears in Always Crashing’s online edition.
AC contrib and visual poet James Knight is tweeting out one page each day from his new book Moreau’s Doctored Bodies. If you’d like spoilers, you can find three of Knight’s pieces in our archive.
“Much like the white cube at its center, it’s not particularly useful to describe”: At X-R-A-Y, Dave Fitzgerald recommends work by two AC contributors named Mike (Corrao and Kleine). We obviously agree with his recommendations, and will add that, if you haven’t, you should probably read Fitzgerald’s Troll, one of the most enjoyably scummy books we’ve read recently.
/ Today’s Soundtrack
Real ones know early Simic is the best Simic