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THE BAT
SHAT
E D I T O R - I N - C H I E F : E N R I Z O L T Z
Volume 1: Issue 3
a journal of premier poetry
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VELCOMEN
Poetry to be to you to straightforward for
likes and dislikes; not friend likes, but
soul-tasting love-flicking likes. Or,patoowie, walking around the horse dislikement
and delinking and decrepit embankment and
flavorless underdevelopmint. THis has been
checked for errOrs. How badly do you to feel
for us all of us then? OUr now being so
fragile as to be nincompooped by our own
rugged slog. But yet you read on. This is
called trudgery and will not be held on top to
you in a court of flaw or you to be held underthin-like so many pounds of brick in a muddry
puddle so deep as to call it a pit of center-
other-sidesmanship. Eat from these plates and
filibust your glasses with the grape of no
reentrance. Be with us all, as we with you
after a hardly no at all time. In whole and in
parts. You like this. -- E.Z.
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POEMS
Volume 1
issue 3
the bat shat poetry journal pg.
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TABLEAU
Layoverby John Phillips......................................................................................................................................................$4
The Commoners Songby CK Baker................................................................................................................................$5
Cuckooby Changming Yuan...............................................................................................................................................$6Springby Holly Day.............................................................................................................................................................$7
Wordby Steven Kuhn...........................................................................................................................................................$7
Sanko Lineby CK Baker.....................................................................................................................................................$8
Money Farmby Nicholas Brower......................................................................................................................................$9
Catfish Mitchellby John Phillips.....................................................................................................................................$10
Missed Opportunities Listby Paul Hostovsky..............................................................................................................$11
The Language of Birdsby Steven Kuhn.........................................................................................................................$12
Featherby Changming Yuan.............................................................................................................................................$12The Morning Afterby Holly Day....................................................................................................................................$13
Treehouseby Lucile Barker..................................................................................................................................$14/15/16
Bathroom Talk in Bostonby Paul Hostovsky...............................................................................................................$17
You Said Somethingby Louis Marvin............................................................................................................................$18
one poem (Grease fillets)by Zachary Scott Hamilton.................................................................................................$19
Offerings by the Glass:
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POEMS Layover by John Phillips
There are a lot of sweatpants here.
Gray, and blue, and red;
Plush and mangy,
Rotten and new.
Sweatpants in the corners of the senses.
Also two girls, breasts squeezed into
matching t-shirts,
Keeping the male gaze folded up
Like a love letter in their back pockets.
They are speaking to a
shredded-jeans demigod,
Tufted chin smug as if he'd
had sex for breakfast.
They all glimmer in the
morning of the sweatpants.
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In time
Youll recover
And absolve
Push those
Scorned impressions
AsideHammer down
The jaded edges
And sing
That delightful
Commoners song
The one you sang
So well
In what seems
A lifetime ago
You really had it
You know
That fiery disposition
And nimble cunning
Those butter chords
And derelict style
We could see it
We could all see itIt was all it took
To turn the evening tide
(And rile that buck fever!)
Heads bashing
Tongues lambasting
Middle fingers high
And Raising Cain
On those May Fly Statesmen
There were no rules
When it came to
Your survival
No textbook ralliesOr common bonds
No structured songbird
Or bravado stage
You either made it
Or you laid it
Life by the balls
Mr. Poppy would say
A Kaleidoscope of dreams
With rich coloured imagery
Hardened artisan seams
In a carefully woven motif
But something got lost
In the needle point
Something sinister
And distorted
Took hold
The quirksAnd street genius
That were your lifeline
Gave way
To grunts
And squeals
And chilling
Night crawlers
The colours
Faded quickly
To a cold
Confining grey
There was no graceIn this world
No retribution
Or switch back
No salvation
Or accorded finale
Only edged platforms
And blackened steel
That kept you cased
In a silent
Vanquished cell
Shivering cold with fear
Night without day
All in the shadow of death
Time heals all
And the Polish sneakers
And open sores
Are long goneBut the Roman nose
And shallow cleft remain
Indeed the falconer
Beat the widow maker
This go around
And Im hopeful
It wont happen again
And if it does
Youll see me
Hand on heart
Standing with that
Old verse in hand:Hes aint tainted
Or silly,
And most certainly
Not forgotten
He aint loony
Or fixed,
Or a product of his self-
doing
Hes just a straight shootin
guy,
Who had the most of it
Figured out
The Commoners Song by CK Baker
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Cuckoo by Changming Yuan
With a thin
Their cold dreams
Blood-throated voiceYou call out aloud
Trying towake up
Millions of millions
Of trees and rocks
All deeply lost in
Of lastwinter
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Spring
the first tendrils poke
through the frozen soil like the first
fully-formed tentacles of anautilus, a squid.
unlike
the squid, however, there will be no
larger body
emerging, no dishpan-eyed monster doomed
to crawl into the house and eatfrom the trashcan. tiny feelers
of perfect emerald
emerge as well, also not attached
to a body, no subterranean
monster determined to lay eggs
in my children's flesh.
when flowers unfurl, I expect
only death.
by Holly Day
Word
by Steven Kuhn
I dreamt of a new word last
night.
Refreshing, in 3 or 4syllables:
like
honeydewdrop,
or applesnap,
It was a joy to write on lined
paper.
A perfect word, it
encompassed
something beautiful.
It popped like
apoplectic.
A dignified, but sweet
fruit, like aplomb.
It sat atop a poem,
the best Ive ever
written.
But 4 lines in, I
realized I was
sleeping,
and I wrote the word
on my hand,knowing that dreams
fade on waking.
When I woke, there
was nothing written
on my hand.
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Sanko Line by CK Baker
Theres a barnacle scar
Deeply engrained
On the basalt stack
At mark 32Whispering summer
Winds
Scented oil
Cotton
And roe
Drift
As waves brush
And shapeThe sandstone shore
The briny air
And lost erratic
Set a tone to this
Pollyanna portrait
Those odd looking mates
Casting smiles
With arrested despair
Settling pot shots
Swiping bugs
DippingAnd darting
As photo men
And muscles
And long neck seabirds
Make their turn
The hunched hoody
And sorted sidekick
Get their fill
Of moss and rubble
Chubby and kelp
Nice to meet your
acquaintance
The pho man would say
An odd drop
And ironic turn
To those horrific corners
Of timeless desperation
Down by cannon bridge
Harbor seals
And carriage horse
Are fronted by
Ravens shade
Jolly tides
Pause
In quiet bays
With curious looters
And nob pickers
Sand merchants
And field totems
All streamed by light
Cirrus strands
Blanket the
Outer rim
Hovering craft
And shimmering willows
Bolt the evening frame
Blood orange
And tethered
With a filtered glare
Dusky dolphins
And seabirds
And shifting tides
Are all settling in
For the long night stay
Its Andrews undulations
And gifted benches
Its concessions
And traces of the Barry Burn
Its sculpted driftwood
And Sanko linesMake this picture
Almost perfect
Children play
And venom spews
From the caterwaul pair
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Money Farm
Life is a money farm
and we sit like so many
rows of sun baked vegetables
growing fat on nutrient rich
inactivity
pale, weak and well behaved
We sway in unison as
amber waves of money shitting humans,
once breaking our own backs
with rough calloused hands,now too soft to bear
the weight of realization
We simply mutter squish
and rot silently in Ras embrace
by Nicholas Brower
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Catfish Mitchell
Ya ever reached down deep
into an upright bass and
ripped out a thick,
wriggling, joyful F; or a wet,
floppy trout of an E?
I mean, just grabbed it, right
at that hot moment, as the
guitarist
yanks the chord from his fists
of strings, as the horn players'
backs
arch, pressing their metal into
the smoky air.
Oh, man.
See these hands? My
right one is bigger than
my left. They've got hair
on the knuckles. Raw
fingertips covered by
brown blisters spackledwith calluses, peeling at
the edges. On a good
night, I can touch the
moon with these hands.
On a regular night, I can
touch Savannah.
I see these interviews in
the shiny
mags,
guys
saying
"it's my
job to
make youhappy,
you folks
in the
front row,
back row,
at the
bar."
Man, they sell records with
that, and it's nice, but I tell
you what
it really is. I hit that note forme. Reaching down into that
bass,
pulling up a big stinking fish
of a note, getting that joy,
that's for
me, that's what my job is, and
if you guys in the seats feel it
too,well I hope you get just drunk
and forget your wallet in the
tip jar.
by John Phillips
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Missed Opportunities List
My dictionary, which was my mothers dictionary, does not contain tofu, Fu Manchu, go mo fo, or fee fi fo fum. It does contain Vixen,
which is a female fox, the name of a lesbian bar in Provincetown, and not a bad Scrabble word either. A murder of crows, an unkindness
of ravens, restore my faith in the collective noun. Therefore I will take my bubble bath
now. My potato peeler, which was my mothers potato peeler, has only just today begun to
blunt. And cotton balls is a complete sentence. Buddha spelled backwards is Ah ddub,
which one says in a tub, to dub oneself the happy Buddha of ones bathroom. And if a thief
stole in, in a black woolen cap, and pointed a gun, and said, Your money or your life,
wouldnt you saywouldnt even your mother saythat your money or your life is a
complete sentence, with an implied subject, predicate and indirect object? Damn straight
you would, you goddamn piano player. Go ahead, throw a stone. For once in your life,
throw a stone. Throw one at me. Ill take your picture
throwing one stone at me. Show me your teeth, you
vixen. And Ill show you the blood my dictionary lets.
My mother should have been a lesbian rabbi making
love to a congregation of one in a lighthouse in
Provincetown, Massachusetts. My father was the artist,
my mother the apologist. And the widow. The artists
widow said his theory of Heaven could be summed up by the light bulbnot the halo, it wasnt a
haloabove the figure in his final painting. Then she got into her Toyota Elephant and drove away.
And we all understood the importance of what she had told us. For shed been the dissolute wife of a
dissolute dead artist. And we all knew what it meant to be hungry. And we all knew what it meant to
lose the remote. And though I wanted to use pleasure as a verb, not buoy, I used buoy. As if to masturbate in a coffin. Then I went
straight to bed and dreamed of a hundred emaciated haiku poets, all standing on the side of the road, all holding up their poems. And
their poems were traffic signs: beautiful, mournful, necessary, and without the slightest editorial. I read them over and over, hooked
arms with the blind girl tapping her cane, read them aloud to her as the world drew up its skirts, like a drawbridge, and let us pass.
by Paul Hostovsky
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The Language of Birds
There are true things
woven in and between the
threads
of wicker summer chairs,under orange juice caps left
unscrewed for hours on a
Sunday morning countertop,
and lying on my carpeted
bedroom floor
beneath finished crossword
puzzles
now discarded.
Outside, hidden birds
chirp of these subtle, true
things
(if its not too hot)
clearing their throats
while ducking from shadow to
shadow,grateful for the trees.
And, like in a dream, I
recognize their colors-
the shapes and curves of the
letters,
but I cannot read the words
they form.
For all the beauty
I can appreciate in their
songs,
I cannot speak the language
of the birds.
by Steven Kuhn
Feather
by Changming Yuan
A white fluffy plume
From an unknown bird
Happening to fly by
Drifts around, falling down
Slowly as if to wipe out
All the dust at dusk
With its invisible fingers
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The Morning After
I pretend I'm blind so they won't bother me
but I have been alive just long enough
to read men even
with my eyes closed, hands out, fingers
reading the Braille of sweat on skin.
if Joey wants to talk to me about how
I killed his brother, that's just fine. Joey
can come in and sit
beside me, here, on the prison
cot, and I'll tell him the story
of how the world looks when everything you see
is tinted red, how even flowers look
suspicious when you've
just killed a man. I pretend I'm
deaf so they won't talk to me, but I
have been alive just long enough to know whensomeone is in my room, can feel footsteps
through the soles of my
feet, know exactly when to strike
at invisible things. if Joey
wants to hear why I killed his brother, that's fine.Joey can come in and lie beside me,here, beneath the stiffwhite sheets of the prison cot, andI'll tell him about how the world
sounds when your ears are full of blood, and how
even songbirds sound suspiciouswhen you've just killed a man.
by Holly Day
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Treehouse
We didnt want the three Maywood boys in the club in the treehouse in the forest, butthey were always bugging us, no tormenting us, to let them join. One night Glenny and me
were up there necking, way after dark and there was nothing but darkness around us, and theleaves above were starting to drip.
I feel sorry for them, I said, I remember whenthey had a father and then he disappeared. Their mother
is useless and always complaining about what she doesnt
have. And she thinks hes coming back.
Yvonne, you are so dumb and so young. I can
remember my dad hiding the paper, even though I could
barely breathe. Doug Maywood will be coming back in
two years. On parole. He assaulted a cop when he was
being arrested. Stole a lot of money to please that silly
woman. She drinks all the time now. He was a lawyer and
he was sent up the river for fraud.
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We could hear him rubbing it, and they continued to fight, all of them getting more cranky. Lets go home and you can soak it or something, Richie suggested. You wanna go home and face the lush? I was about to sneeze again, and Glen passed me a rumpled tissue. We could see the light flickering down the path again.The wind was up and I could tell it was going to rain soon. We climbed down and went the opposite way on the path. There waslightning, too close, and we ran, stumbling out to the playing fields. We were soaked and cold by the time we got to my house, andthe rain kept up until after midnight.
The next day we went back to the treehouse, but it was gone.There was only a blackened leafless, bare black trunk, standingthere like a charred finger.
by Lucile Barker
Treehouse
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Bathroom Talk in Boston
by Paul Hostovsky
A beautiful woman with a small dog, small breasts, foreign accent, stops me in the Public Garden, and says: Excuse me, do you know the
bathroom? And I wonder if the locative case in her native tongue is absorbed by the accusative case. And I wonder if the tongue is
employed in a first kiss in a beach town of her native seashore, the waves lapping at our feet, as I look down in the general direction of her
urinary tract and feet, and say: Yes. I know the bathroom very well. She smiles hopefully, gives me her great big brown expectant eyes,
and says: Yes? And I feel a delicious pressure building in my chest, and in her chest, and in the air between us, a kind of referred
pressure from her bladder, or her colon, a kind of grammatical pressure from her tongue and my tongue which are meeting here in my
favorite context: Bathroom talk my mother called it, banishing it from the house, then banishing us from the house when we couldnt
stop laughing at the thought, couldnt stop crooning at the sound, and the sense, and the nonsense, and the signifiers and the signified.
The nomenclature we invented as we went along, went about our business, which was the business of the body, the business of being in a
body in the world, a world that preferred to keep that business hidden, secret, except for the children and the dogs and a few banished
grown-ups. Yes, yes, I tell her, and I hold out my hand to her, pointing with my other hand at the gold dome of the State House. Im
headed there myself, I tell her. Its the best-kept secret in Boston. The cleanest, most exquisite public toilets in the city flush and gleam
there, flash and yearn there, there in that stately place, for patriots and foreigners alike. Though a dog, even a small dog, wouldnt be
allowed in. No.
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they unfurled banners
and marked calendars appropriately
they were treated as importantly
as things like nothing, absolutely, maybe and something
ought to be
you looked on
and you said
maybe absolutely nothing is
something
You Said Something
you said nothing
nothing walked out on you
you said something
something hung around
you said maybe
maybe shrugged and looked up and down
you said absolutely
absolutely knowingly nods
lead by absolutely
maybe, something and nothing
walked bravely into the big, scary world
by Louis Marvin
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Grease fillets
for sale
grease fillets
for sale
come one
come all
grease fillets
II.]
Think in light. Be the camera and record
only light. Now record shadows. Think in
shadows. The double fractal tree limbs reflect
in the bus stop windows. Be a mirror, now
reflect light and seek shadows.
Now ice it, soak it in Plexiglas, dip this
reflection in plastic, wax or ice and watch
the shadows sink, the light fades.
Now become the glass of this jar,
you're the fern. Now look on the
oaks with lights and shadows for
eyes.
III.] Scuffed diamond
housing ivory
diamond chair king seat.
[I.] Washing threads in my teeth
again, the cloth is simple green
going through with stapled edge
and dynamite staples, the
needle it is the entrance maker.Thank God. This jar is making
sense with gold and light and crystal
light and shoe string glows before
the black and white photograph.
The separate entrance comes into
play from the ceiling, very
nice slippers for my mouse are
hidden under the books, so taughtin the threads of this jar. A carpet
A flashbulb window for her little
wall. She's sleeping. Shhhhhhhh.
An ancient typewriter for her
husband.
A small camera with bedding for their
child. The kitty cat sniffing at a
lock, picks up the mucus, the odor
and moves on like every night.
The jar makes sense in fluids.
Green aluminum light filters in for
the dinner table. I'm washing threads
in my teeth again.
by Zachary Scott Hamiltonone poem
// Zachary Scott Hamilton is the author of fourteen Zines
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The Bat Shat Vol. 1, Issue 3 bywww.thebatshat.us is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
xx
Credits
Paul Hostovsky is theauthor of three books of poetry,
Bending the Notes, Dear Truth,
and A Little in Love a Lot. His
poems have won a Pushcart
Prize and been featured on
Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The
Writer's Almanac, and Best of
the Net 2008 and 2009.
Louis Marvin mildly boasts:burbank conception, desert
fired, island life
teach, coach, soldier,
champion
with Chinese food and girls
published slowly but surely
www.louismarvinlives.com
Without much prompting at all,
John Phillips states:
I'm a musician in the wilds of North
and Middle Georgia, raised by
possums in the hills of that fair state,and a strange man for the job. I am a
magician in my spare time and
believe that all art is the art of
illusion. I perform feats of sleight-of-
hand with objects, words, sounds,
and emotions. I believe that the best
poems and stories cast two or more
shadows. I have written my entire
life, and lost much of it to cruel
revision.
The child of evangelical missionaries,Nicholas Brower
grew up living and traveling throughout Europe and south
America. At the age of 18 he was lured into the military with
promises of women, unending glory and a free college
education. He served four years in the USMC and was
discharged in southern California and spent the next five
years surfing, writing and pursuing a BA in literature. He
currently resides in rural Washington State.
CK Baker points to
the sky and yells:
www.hookmachine.ca
Steven Kuhn expects a visit:
http://steven-kuhn.blogspot.com
Lucile Barker is a Toronto poet, writer and activist. Since
1994, she has been the co-ordinator of the Joy of Writing, a
weekly workshop at the Ralph Thornton Centre.
Recent publications include Memewar, Room, Antigonish
Review, Rougarou, Litterbox, Flashlight Memories, Bat Shat,
Snakeskin Review, Hinchas de Poesia, Jet Fuel Review,
U.M.ph.!, Menacing Hedge, Nashwaak Review, H.O.D., the
Danforth Review, Vox Poetica, Connotations, The River,
Apocrypha and Abstractions, Binnacle and Whistling Fire.
She is a two time winner of Press 53s 53 word story contest.
The Golden Age was the 2010 first place short story winner
in the Creative Keyboards contest, a project of the Hamilton
Arts Council. Poetry and short stories are also forthcoming in
Ginger Piglet, Curbside Splendor, Vox Poeticas Birthday
Celebration, and Wordsmith.
Changming Yuan, 4-time Pushcart nominee and author of
Chansons of a Chinaman, grew up in rural China, holds a
PhD in English, and currently works as a private tutor in
Vancouver; his poetry has appeared in nearly 520 literary
publications across 21 countries, including Asia Literary
Review, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline,
Exquisite Corpse, London Magazine, Paris/Atlantic, Poetry
Kanto, SAND and Taj Mahal Review.
// Zachary Scott Hamilton is the author of fourteen Zines,
including Temple of Sinew, The Orchestra of Machines, Wallet of
Hexagons and HAIR LAND (named Zine of the month by the
Independent Publishing Resource Center).
His work appears in various magazines including:
Ignavia Press (issue 4.1),
Otiliths (a journal of many e-things),
Sein und Werden and Karawane magazine.
He Recently went on tour with the band Holy! Holy! Holy! Andinstalled artwork with partner Molly Pettit for a photo series,
which appears online at his website:
WWW. Blackmonsterzine.weebly.com.
His book, The Teacup of Infinity will be released in February of 2012
By The Black magic LSD sex cult.
Holly Day is a housewife and mother
of two living in Minneapolis,
Minnesota who teaches needlepoint
classes in the Minneapolis school
district. Her poetry has recently
appeared in Hawai'i Pacific Review, TheOxford American, and Slipstream, and
she is a recent recipient of the Sam
Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College.
Her book publications include Music
Composition for Dummies, Guitar-All-
in-One for Dummies, and Music Theory
forDummies, which has recently been
translated into French, Dutch, German,
Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese.
http://www.thebatshat.us/http://steven-kuhn.blogspot.com/http://www.blackmonsterzine.weebly.com/http://www.blackmonsterzine.weebly.com/http://steven-kuhn.blogspot.com/http://steven-kuhn.blogspot.com/http://www.hookmachine.ca/http://www.hookmachine.ca/http://www.louismarvinlives.com/http://www.louismarvinlives.com/http://www.thebatshat.us/http://www.thebatshat.us/ -
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Dont trend on me. I am having a hard time
making flags that dont have snakes or private
parts on them.
Enri Zoltz
False starts and false promises. Not even hard deadlines could
force us to put a journal-child, a magazine-baby, into this world
that wasn't filled with what we knew had to be the best of the best.
Why, this best of best? Why pause after just why? Because this a
conversation. A conversation with who we are and why we are. Aconversation with who our readers are and who we think they are
and who they need to be for us to be who we say we are. There's a
lot of guessing. There's a lot of game playing. In this tinder-age of
man and man's dominance over that which is most un-person,
there is still beauty in searching out the fine detail of a well
executed circle; be it from coffee mug or child's crayon. Be it phony
or calculated in authenticity, on x and y axis points perhaps, it is
comforting to us at our very center to have these circles both existand to have them constantly be recreated. Either way, as we
assimilate in our cities, making them the cyclical living graves of
steamy all-the-timeness, we also retreat into the woods and folded
earth-creases that show us our smallness, our most intimate
roundness when faced with the vantage of no-more-to-seeness. All
of this rich experience must go into the recipe for being alive; and,
using words to make this point emphatic is at once vital and
seemingly unimportant. The goal for The Bat Shat, thus far, has
been to focus on the small streams that make break in thelandscape; reminding us to be at once alive in the system of
streamness and also aware of the embankment, the grand noise
that surrounds us.
xxi
Editors Note
The Bat Shatis composed of unknown ingredients, but:
Enri Zoltz is acting as Editor-In-Chief
JC Martinez is considered to be Chief Technologist
Ello Piaro is credited as Art Director
Crosby Jones is used as a Human Resource
T. Bird is oddly Supportive
Other Anonymous Contributors*:
P., D.L., T.M., J.C., L.W., C.R., L.M. & K.K.
*possibly editors or whey against curdle
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