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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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2

POEMS

Volume 1

issue 3

the bat shat poetry journal pg.

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3

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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9

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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18

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