I S S U E # Z E R O

Z E R O P R E S T I G E I S S U E # Z E R O

C O N T E N T S

Piotr Gwiazda

Charles Legere

Emily Carlson

Dayana Fraile

Joshua Zelesnick

Guillermo Parra

Jeffrey Schrader

Michael Nordenberg

Robin Clarke

Rita Mockus

Sten Carlson

R.B. Mertz

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ASPECTS OF STRANGERS from NOT GARDNER from Sleeping with Phosphorus, from THE EDUCATION OF M from The Light Travel Machine: February 5th, 2014 (tr. G.P.) from entwined throughout the system To the Ruins Introduction to Spring / Sonnets. Distant Light, Consistency Infinite Dates from She-Riffs (History in the Female Key) FOR benjamin, FOR chris PARADISE BY THE DASHBOARD LIGHT (“The Draft”), LIKE A MIRACLE (“Pittsburgh Says Yes & Marries Etta”) about Zero Prestige

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P I O T R G W I A Z D A A S P E C T S O F S T R A N G E R S 1 They believe in the transmigration of souls, especially animal souls. They protect their eyes from the sun (they are afraid of the sun). You can easily mistake them for robots. Don’t tamper with their systems. Beware of their hands and of their little sharp fingernails. 2 They protect their gardens and forests with weapons of mass destruction (KEEP OFF THE GRASS!) They shake their fists at the sky, write messages to the departed on the roofs of their houses. They walk along the beach, unseeing and unmoved. Under their feet, necropolis. 3 Time is on their side, yet all their buildings and temples will eventually turn into heaps of stones. They copulate, propagate, hoping that after they die they too will be reborn. They desperately want to tell you their dreams: “I dreamt I was fleeing radiation,” “I dreamt I was a drop of water.” A decaffeinated culture. 4 Sometimes they engage in morally questionable activities like wood engraving or throwing pebbles into a lake. (“Creative resistance.”) They chain themselves to a cloud, they chain themselves to a lamppost. They can read your mind, they can take a picture of themselves. Yet even their wisest philosophers can’t distinguish between the actual and the virtual. 5 Time is everywhere, yet it eludes them. They can hold their breath under water for up to ten minutes, yet few of them have had the experience of finding themselves in totally unfamiliar surroundings. They take pills, stay connected . . . Their nerve cells produce electric discharges. 6 Some live in glass houses. Some live off the grid. Some have night inside them. Some have rain inside them. Some blend into nature. Some appear otherworldly. Some are on friendly terms with the dead. They will believe any story you tell them!

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C H A R L E S L E G E R E N O T G A R D N E R

This is a book about the emotional life of class. It’s about growing up in Gardner, a small city of about 20,000 people in central Massachusetts. It’s a former mill town, which is now—and was, when I was growing up, even more so—almost entirely white, and largely French-Canadian, Roman Catholic, and working-class or working poor. My own family is French-Acadian, and I grew up hearing French all around me; I went to a French school, where I didn’t learn much French at all. I once assumed, without thinking much about it, that neither Gardner nor I were atypical. I would look at a map of the world, and touch Gardner with my finger, and think of the accident of having been plunked down there. After I left, it began to seem so different from the world I was living in—the presumptive world, the basic perspective about where we come from, or I come from—so as to seem not itself. I feel the same about myself, when I grew up there: that I was and wasn’t who I am now. When people talk about class, it’s usually to talk about economy or sociology, but I think class can also be a culture, a perspective, and a felt sense, and this book is about that life.

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N O T G A R D N E R

In Mass, each second feels like it’s taking forever, even as my body is periodically jolted with energy. I submit to the pleasure of watching the same thing over and over, and becoming enraptured in boredom, and noticing variations, like whether the altar boys are wearing shoes or sneakers, or whether the priests’ robes are purple or green. I look into caves of shadow in the folds of the priests’ robes. I lift a hand in front of my eyes and shut one and then the other so it seems I can look through my hand. I focus my eyes on the priest until he seems to stand out from what is behind, outlined in blackness and lifted out from the flatness. The priest’s shape becomes incandescent, colors attenuated, shape radiant. My scalp begins to tingle in a kind of rapture of heightened attention—this is a sensation I have had rarely but always ecstatically, and I associate it with the time a storyteller came to the public library and we circled around him, although once I begin feeling this, I can hardly hear anything anybody is saying. Now, when the priest says “Lord Jesus Christ, you said to your apostles...”—I suddenly hear that Jesus Christ as the priest swearing. It’s as if I can see a teeming of perversities—sexual, transgressive, whatever—playing out underneath the surface of the Mass that I’m sitting through, bored and hallucinating. From the depths, I give myself over to singing “Holy, holy, holy,” though I don’t know any sound is coming out of my mouth.  

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E M I L Y C A R L S O N f r o m S l e e p i n g w i t h P h o s p h o r u s

FOR TO FEEL ALONE for when we landed pilots wouldn’t tell us in which country for because I was white like her a flight attendant whispered we’re not used to dealing with refugees a word I enter again into the dictionary to find language fractures to say for we stood in the aisles of the windowless jet and stretched for what we all are I am for we said I remember you from the fairground for we didn’t call it a refugee camp for American officials greeted us by asking for the names of terrorists for Fadi’s watery eyes for what refuses to call terror by name for the Red Cross partitioned a space for us with cots and sandwiches for I called my mother and began to cry for a man I knew from the fairground who had lost his child put his hand on my shoulder and admonished stop for this is what Fadi would have done were he still beside me for where was my dignity for where was Fadi for the mountains rising out of the sea for terror in layers for my body exhausted for names of the dead for I couldn’t forgetfulness for in the belly of the warship the baby turned blue for her mother’s scream for my mother’s anger that I had gone and she had stood at the abyss for my lover’s arms when I woke with shell shock nightmare screams for 7,000 US backed air attacks in 33 days for 2,500 naval bombardments for 1,183 killed for numbers inexact for one million displaced for cluster bombs and white phosphorus war crimes for a night of nightmares for years of nightmares for I tried to also tell the beauty like Fadi said for he stumbled across the empty sand the wrong way calling my name beneath three Apache A8 helicopters for I ran to him the sky black smoke for any number indivisible for for as I neared my mother’s arms my mouth had no words

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f r o m T H E E D U C A T I O N O F M The first thing I hear when I wake up is silence—the silence of sirens, of people arguing over drug money, of the constant Hill District gang slurs and breaking 40s bottles. Yes, this is all silent to me. What you hear everyday becomes silent to you.

–DeAsia Davidson Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it. –Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed SCENE 1: STUDENT COUNCIL ELECTIONS

student in white Masquerading as the real hot hip and cool I am your passport to paradise whoever writes her story inherits the land of her story the network’s not broadcasting, screams under my bed when for the first time I saw a carbomb I said I GOT TO STROKE VIRTUAL REALITY anymore I don’t think about it I don’t know if I should tell you it’s not the dates on either side of the dash, 2001— the meaning is in the dash you taking notes on land in starlight does it matter anyway, shock waves, shells, if in the end a crescendo

student in pink PAY ATTENTION I am a somebody writing letters to the president at daybreak beneath my window kids in the street in the margins of my geography homework I have this idea I’ll graffiti our letters across America’s ghettos DEAR PRESIDENT will make appearances he too will see WE NEED TEENAGE HANGOUTS WHEREFORE FREE-FALLING FROM SWINGS TALLIES OUR NUMBERS I FORESEE A SOMEWHERE OVER DANCEHALLS IN WHICH SLUSHIES PINK LIGHTS as we bounce ideas around he asks are you surprised classrooms look like barracks yet a song

student in purple I’d use a female name as your president so kids can say Don’t she sound like a nice girl because of her appearance but she’s not, that I know a cradle to prison pipeline and not my father STAND UP IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE IN PRISON one in three black men imprisoned during their lifetime America, looking out among you I see the Black and Latino kids stand while the white kids’ eyes go wide like whoa, you know a criminal amnesia, criminal, the majority of illegal drug users and dealers are white and not the three fourths of all people imprisoned

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student in purple student in the crowd: Back in the days when Yeah, you got days anyway when a title could blaze my heart a little bit out of my body I found these dusty old dear faggot letters from x now is it’s all over the internet my face is a salt lick not that I cry asking God I want to be normal like my brothers in a system standing in cash money on one hand, the evils of capitalism in the other hand, Benjamins, can I talk about that in here is it proper, we speak “OUR English” in class not “OUR cash English” that an “our” exists when it comes to an English at all where first I encountered love

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D A Y A N A F R A I L E F r a g m e n t f r o m T h e L i g h t T r a v e l M a c h i n e : F e b r u a r y 5 t h , 2 0 1 4 t r . G . P . Two days ago was my 29th birthday. I’m 29. Almost 30. I don’t feel very different from when I turned 19. Though I must admit I feel better now. This is true in all senses. 19 is painful. Drama delineates our surroundings until we disappear from the real. We live in projections. In possibility and contingency. Common knowledge surfaced in that phrase recycled from poetry festivals and book presentations in Caracas: “Adolescents suffer.” [los adolescentes adolecen] Just like that. With pop psychology for dummies. A pun I imagine circulating from mouth to mouth among old alumni from the Faculty of Humanities at the Central University of Venezuela, all of them men with coats sprinkled with crumbs from hors d’oeuvres that love to pinch various manchego cheeses. I celebrated my birthday at Fitzgerald’s. A bar near the Cathedral. They’ve got good specials. Bad food but edible. Very greasy yet edible. My classmates surrounded me. We chose a long table in the back. First we shared a pitcher of local beer and talked about how things were going; our classes and professors, our students in the classes we taught. What we all shared. Then a blank space for incoherent jokes. We’re all comedians here. One of our classmates’ girlfriend is visiting from Argentina and we talk about the shitty winter. The thick layer of ice covering everything. The Andy Warhol Museum. The free entry on Fridays for students. I told her about the frozen nose, the matter of my frozen nose at seven in the morning on the streets of Friendship, where I live. Our cohort will soon take the prelim exams and we’re talking about the anxiety of it. A classmate comments on how his psychiatrist has diagnosed some weight gain after the first year of being medicated with lithium. Another classmate considers how the psychiatrist was really rude to talk about how fat he’s gotten to his face. We all laugh. We really laugh a lot about it. We start to guess what topics are most likely to be included in the exams. Half-joking, half-serious, a classmate says (or is it me who says it?), I’m gonna fail this exam, they’re just too many books. We’re meeting regularly to share impossible handouts and equally impossible research tasks. We eat chips, vegetables, doughnuts, cheese and cheap salami. We type with annoyance, with fury and, sometimes, even with hope. With the certainty of revelation. It’s been impossible to not get caught up in pointless arguments about continuity.

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In one of our study sessions everything had become a party when the classmate presenting the psychoanalytical-structuralist analysis of Josefina Ludmer’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: An Interpretation, placed on a table crowded with night and leftovers, all those luminous and rare images of structural oppositions like associative drifts. The metonymy eyes/penis proposed by Ludmer to signify the two opposite characters, Aureliano/José Arcadio was proliferated in images of infinite penises as elements of penetration both figurative and literal, establishing joyous disjunctions amidst penetrations from above/penetrations from below. Penetrations from all over, in all senses. Under the living room light. On the table. All of us trying to understand and the deer eating grass in the patio. A classmate raised his hands to his head and asked with tragicomic confusion: But where from above? and... where from below? Here, we’re all comedians. Especially to avoid the recurrence of crying at any moment. Like the time when someone, during my presentation on the poetry of Vallejo, asks me about the poet’s death while holding his pen with note-taking ferocity and I immediately recall the verse: “I will die in Paris with a downpour, / a day which I can already remember” from the sonnet “Black Stone on a White Stone,” but I can’t recall the date or the circumstances and I ask for a minute to google it and I find that article that says Vallejo had died on the morning of Friday, the 15th of April in 1938, at the hospital on Boulevard Arago in Paris. The author, named Dr. Enrique Robertson, a physician in Bielefeld, Germany, told how Vallejo had been hospitalized for three weeks without the team of doctors of Dr. Lemière being able to establish a diagnosis. The poets said some very poetic things, of course. Some ventured to say that it was tuberculosis and others that it was syphilis. The more romantic ones blamed the dirty air of Paris, while those more attuned to epic tones opined the poet had died from Spain and from too much war exerting pressure on the dark edge of the days. The cup Vallejo speaks of in his final book. “About twenty years ago,” Dr. Robertson declares, “the German doctor Hans Magnus Erzensberger declared that Vallejo had died of hunger. He suffered chronic malnutrition.” And Dr. Robertson then pulls out from under his sleeve that very sad anecdote supposedly narrated by Arturo Serrano Plaja, a member of the Spanish delegation to the I International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers celebrated in Paris in 1935, who reports having been a collaborator in designing an austerity plan for the representative commission that was inspired by Vallejo, who could invariably be found eating boiled potatoes day and night. Potatoes were never as sad as they were that night of studying in Pittsburgh. The most avant-garde of Latin American poets had died in the deepest misery. Peeling potatoes. We look at each other with concern. A classmate urges us to see it as something natural, because we will probably all die in the same manner.

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At the bar we give each other little gifts. A classmate reads aloud from the cocktail menu. We burst out laughing with the dirty names, frankly misogynous. We begin to feel very curious. We ask ourselves if it’s normal for students in this country to drink cocktails with those names. I think about the eccentric names of the hot dogs and hamburgers of the street vendors in Venezuela: Bin Laden, The Savage, The Hunger Killer, The Little Disgusting One. We choose one called Red Headed Slut. The inevitable joke: if we drink it we’ll become sluts. The waitress brings a plastic pitcher with a brilliant liquid in which a multitude of tart gummy worms are floating. We marvel at this elevated display of North American ingenuity. One of our classmates asks: “Where’s the red head? You haven’t brought her.” The waitress smiles and says something I can’t understand. Everyone yells happy birthday, a selfie with the birthday girl. We serve ourselves that disgustingly sweet drink in little plastic cups. It tastes vaguely of peach iced tea. As an offering, I give them a pizza with spinach and olives. Everyone makes fun of me, someone has said I ordered the pizza with kale, that leafy vegetable I’ve become a fan of in recent days. And I say, “You’re serious, you don’t like spinach?” The tomato sauce on the pizza is made with concentrated tomato paste. But we don’t care and we eat it all with lots of appetite. The woman at the table next to us starts to violently hit the man sitting beside her. She tries to push him out of his seat. She spits a series of insults from between that accumulation of unimaginable rose lip-gloss. She yells at him to leave. Her companions try to mediate. We observe, stupefied, with a barely-concealed curiosity. We die of laughter like happy hopeless people because all of us here are comedians. Last Halloween a student told me about how when he left a party he noticed many people dressed like skeletons from the Latin American Day of the Dead. I told him that the idea for the Day of the Dead was probably Mexican, and that I didn’t know very much about it, but I could understand the imaginary it represents. A classmate from the Linguistics Department, seated at a nearby table, sends me a cocktail pitcher via the waitress when our shouting alerts her that today’s my birthday. The cocktail is called the Miley Cyrus. Pineapple soda. A shade of coconut liqueur. A few minutes later we disperse on the sidewalk toward our various bus stops.

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J O S H U A Z E L E S N I C K f r o m e n t w i n e d t h r o u g h o u t t h e s y s t e m no hands, not beauty this evening rise, lets the coin in from the side how the city enters no half light, thorough fare tendency to behave like all good speakers common swells from under, under, under, under phantom enters: speaks.

Let us not allow those who finally allow us to speak to get the final say. It’s theater. We speak with fervor, point out contradictions in logic, remind them that We are the ones they should do their bidding for—yet we, the witnesses

of catastrophe, the takers of a stand, are left silenced. Nothing comical in this. I’m here, a witness to history—as one who lived. A witness, a worker, a lover, a sinner, a dancer a child, a parent. A history, not documented or identified, is soon forgotten. phantom exits.

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curtain call and step to the east. fingernail torn off, an eventual parody of forgiveness in a vacuum both objects hit simultaneously solemn here, right here did you know, she said, growing up there, in the Bottoms∗, how did it make sense? Ill in bed, her father called: come, I need a blanket and to talk. I’m here, she said, just a whisper. The blanket— she tucked it around him how did it make sense? We’re running out of time, dear child. it’s not wonder but frantic expression

                                                                                                               ∗ Bottoms: a historic neighborhood, consisting of clusters of row houses, 3-4 dwellings per unit, in Braddock, PA that housed Andrew Carnegie’s immigrant steelworkers. This area was heavily polluted because of its proximity to the steel mill. During the Great Migration (1910-1970), many African Americans moved into this area.

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flip the circle and the circle by line stuck behind a fence total disregard for tendrils shipwrecked has come a long way phantom enters: speaks. cluttered, unkept, and unclean. This is our future servitude. How many hoodlums do you see in jail tonight? We need rockets aimed, not for destruction, but as vessels to get our sick to the hospital in time. Another bus route cut in the Bottoms. A little bit at a time cut for 30 years. What we notice and what we live with challenging each other—so passive—little bullies we kiss for showing up at all. Listening is never enough. My words have been thrown into the Mon and forced to swim. Forced to swim. Over, and over, and over, and over and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over. angels only betray other angels phantom exits.

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G U I L L E R M O P A R R A T o t h e R u i n s 1 To the ruins before the rain a circle drawn through trees into sunlight affair of my walks right course in these city matters visions after dusk put words together for a page in pocket living organisms circle the form – listening seasons, lists of forms made delightful by repetition’s click

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2 Variations of the buzzing cicadas for sunset in the blocks outside the city, from a hill the room is a fourth floor accustomed to the flight of hummingbirds organized at moonlight scenarios, an anticipated vinyl – misread by us back through a curtain astonishing region where the air is clearer the tides leave a sandbar you can walk

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J E F F R E Y S C H R A D E R I n t r o d u c t i o n t o S p r i n g / S o n n e t s . I don’t really know where to begin. Most of my published work is somewhat cold, analytical, political, and so on. A couple years ago I fell batshit crazy in love, which is an odd and exciting feeling for a cold, analytical, political person. I started feeling as though somewhere over the course of my writing life I was going to have to deal with the concept of the love poem. It’s there in our poetic history – we can’t deny its presence and influence on our lineage, no matter what poetic lineage one finds him or herself in. So I began working on this manuscript called Old Plank. Old Plank is an attempt at using the language of history, drama, dance, geology, and ecology in order to discuss politics – but uses the language of politics to discuss love. I struggled with it for awhile. And it eventually hit a standstill. Then the woman I’m in love with split. Took off without a word a few months ago. And I ended up finishing the struggled-with manuscript with the somewhat common replacing of the concept of love with the concept of heartbreak. I’ll back up again. I enjoy working with conceptual gestures, and so dealing with the love/heartbreak poem has to embody those same conceptual gestures – there has to be some mitigating/universalizing factor that makes those concepts remotely interesting to anyone other than me, and has a language that functions in an ethical agency. But as I say that, I’m still not sure it was successful. I like it, because it’s my first attempt at a personal aspect in my work in quite some time, and the handful of folks who seemed to dig it recently at the May installment of The Bonfire Reading Series seemed to dig it for those conceptual gestures. I think. I had to leave before the after party got into full swing. Just to clarify, the images above aren’t from Old Plank. This is just a longwinded introduction. Hang with me a little longer.

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Stephen Ratcliffe is one of my favorite poets, and one of my biggest influences. He’s had a monumental daily writing project going on for decades now. Working on Old Plank became a daily project, and it began to feel fulfilling – like I had found a routine that might continue. I reached a satisfying conclusion to Old Plank a few days before the first day of spring. While I was spending the next few days heavily editing, I began to think about how to continue that daily writing. My first thought was a sonnet. I don’t know why, but I’m drawn to its place in poetry. Carries a weight or something. It’s like the love poem concept – if you choose to deal with them in your work, they have to be dealt with in a non-deconstructionist manner: they’ve already been totally torn down in conceptual/experimental gestures, and so the only risk left is to risk a certain degree of sincerity within all that chaos. So I thought about its shape and structure, and scribbled the above pictures. The images show 3 days’ worth of sonnets, in a cycle that repeats. I figured I’d start it on the first day of spring and write a sonnet a day through the season, ending on June 20. Each sonnet is a basic 3 stanza structure so we hit the all-important 14-line requirement. Rhymes and syllables are of no concern in this project. Each stanza has a general concept of “type of language.” Whatever type of language finishes a sonnet on one day begins the next day’s sonnet, and the other blocks shift down. This hopefully creates a rotating, moving series of concepts that in turn creates a structured-yet-chaotic text. The “Quote” stanza is from an old book of art theory called Purposes of Art. There’s nothing amazingly spectacular about this book, but I read somewhere that it was the first art book to categorize by genre rather than chronologically. I don’t know if that’s true, and I don’t really care – I’m just stealing passages from the section on sculpture – the young lady who tore my heart out happened to be a pretty talented sculptor and it happens to be her book, so that’s what that’s all about. The Weather/Ecology stanza quickly became a Weather/Nature stanza, as it never really seems to focus on systems and sustainability, but more on a daily observation aspect – maybe over the course of the manuscript it will be somewhat ecological in a portrayal of a season’s weather and birds and so on. The Politics/Philosophy stanza changes directions a lot, but for awhile now has focused on some sort of existential creation of selves and new selves – the reintroduction of bodies, and the ongoing processes of defining and redefining. Heartbreak bullshit, ya know. I decided to leave the last 2 lines “open.” I don’t really know what that means. Maybe it’s that I can take liberty to go off-topic for whatever reason. The manuscript is currently called Spring / Sonnets.

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It’s a bit over halfway done. But you probably already figured that out. I don’t know how it is. There’s a chance it will be interesting upon its completion. On their own, or if you take these sonnets out of the entire text, they look kind of dumb. 1 or 2 or 3 or so just don’t make much sense – but taken as a whole I think the work becomes an interesting document/documentation. Ultimately, I was given a scarring reminder of why I initially became interested in poetry as a young romantic, but it was given to me at a new age and with new experience – and so I’m stuck in an ongoing process of dealing with love and loss in conceptual and political terms. The overwhelming majority of my life and my experiments have been failures, so we’ll see what happens.

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M I C H A E L N O R D E N B E R G D i s t a n t L i g h t It’s a distant light, a bulb, in the window of a neighbor, flickering in double human rhythm: for one breath, light— the next, not much. And when it’s over? Like everything, I could be wrong. Learning, I’ll sing my young song: shapes, the shape long-gone. I’ll turn the record over, playing, the track again, the one, undoing the sutured bed.

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C o n s i s t e n c y The same frame of light, stepping out the door— the same dimmer square. Ordering the same coffee in the same cup. Returning the day to the outstretched sky, the way it plucks each day, with small changes. Let me change a little I say to myself—and I believe it to be true. Praise, this lathering photosynthesis. Praise, the unexpected ways love can be given when I find someone who reminds me of who I was. And if there’s nothing else, let me unearth a kindness that’s viable, that I can walk away from. It gives me what I was unable to ask for, and needed.

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R O B I N C L A R K E I n f i n i t e D a t e s ‘Carved out of what, though, this place?’

--Infinite Jest My-boyfriend-Al-Gore, Marlo would say all-in-one-breath to make the Clintons disappear more bearable—we didn’t know we didn’t know NAFTA, which is why never to write syntax, that rigor mortis freezes the parliament of the farmer and the chicken and the corn and the hoe and the dumpster and the black bear and the cheetos and the cheetah each representing themselves freely in democracy like some people from history you’d have dinner with tonight my dearly departed David Foster Wallace may I summon your prose for an I-thou erection? The Bible? an old man asked at your 900 pages, yes, in the sense of weird science capable of time travel— it turns out, we did start the fire cows with lesions that horse in Hickory, Pennsylvania who will never stand in whose eye I can’t stop seeing benzene, toluene, thank you for the speech at Kenyon This is (in the) Water This is (Oil) This is (War) the dead can’t apologize or lie for your bandanna, the purpose of education is to fix the past, become cool, no create options W/R/T flipping off the hummer— were there hummers then? before your suicide? had we occupied Iraq for the second time? Not even half-way through your Christ birthday

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it seems like you predicted everything I was already failing to wake up to the nightmare of post-Koch Detroit winces like all my elementary school memories of what’s left when they refine what’s kicked under the seat in first grade I pooped my pants and tried to scoop it into the lift-top desk scrawled with names of boys I can’t say hearts and stars streaked with feces what does this have to do with Detroit? a three story pile of waste petroleum from Canada cutely known as “petkoch” you don’t raise your hand don’t say what you need because you’re afraid of being dropped like an infant called petkoch on the poorest door stop that passes for earth a local drink called boil-o they put it here and people live on it

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etit

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”

  26

S T E N C A R L S O N F O R b e n j a m i n a f t e r J a c k S p i c e r Tell everyone to have guts Paint it with fists Do this with us Have guts & paint with fists until the guts & fists Come through the framing edges of the supports Cutting & raw Like love is. Even if The line frays Goes abstract Like a stranger In the crowd in the cold at the end of the park Says— Brother I want your heart. * Shout outs to bird dads. Whiteys on the moon. OH MY . HEY Picture me balling on yr framing bars as usual Love me like a musical instrument My achilles dick Glazed or not too heavily painted directly onto an old plywood panel & Into this oily layer while it is still wet Is introduced A sort of Preparation of the aromatic root of the sweet flag Conspiracy of political & optical values. My joker dad Is the first clown ever to hit the banker on the side of the head with the custard pie. I still wonder about it sometimes. How I was never taught What I should say to somebody I hate.

  27

F O R c h r i s a f t e r J a c k S p i c e r BORLAND GARDEN COMMUNE LOVELY PRETENDER QUESTIONAIRE (to be taken upon re-patriation) Put mark where it applies to you: I am an artist (includes noise) ▢ I always write my resume by hand ▢ Cheap, narrow, shallow knowledge is my motto ▢ I like to do small jobs & as many as I can ▢ In the absence of external stimuli my inner life develops at a furious pace ▢ I know 7 Japanese monster’s names by heart ▢ I’m Long Facebook ▢ I have no less than 4 books about UFOs ▢ & a vocoder w. a rare syncronous firefly in it ▢ & a parasitic robot worm in yr ear, just like in Dune ▢ There is no excuse for good poisons or good antidotes ▢ Behind bars I’ve seen theory coming to life ▢ YOLO is "carpe diem" for shallow people ▢ FROYO is short for “forever yolo” ▢ In grad school we said “you die a thousand times a day & yr still not

dead yet?!” ▢ Yet shallow people don't speak Latin, that’s how we can say (everyday) “forever froyo yolo” ▢

  28

R . B . M E R T Z P A R A D I S E B Y T H E D A S H B O A R D L I G H T / “ t h e D r a f t ” When doors were first invented some people couldn’t see the horizon’s ships like Rory Dodd sings “turn around” but she doesn’t sometimes& then she says let me sleep on it and at the restaurant where you came there’s no word yet on Michael the archangel in america may be losing his feathers in the backseat or dancing a peace sign over his eyes in a bar and Samuel Sam Sammy Sam wakes in the night to hear the Lord’s voice the Lord says “Samuel” but “Samuel” means “name of the Lord” and Sam says I’ll give you my answer in the mourning what is promised by the prophet in his/her own house before doors were invented stayed in the house before the internet the closet doors stayed locked shut like licked envelopes without your name on them only some people could see the queerness&those who refuse to list their names don’t tell or get asked& football is similar to war there is armor there is the crowd & the circus & the trauma to the head& there is a cold draft and love leaks through & who you love becomes a statement like in war the guy said only in war do you find some one from your hometown and love them for it but when you were on the street at home&saw someone did you love them?

  29

L I K E A M I R A C L E / “ P i t t s b u r g h S a y s Y e s & M a r r i e s E t t a ” Etta says to puke out what we’re afraid of into the fountain the Point turns on and off & sprays & I can’t even tell you what I’m afraid of and there’s that song playing in my head about not being afraid of “it’s like a miracle” activists can believe in and CALL a miracle like circling the fountain I am afraid that I will do what’s best for someone else instead of what’s best for me which is my way of saying I’m afraid of saying what I’m afraid of I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing for which God/the father leaves you or the law says the mother must leave you with the father the mother who didn’t trust herself enough to say No said No to everything else & mourned in sickness seven healing generations from her belly & room for more she says Bring Cecil bring Vanessa bring the homeless friend & Etta’s people ruffle around the fountain promising to live lightly upon the earth you say look at all these people holding each other & making a wedding ring out of our bodies am I giving Pittsburgh away like a father does or am I marrying now again to the ground I’ve bled & wept & planted into & fucked hard upon & wandered home through too late or too early to protect from elements please do not museum me like Peabody’s columns masked in brick our city’s heartbeat throbs an underground fourth river encased in stone stabbing into our lower backs would be too painful if not for each other’s hands

  30

Z E R O P R E S T I G E is a Pittsburgh-based poetry editorial collective that works to create contexts for each others’ writing. We meet for dinner monthly. Join us. Email charlie . legere [at] gmail [com] for information. ———————————————————————————————————————————————————— Issue #0, Summer 2014. Layout : Emily Carlson and Charles Legere; Cover: Sten Carlson and Charles Legere