Friday, May 22, 2015

New Story in Interzone: Angel Fire

I've got a new story in the current issue of Interzone (Issue 258), the UK's longest running science fiction magazine. 




The story is semi/distantly/vaguely related to my Service Economy series. But don't let that put you off (if you're dedicated to capitalism). A vision of the near future, maybe tomorrow; the descent of someone living in the stratosphere (financially). Hedge-fund managers and apocalyptic angels. The usual.   


In the US you can order a single digital copy of the issue from Weightless Books or subscribe directly to Interzone. You can also find copies in various bookstores around the US. Here in Santa Fe, it's available at Hastings. 

Issue #258 (May/June 2015) includes work by T.R. Napper, Julie C. Day, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, and Malcolm Devlin. Brief snippets below.

a shout is a prayer / for the waiting centuries by T.R. Napper
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe


Item image: a shout is a prayer

I’ll give you a roll of barbwire
A vine for this modern epoch

 Climbing all over our souls 
That’s our love, take it, don’t ask


“Any food?” asked Phuong.
“No food,” replied the woman.
“Rice, old rice, bamboo shoots. Anything.”
“No food.”
“I have a child. We haven’t eaten in two days.”
“We all have children. Here, take some water.”
Phuong reached out in the darkness, a smooth, cool wooden ladle caressed her hand. She fumbled for the bucket, filled the scoop with water, and held it out for her daughter, who grabbed it and slurped noisily. Phuong felt for Trung and passed the scoop to him. He rested his hand on her shoulder as he drank. Her skin tingled at his touch, familiar, yet always new. Then she took her turn, cracked lips and swollen tongue welcoming the cool stream of water.

The Re'em Song by Julie C. Day
illustrated by Jim Burns


Item image: The Re'em Song

Of course, leaving was easy.
“The same damned people, the same damn trees, even the same damn work, all our God-fearing lives. Do you really think we would have married if there’d been even a handful to choose from?”
Jaw bones and sections of vertebrae hung from the rafters of their house. Ribs and phalanges contained in carefully sewn skins were piled outside, waiting to be shipped off. And always there were the horns calling from somewhere deep in the woods.

Doors by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
illustrated by Richard Wagner


Item image: Doors

It had been three months since I’d taken my brother anywhere. The last place we’d gone together was our mother’s funeral. Since then Zack had been difficult, more so than usual, refusing to put on his shoes, shushing me when I asked him to do his chores, even screaming and pounding his fists when it was time to drive him to the recycling facility where he sorted paper as part of a program for developmentally disabled adults.

Angel Fire by Christien Gholson

Item image: Angel Fire

1: Newark to St Louis

35,000 feet over Pennsylvania and we’re finally above the brown film of smog that enshrouds the east coast. To the west, billowing up out of the white horizon, I can see a thousand-armed dancing Nataraja, braiding his hands into a slow-turning column; a cumulo-castle thousands of yards wide.

I am that thousand-armed shape-shifter. My wealth has been created out of thin air – hedge funds, arbitrage, global macro strategies; jargon and numbers in the ether. My kind doesn’t actually do anything. There’s no product: no violin crafted, no corn grown, no poem created, no pipes plumbed, no cement foundations poured. The stupid bastards back in the cheap seats hav­en’t a clue.


Her First Harvest by Malcolm Devlin
illustrated by Vince Haig


Item image: Her First Harvest

Nina’s dress was made from synthetic silk; it was a pale silver grey which shone even in the thin phosphor lighting of Aunt Caroline’s dressing room. Nina stood side-on to the mirror and twisted so she could see her back more clearly. The dress hung open from her shoulders, sweeping down in smooth symmetrical curves to meet in a discreet bow above her waist. Her exposed back struck her as looking unhealthy and pale in the thin blue light; her crop was barely more than a thick rumple of texture across her skin. It looked barely more valuable than heat rash.


Bopa-lalla. 
Enjoy.









Sunday, May 10, 2015

A Poem by Miriam Sagan - Diamond Tsunami



Map of the Lost

Another installment of Poetry? I just don’t get it. A series where I post a poem or group of poems by one author, followed by anything the author wants to say about the work. Today’s poem is from the book, Map of the Lost, by Miriam Sagan. 

Miriam is the author of more than twenty books, including Searching for a Mustard Seed: A Young Widow's Unconventional Story , which won the award for best memoir from Independent Publishers for 2004. She is also a founding member of the collaborative press, Tres Chicas Books



Some of her other books include Seven Places in America: a Poetic Sojourn, Rag Trade, Archeology of Desire, and The Art of Love . She lives and works right here in Santa Fe, New Mexico.


More importantly, she has posted haiku signs around her neighborhood (about three blocks from where I live)! You can find the original post on her blog about the Haiku in the Hood project here. And an update here.


Miriam has a generous spirit. On her blog,
Miriam's Well: Poetry, Land Art and Beyond, she posts work by her students and other artists (poets, visual artists, sculptors, novelists, you name it), along with her own work.

Seven Places in America
Here's a story about this poem: Moab, June 2009, Michaela and I were making one last pass through the desert before a big move to Wales. I ended up in the poetry section of Back of Beyond Books, pulled out a few books, read a little, and had the same sinking feeling that had been growing inside me for several years – what is this? Why is so much of this boring? Where is the voice that has a sense of context – a voice situated in the beautiful and terrifying world we live in?


Then I found Map of the Lost by Miriam. I pulled it out, opened it at random, and read the poem Diamond Tsunami. It lit up my mind. I think I laughed out loud at the end because of the light. Sure, I was just another crazy guy laughing in the poetry section, but later that summer, after a hiatus of three years, I started writing poetry again.


 


Diamond Tsunami


There is a wave
You are not in the wave

You are on the expensive balcony

You are at the Copper Queen in Bisbee, Arizona

You are in the wave

You let go of the child’s hand

The wave overturns the turquoise truck
You were so proud of that truck

The wave fills every swimming pool with salt water

There is no wave

The no wave breaks over the house

My body is transparent and you can see my heart beating

The wave is in the mind

The satellite photographs show the islands have disappeared

When I say “you” I mean the three persons of grammar:
Me, you, and everyone else

The wave covers the balcony and the palm trees
Yes, we are in the wave.



 *

When the 2004 tsunami hit Indonesia and other parts of South Asia I was on vacation in the Sonoran desert. The news of the destruction was everywhere. I was in Bisbee, Arizona, home of an enormous open pit copper mine and a grand old lady of a hotel, the Copper Queen.

As a child, I was obsessed with tsunami and did not realize they were unlikely to hit Cape Cod. Water rising, big waves, sunken cities--these remain imaginative obsessions to this day, not eased by global warming.

Diamond tsunami is a Buddhist reference--or at least diamond is--to the jeweled net of Indra, where each gem reflects every other in a net of interconnection – and to the Diamond Sutra. Interconnection--how to make sense of it? How to make sense of events half a world away that I have absolutely no direct experience, but that nonetheless resonates?

As I wrote the poem I was cycling through all the possible attitudes I might take--this has nothing to do with me, this is actually happening to me, literally no one is an island versus I'm so far inland it can't matter. And then into the realm of the unconditioned--none of this is actually real. And then back again.

Then there is that truck. When I put together my collection MAP OF THE LOST for University of New Mexico Press I found that exact same truck being destroyed by water in a different poem! This time the truck was stranded in a flash flood off east Alameda Street in Santa Fe. What is the truck? A Buddhist vehicle of the dharma, civilization, or a New Mexican's caballero sense of self? I don't know. Just that water is greater.


Miriam Sagan
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Miriam Sagan


Links to Miriam's Blog
& some poems online








Rag Trade