ISSUE #21
BHJ’s current issue (#21) engages with Isolation — an especially pertinent theme in our current pandemic period, but one also conducive to innovative creation. As destructive, difficult, and tragic as the last year has been, for many creators, it has also been a generative time.
Editor-in-Chief
Ryan Henry Cox
Editorial Consultant
Andi Pontiff
FEATURED CREATORS
COLIN RAFF
CHRIS TYSH
GINNA LUCK
KELLEY WHITE
CANDACE HILL
OANA AVASILICHIOAEI
COLIN RAFF
Colin Raff is a Berlin-based American writer, artist, and animator whose interest in fictional taxonomies has not yet abated. His graphic novel Sintaktik 1 was recently published by Le Dernier Cri (Marseille), and several animated shorts can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/c/ColinRaff.
A Response
On the evening of the fourth day that Mellaphne declined to remove the apparatus from her head — still assured that by so participating, her anxiety would greatly diminish and that, moreover, her brother would receive the surgery he needed in time — she reported a perceptual phenomenon. The venomous spider’s corpse, still displayed opposite her face, appeared to transform into the head of a small bird (species unknown*) whose low trill once dominated her excursions, some years ago, along the river, across from rows of poplars, always around dusk. She would often get in trouble for wandering out so late. She recalled the clouds as long and violet or black, like bruises covering patches of red light. Her brother hadn’t been born yet.
*Angora longbill (Macrosphenus galatiae)
CHRIS TYSH
Chris Tysh is a poet whose latest publications are Hotel des Archives: A Trilogy (Station Hill Press, 2018) and Derrida’s In/Voice (BlazeVOX 2020). She holds fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Kresge Foundation as well as a Murray Jackson Creative Scholar in the Arts Award from Wayne State University.
Zone
You reverse the order of the poem
Only to land at boarding gate 80
Zone 1, embarquement immédiat
A voice echoes through the empty space
With that sexy French cigarette voice
Except the poem’s got it all wrong
You haven’t really been out since March
Since before corona (BC)
It must confuse you with another time
When people sat at cafés and argued
About les gilets jaunes, booze and faux amours
— For Etel Adnan
Year Zero
A tiny sum hangs In the lower frame As though Unspooled from The top of the poem Still waiting to be Disentangled from The year zero when An orphan boy Roams the streets In ruins Kicking at rubble After a while the screen Goes black Your face an endless Cortège As house lights Go up
Woke
Is there a place Where you press me About woke The way you bite Inside your lip As if to say please I wrote the damn bill I know the score The conductor joke Gets lost in translation But what remains open Is the 24/7 all you can eat Opéra bouffe with huge slabs Of white layer cake stacked In the wings before even bigger Than the death contraption In Angels of America GRIEF descends center stage Sweeping the crowd With its trapdoor maw
Scandal
Appears as soon as You’re escorted off The train A moment the poem files Under RSA (Repressive State Apparatus) A knot of uniforms Squinting at your exit Visa In another instance Your stiletto heels clack Like typewriter keys Along an interminable Corridor barely visible From the prison gate Wrung dry the hard shell Of a new sentence Comes into view Passing her lips A smile In round brackets
Ravine
Any mark on the body
Adds to the ledger
Of grievances
Roughly put
You bump up against a hand
Elbow, clavicle
Pushing through
Her thin tee
In the elliptical night’s
Vast dominions
A thought begins
To form around
Its grimy cup
Remembering shadows
Of a dalliance
At the part where
Young girls heave rocks
Down a ravine
— For Christine Hume
Quasi
Moribund the aforementioned gender norm wanders off the rails sick of explaining the handcuffs twin bed and corset of assumptions cinching the figure stitching in double blue thread pink background right down to hollow joints now that the whole cloth comes undone nothing but twine wire and balls of straw
GINNA LUCK
Ginna Luck (@poetryluck) is a writer, teacher, and aspiring visual artist. She is the author of Everything Has Been Asking For Mercy. Her poems have been published in The Tiny, Radar Poetry, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, and others. She lives in Seattle, Wa.
An Infinity Pool Is What It Feels Like To Move Up On My Homewomb
I’m dying on the side of a deserted highway after twenty years of walking, racking, stacking, sanitizing. I’m dying of exposure to the chemical. The chemical is in my brain like a pulpy storage organ. It’s fogging up in my scuzzy animal. It’s grabbing at my sleeve. It’s synthesizing to the steely prison. I can’t do anything about it. You’re setting off without me into the tumbling gallons of more chemicals. You’re bodyspeaking a dark suburban ambivalence to your blood battery. The air is endlessly becoming a single wire in the stench. I can’t ignore it, but I do because I don’t know I’m dying. I think I’m entering your tiresome strangle. I think my intellect is a nest. The birds aren’t scratching up my face. They’re picking at something soft, reddened, and itchy in the lost system. I swear I’m making it to the bigger stronger faster medicine. I swear I’ve turned the gas off my compulsivity. There are no more funeral boxes or dead-eyed enigma shows. No dull, forgetful, hollow bitchboys. No maps, no books, no language. No way to describe a storm cloud. No place that isn’t casting strange shadows on the path and thick rotating engines where there used to be trees. I’m filled with guns and knives and rings and ropes. No beds, no pillows, no lamps. Just stiff greasy towels and broken strings. Cracked concrete, cracked brick, striated grooves, and linear marks. Something like a plank, some scaffolding upon which my body does not rest. A stuttering liquid keeps becoming a flock of actual seagulls. The thing I’m scrubbing into the asphalt is mostly over now.
The Muck Says Nothing for the Muck Doesn’t Speak
I’m balled up on the woo woo grief song of my unreal cloud. I mean, doesn’t everyone revolve around one inarticulable discomfort, one pilled and sticky yet beautiful knotting that their body will only ever love, some horrible unsustainable soothing thing? All sorts of thinking die in me. All sorts of thinking sit on the floor with how it sounds. Woo woo blurred up blind spot, I bang you into the muck to escape your noise. I scum around all through the house, starting in the back like a smashed apple. I hop onto an immobilized feeling like I might a sofa. My body blah blah blahs for affection from the one not listening. Everything else, back away. My system doesn’t forget what it smells like – dead bad nuzzler, unlit puzzler. Here come my muck mountains. Here comes my gaping hole like a substitute, my face on a gob-killing. I think behavior and together we clean cut through the middle quadrant.
Small Deaths Keep Us Close
We harvest the smell under the cornstalks. We crouch in the seedpods with the void of their vegetable. We hear the air in a mosquito’s wings crack and the grapes stiffen and the earth like a dark carpet steaming beneath us something delicious and uneaten. The carrots are suffering. We spill buckets of red seeds all over the future shapes of roots like a spell that might wing from the earth the forever unblooming, wet clusters of empty trees. I say do you remember seeing anything beyond the dead bees? You say firework tulips and mums. I say yellow strings of wet sapwood. You say goose-bumped and ripened apricots. I peel your nightshade. You wrap my hair around a deeply mutilated young peach. We drag the dead rodent onto the tomato plant and pretend its body is fruiting, becoming soft, a new hum of skin, a bright yellow follicle of want.
KELLEY WHITE
Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner-city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle, and JAMA. Her recent books are Toxic Environment (Boston Poet Press) and Two Birds in Flame (Beech River Books). She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.
Between Thin Lines
you’d think on a day that threatens thunder you’d think on a raining city you’d think when the ice melts there, the door, just as the foundation crests ground the place where the hired man slept his boots cracked, his razor she named him Able she named him Crow she named him Boy whose father I will not remember he said grenade he said pomegranate he said tomorrow don’t you see the mistake, that yellow? the seagull framed one moment in the window how many windows look on nothing but walls?
CANDACE HILL
Candace Hill’s (poet, weaver, painter, multi-media artist, and teacher) poetics unwind the music and mathematics underlying the conveyance of language to fit a particular moment in time. She has been an artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Cooper Union, and The Watermill Center and received awards including The National Endowment for the Arts and The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Multi-Media. Muss Sill (Distance No Object, 2020) is her most recent book of poetry.
Hill’s work below engages with her friendship with and the visual art of Mary Heilmann, who will be showing work during upcoming exhibitions at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery and the Parrish Art Museum in New York.
In Isolation
with paintings by
Mary Heilmann
“Surrender your anxiety! Be silent and stop your striving and you will see that I am God. I am the God above all the nations, and I will be exalted throughout the whole earth.”
— Psalm 46:10 (TPT)
If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek,
Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered…
— Act 1, Scene 2: The Tempest (William Shakespeare)
The proclivity toward shoehorning sequences we won’t do,
“Walking Through the Ville Coulda Been You”
for Kooda instead we will coup de ville you
hands flyin top-down buy in
“If we were good, we would go to heaven when we died.
That’s what they told us.”
— from The Architecture of Heaven (Mary Heilmann)
The progress of discernment who has not heard of rosy rose coloured grottos who has a better answer 4 cancer which leads lead back to back turned to too into, “Hi Mary,” blew on blue, all time here today gone two my spray paint swirls over to her Charming Billy girl near The Big Wave, Gloria’s clothesline sheets peeping thru Tom the slaves Black door oar 2 experience sedition seen in stillness, since she appears to me in that violet lit eye 2S s way sway at night as light clicks on to cry over my ‘neighbour girl‘ as she likes to call me since rounded invisible corners laid down tar further back than asphalt cars that sculpture mount, in the olden day they’d cut the next one up using the what what on cusp, which stands in for 26 years hence the reminder to pray what’s what what?
1
“Hay, you give me chill’s” n visa versa coulda been u2. Coulda been Sue sued. I can claim the immunity from grotto life iffa want 2, still here longer beach & B being the younger ‘girl’ my thoughts aren’t too wapie only sappy matter fact not a decision-maker either one could make ah yes a temple 2 infinitely the wiser choice dimpled the other girl’s nicer got whiter curly hair torn out at that root curlicue in gang fight maybe Catholic v Protestant monickers at least not saying omitting hay come here let’s omit tide socket Monica, not chase busy aweigh away sway come n see you at Hanukkah when seas surface let’s bat away cat in hat combustible then book, cultural icon innovator or at least old lover one of those guys I’ve never bothered Warhol gridding or met in studio scene ain’t seen studin their backward walk to birds curve plover work bids on lark 2 pipe spurred on buy sparked branch turn in here go down Cameron Banana Bannons weird an art book covers franks rhyming with stank Mad Hatter ambivalence matters. Gordo’s meant to be incognito hangin over near waves long ago beaten hopefully he’s blunt bashed then enervated aware enough to get up before spatial dust swears 4 certain wears or the floor’s equivalent bares stairs that formed by the water mistress … leaking into what happens before others comeupprance to major fluster practice looking at skills looking all ill hands on deck in particularism’s pockets and also brains goofballed in too rockets who’ll inform Jill 2 stay open re perdition who fell out embracing stout with stripped out relegate whoa Jack witticism’s into whoa it’s a Micky fin trick at cynicism.
Sifting through what we won’t do with strip in this mollified period but rather point to stripes historical look at mediocre surveys, who’s left out mechanically incisive will do when this this hear spectacle drops glasses n a grassy Google map stomp knoll classy cigs striping shrill knots bottom of foot yappin while eavesdropping at entrances that’s all less complicated than East Indian stripping the ageing bottom sure appears simple, but no Mary appears willing to make it look simple easting … her past dots splotch sexy under pants hot subterranean nope bell the soul of out ness these new detective works poised to be both semi abstract n waxing pleasantly boastful, surprised as something humblepie within grandmotherly shout outs no oars there east river’s in keeping with Riverhead’s dis equilibrium they both are no longer reincorporated back into the sentencings of the girl track in the bumpity bump truest sense of the word or there’d be no manly discourse between us under the eaves & that wood eye a not so warm blooded being thing who couldn’t see far enough off to give easy Japanese herring boats cool runnings in lengthy jeweled pool formations to he who would be elsewhere an eastward chilly breezed air of doors open oh dear air conditioning, the Hamptons, the definition of moorings broke abruptlies, more important in the naming of paintings we’ll render a meaning at Easter, as in conquest circularity and kidney shape pools instead of pies we make jointly thus justly becoming thusly a Chill California girl with British leanings, discourse at least a daring whole lotta mischief kerchief tide abrupt aside thus we bees loathe to forego liver spots forgotten already pleased.
2
Both instances are strange — a neighbour reviewing the condition/state of the soul, who isn’t ill at ease being tall or in awe of to think two bees May may just be minimalist writing abstractly as to rename a part of her now wracked canon citing sleepless nights in Paris deedum no hums brightening, “my daydreams, even in church, were often filled with pictures of Hell” (MH — The Architecture of Heaven). omg But has the evolved negro become that more formal formalism or as a formality ageless grave art teachings match 2 formative years reaching former next doors dormer even broached with ladder by carpenter whom is why no formic bomber, why the desire to show her my key concepts, Formica in clay heaven this-a way >> letter to God what about Formosa … the semi weathered red barn startled into the clouds, 2020’s glistening expansiveness in pandemic, sleep, must we bemoan her at 80 for sure nobody else’s there as trident with two reddy glasses peering through forsaken spectacles being what they were, when her important work’s laid bare with no concrete fiery reds (momentarily) oar did I miss that period to be declared/discussed not suggesting what’s physically demanding, open, perform tube spurts spirting, over Satan’s warm speech as we age threw glass window shade absent those butts still with us in clothes & y why why knot not knit the mighty hit long foured the two neighbours clocking orange or orange eating what’s not noticed’s the formerly bold pallor, is smelling back? Ah a yes us us in a pandemic Fonda JLo type tight whip fight in increments something else could be chosen then replaced, the cap frosted lost foils up next walling bunnies bull wink then divided wailing given a spiritual healing well boozed over notices ominous demonic laughing … who will be next in one’s desired Satan sneakers, social landscape escape escape … formicate sew no bathing suit in light induction tape milkweed butterfly crests landed by himself & Himself marigold the sprite will pay for this uptight !
Will I hope to be able to report on my next year’s feelings about her Ms. Mary’s desired here-to-come dreamy work humm shiny colored poignant accents & or fuel my own with some of those sublime Fragonard maids, leftover feelings dames faint brown tinge over skin on no meals thinned water sounds wriggling through old pipes next to, “May may know already,” dough 4 busybody’s busy priming movers gesso ing intersectional desserts; flirt, I start inevitably from there not as biographer, fraught for a minute form of the new neighbourly old friend ceramic comedy place east end holder up rejoinder to this young woman’s lived in artworks, inseasonal & beyond, living outside’s disfashionable as barking tent companions what kind consciousness there looks looks across remote lavender & nepeta bush at art — & seas control, is it the phallic cloud eternal material intimate current ocean conventional kneeling at buttonhole stitched water’s unavoidable edge or herself obeying the ongoing work across the snapdragon brambles relating to, hark, hark, the foamy seasonal changes, hark Angelonia bark Poseidon deformed deer resistant spray ineffable aspirator dam god, the very rigorous nerve of existence incandescence demanding a signifying system existing nearest devouring gardens of ants in limbo curses nothing dangling, sand dunes up to no good hello preaching insects storyline’s wavery island alerting agony to kill Odysseus incanous pass me buy oh gentle saviour “water lawn?” or not regaining buzz flys painful thorns foot in line companion planting let this watery nightmare be done over n over again cutting grass in images encampment only cock loud on linden filled landscapes duck bills hooper over silent trolls loopier.
3
We’re townies in now & forever isolation coming back in like little weeds void of tennis court cracks those rock stars aglow taping over pavements or tapping seductions’ disarming grosgrain’d angels … at this stage of creative consciousness anything hallucinatory hood buy air —masks Miss H’s browse fence show me imaginary rivers run into & over our oar existence no tantrum overshadowing water frozen in pipes nature’s painting that bed in a stream strangeness out … outdoor heroic views, seagulls when put all together with sunflowery seas past plastic & chivalrous oceans present hook meows, in zoos now sober regularity gated belles let’s defend her prowling seas sees a shut in, stay in, along with human-owned futures arranged weakly along borders brown with waters mastering the summer protection situation … murdering crows no kids … running … the hell of known pandemic loomed & looming … without these Mary paintings underneath it all … would I ever think about mountainous polluting struggles, book ended broad leafed evergreens conifers the horror signs sassafras clashing down virtually sheer winds of Styrofoam over on calculations beautified the disharmony of pigsty propositions the gray days harsh minor kill life, clear, blame God, bleak stare, stay there, then dear oh deer who’d push us out to sea … when need be 4 original loss vitamin D’s? Would it be nature or what ever makes pillings’ pilloried possible pilings whom ever will remember after the just remains on paper plate shavers our shudders, follow me, shudders climate enshrouded yet there’s the un or terrified done of it all … Jesus, without these clean active seasonal tormentors with a ‘she brave enough to achieve supernatural blues’ a turquoisian clue well done’s said prim hast thou no fury yet more blue blood to cast away, with crunchy white shiny conjectures semi-abstract headlong down at the bay Gates adventures ^ camp benches Banging it out exactly our once pretty expectant bikini’d butts at shore scary waiting nearest September’s door — elemental sure footed bloody weak points okay vaunted styles wanted, buy sum epic seam meridian commanded Mary, Christ’s mother justice we demand justice, listen up “Wind and Sea” seems to say while “Clear Day’s” reflecting on itself repeating in sharp monotones practice perimeter azaleas bless our, this is not the dead over falls out there all things in common Niagara Falls imperial cleanup, yes closer to clean life these engagements communicate with her 2020 byline “hi neighbour“ dying to slaughter here’s power horned in in time we all must aim to dominate the elements saying hellos while a troop of small cell huntsmen in clothes entertain themselves inside pricking behold the fragile body without certitude eyes of of we’re coming over & over they come armies of cruelty redemption no equal, leaving all else behind but mad red reputation from past times heralds that closed door virus asserts control chewing up the context of what’s next in bold text, what will be the new fresh clear youth variant clouds afloat the greatest subject, was it the heaven that never was or is in a series this, the sparkling spark jigahoot inflicted upon that yellow passage lark emerging near other Blueish green space cadet those studied small beans roasted vaulting out malicious like ragweed among asymmetricals pollen pebbles known as white acrylic similar effect their glistening eye ranges adjudicating “Ditch Plains” shifting from is it 7:30 can’t you see the light self interest fluttering primer trucking 1930 plates covered up from beginnings & endings, the placing & ranking of natural things all the great deers taken away, deer prisons nay? Native channels our horns aplenty used want sum 4 precious primarily water 2? Royal tides a memory u, electricity? Who & shores influencing moon haiku noun what happens now boo boo omega & who hears when homeless freezing cold life & cod peace sets in and in … to cast away priest-craft grin.
4
Unrecognizable ideas of course without the almost temple point “Black Fan,” my man!
The extreme opposite kind of painting from earlier disturbed millionaire next to pauper lil Jupiter time 2 throw back a beer thrown can eternity spiral 2 distant 4 a workers pi reference point.
Then another travels back into zoned Indian time, prickly NA take a good look at titled “Invisible Kachina” curve of the no plume feather borage straight black and white small trespass, tourist imbroglio curb errrr screech ever the bon vivant minimalist bamboozaler or never was quite right with that angler frightful church worm, got to her, that cranky crueler hydraulic, here anyway dissembler in name only fences round a healer for the never again happening under saintly eye concealer, an Indian appropriation heirs no airs no trouble seas consent but thought of as silky dunlin horizontal blk & wht straight shooter barely a brush Mark back that wily horseback character right horizontal & why go left add in that tiny clammy roughneck thought sloth wrong a smidgen invisible but like invisible ink I’m writing “green plants and lioness” she’s there to claim doth, I nimble, gangrenes never enough a mind Kimballs lost in fried bread n noodles, here’s to my Indian carrot stir fry deep environmental affection 4 tremble carrots, Mary I’m still a loyal fan blues supporter … take the coloured stripes nearby come next autumn often missed those hellos like the ocean floor absolute everlasting, though sis, Black Fan’s secure in that wave, why’s that here, in the midst of all the death ingest, the renegotiating of less pulling up hellacious clear waves, sea, ocean, breeze fluid white cap claim heart views chained which lead is us to wavy victory head home be on guard infrared that part of humanity a stone’s throw back line from beach Bach n other winter buildings packed in upscale’s stop … stop … Limit Lines broken eggplants climb through potatoes no celery groan here outstretch manatee Mary to the very end of perspectival harmony to around sides & backroads hearts too corny a reality a Mozart drips 2 no watery calumny that overlaps maybe that tinge of contraries, lost energy for dismantled distances thunder cold blues a Moran indigo descending displayed like mama crude piano coulda Kooda almost made it member-less within egg size pebbled plant west beach directions unhurried fire branded pone shakes shall we once again shelter be welkins given ferry rights all bleak gray forest outside have we learned nothing ergo until pell mell sets in these cool tones, cool lines, cooler hipness grown to coolest’s tender mighty stakes devotion to agony others ma be the y Mary entertainment the decomposition vision toasted screaming 4 empty expanses 4 pert oxygen tanks as areola remaining thin very refined, progressive intentional looking back the calculated technique of way primary complete the quieting the tension atomiser the last tiny spray burst of lavender riskier elegiac figurative wants nothing defends freshwater enemies entering the generic retreated heated fetid fact state of ground water cesspools’ dat downing cans milk and honey for abstract painters thwack’s looking toward that Rockburne slack un fold the minimalists genus narrow window Japanese gold keep going crack into & over there you go kaboom pow zing the Mitchell abstract expressionist thing let it bee sown corrective permanent rap sea song up holding their blaming escapades adios threatening estates into names what beauty happened 4 sale priestess mostly gauche the mansion believing in mowers graces intimate ethical achievement Naples yellow mine bleak in each other’s silvery moth known as paradise hydrology c at finish who’ll burn theodicy on that streaked striped lawn there’s no cure for neighbouring except to live 2 the left of uncaring waves balancing between calm youth spent in drawing butte on porch northern climes wronged longed 4 summer’s seafront towns missing lions roaming Alabama’s halfhearted kinship with whether weather this bush will on canvas bee dash’d.
All photography of Mary Heilmann by
Candace Hill (2020–2021)
—
“Mother & Daughter On Gardiner’s Bay” — Sag Harbor Hills, NY (1965)
OANA AVASILICHIOAEI
Oana Avasilichioaei (Montreal) interweaves poetry, sound, photography, and translation to explore an expanded idea of language, polyphonic structures, and borders of listening. Her six collections of poetry and poetry hybrids include Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019) and Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015). Look for more info and work at oanalab.com and soundcloud.com/oanalab.
Tracking Animal
(An Extemporization)
END OF BHJ #21
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