December 22nd: Carol Guess

Upturned Cistern, Plastic Fawn

The lettered streets stop short of K. Knock on the garden of the ruined gate. Beyond us cold orchards and kerosene lanterns, frozen Delicious asleep on the tree. Past Anchor Island, past Petulant Ridge, past the failing pedestrian bridge. You’ve brought weather from the places you go. A girl could get lost among handfuls of loose tea. Two men in scrubs ferry a trolley, body without heart or heat. An airplane lands on frozen water, windows white with winter geese. The pet sitter decorates houses with dust, flowery pillows from her dead daughter's stuff. I'm your only possessive S. Brace yourself if you love someone else.

Carol Guess is the author of seven books of poetry and prose, as well as Doll Studies: Forensics, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Find out more: www.carolguess.blogspot.com

December 21st: Kristy Bowen

the kissing disease

 Sometimes, I am too suggestible. Both exquisite and satin hipped, moving through December like a doll within a doll.  I am always too exciteable, this contagion sweet on a boy's tongue. I pretend that we are moving further and further apart, like halving an orange and then halving it again. Or a curtain unfolding and unfolding to reveal a ballerina, ice lipped in a white dress.  You wouldn't believe the things I want sometimes.  Like now, the fever blooming inside me, scented like milkweed and snow.  The enormous tangle of branches that give way to a tiny kitten heart.  This river looks fake, all singing children and dirndls.  But then, so do your hands, pulling me toward you in the truck.  I braid my hair and pretend it comes natural to me as breathing, as this little disease caught in my throat. It might be a butterfly.  It might be a knife. All night, my ribs are a sleepy furnace, where small colonies make scrimshaw drawings of strange beasts. You wouldn't believe the things they want.

A writer and visual artist, Kristy Bowen is founder of dancing girl press & studio, an indie press and design studio based in Chicago. She is the author of in the bird museum (Dusie Press, 2008) and the fever almanac (Ghost Road Press, 2006) as well as several chapbook length and book art projects.

December 20th: Lisa Janssen

Midwinter Chicago, 2010

Bunker Hill looked beautiful in 1960
a black and white clapboard shambles
in perpetual dusk
as the cars make their way down 3rd
headlights refract in the camera lens
into a line of blinding stars

A spectacular view of Los Angeles
from an old man’s window
from the new man’s window
from the malingering world’s window
and the woman who has no future
but perpetual black and white
and sons and daughters who will do no better
her window too

I would imagine myself at that window
but I am at this window
it has snowed all night and still snowing
outside my window it was silent
and footsteps so softly
but now the shovels are scraping
the children are screaming
it’s almost Christmas

Christmas is a desolate window
a truly dark glass
through which I see a convex past
write your name in the fog like a ghost
a window there is no way to close
one of these winters
I’m going to board it up for good



Lisa Janssen is a writer and archivist living in Chicago, Illinois. She has published poetry in several journals, and currently publishes and co-edits MoonLit magazine. Most recently, she completed editing film director Curtis Harrington’s memoir Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood, which will be published by Drag City in 2011.

December 19th: Susana Gardner

Artless
     Adores her itinerant
Quivering  Sea of voices

Painted
     Image   legible
Iridescent  rich& lush

Binding December    alone
     Eat your early paradox:
Dirty Cloak Industry

Artless is
     Radiant exultant
Contractions of little mugs

Heaving& rising
     Incident me:
Come, Come, Come!

Answer mechanically
     Thoughts persist
Alcohol tedious    thereafter

Inward damp imbecilic
     Dress    half undone
Evident atrocity

Ought I leave?
     His harlot artfulness
Wanton carmine-tinted menacing

Ardent
     Wakefulness  desiring
Luscious lips        diminish

Half-ships
     Idempotent     perfidy
Apogeic maxims

Susana Gardner's latest book, Herso, An Heirship in Waves is forthcoming from Black Radish Books. She lives in Zürich.

December 18th: Carmen Giménez Smith

RADICALIZATION

An agitator holds her sign up asking are you feeling equal, so you and your sisters deride her because she's so public about Injustice, so second-wave. Your sisters gather around her with collective scorn and sully her earnest nature It’s thanks but no thanks. I can vote, walk into the pharmacy for my Plan B, and wear a chain wallet. One sister throws an apple into the melee and the unfazed agitator bites it. Her straight block-teeth break the fruit apart which shocks your sisters, but when they’ve abandoned their mockery for the lure of a choice bazaar: earrings, Ugg boots, removable tramp stamps, a Sex and the City marathon, you're hot for the agitator. The crowd clears and you kiss her sweaty neck and use her agitating sign as a bed. You scrawl her agitating words onto your belly and stand naked against her muscle memory. Not just the cause, the impulse, the result, but the buzz of lack. You’d like to consume it right out of her, that humming electric dissatisfaction. Then you’d like to put it out of your body in the form of a Louise Bourgeois sculpture, milky, blobbing, love the star-fuckery of doing it with her and to her, then the sticky pulling apart, the eternal production of polyurethane eggs wrapped in yarn.
 
 Carmen Giménez Smith is the publisher of  Noemi Press and the Editor-in-Chief of  Puerto del Sol.  Her website can be found here: www.carmengimenezsmith.com

December 17th: Danielle Pafunda

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

Hush, now. 
In a house like ours,
stay quiet. 

Keep moist
or your skin will split
and spill your secrets
across the carpet,
one stupid bagworm
after another.

Hush.  Do not disturb
our needles,
squalling thread. 

We’re stitching up
all your fancy mistakes.

We’re stitching up
your mother’s face.

We’re going to stitch you a new one.

We’re going to take our time.

 

 

 Danielle Pafunda is author of Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press 2010), My Zorba (Bloof Books), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press), and the forthcoming Manhater (Dusie Press Books). She's an assistant professor of Gender & Women's studies and English at the University of Wyoming.

December 16th: Leigh Stein

AIRPORT OF SAD HAIRCUTS

I finally have enough socks so that I only have
to do my laundry twice a month, the guy said,
on the plane, but still, does that mean
my girlfriend shouldn't have to call and wish
me a Happy Hanukkah? I said I wasn't Jewish
when he asked, but did I know about the candles?
Everyone knows about the candles, he said.
That's true, I said. All the towns
in the morning were below us, with
their snow-covered cul de sacs and
snow-covered hills for kings, their water
towers and windmills and kitchen
islands at which people fell out of love
every day, and even gas station parking
lots snow-colored before the first cars
arrived at dawn, the car wash lights bright
enough to make someone decide to live
through the holidays. My name's Seth,
the guy said. I'm a financial planner
and I'm not saying I make a ton of money,
but I make a ton of money. When Seth told me
his girlfriend was a dancer, it made me think of you,
how you asked me if I was a dancer, the first night
we met, back when I still had a chance to forget you, but
I think once I saw you pick that lock with my library card
I would have followed you anywhere. The necklace
I got her for Hanukkah? I'm getting ready for work
and I hear this crash and her go oh my God, and
what did she do? Dropped and broke it all over the floor.
Just clean it up before I get home, I told her, Seth said,
and I'll get you a new one. Honestly, I can't wear any
of the necklaces I have, because they were all given to me
by people I try not to call in the middle of the night.
Honestly, Seth, I never went to sleep yesterday
because I was trying to hold onto my youth.
There are lines around my eyes. No one else
can see them, but I know they're there
because I know myself the best. Guess what.
In the new year, I won't sleep ever. I'll become
younger. I'll never call you at 1am again.
I'll be eleven, I'll be twelve. I'll tape songs off the radio
and they'll all be about you, but I won't know that.
I won't know you or what you'll do. I'll wear pink
and I'll be good at math and I'll be twelve.
And in the movie, we'll play ourselves.

Leigh Stein is the author of the chapbooks How to Mend a Broken Heart with Vengeance (Dancing Girl Press), Least Inhabited Island II (h-ngm-n), and Summer in Paris (Mondo Bummer). She lives in Brooklyn.