this is the girl of the moment

by carina finn



this is the girl of the moment




the look of the moment is campesino chic. all the lavaliers can be used as ammunition. the word of the moment is functionality. the girl of the moment should be unable to sit. this is the essential pose for spring. all of the condiments are crinoline.

this is the year of the magazine. matte is the new glossy! liner is the new kiss. campfire badges adorn the uncanny. the girl of the moment has never seen a century.





the biennial couture collection approaches! the girls line up to walk a treatise. the treatise takes place in the coffeeshop alley. heark to herald a moment of adversity! last season, all of the girls are starving.





the girl of the moment is pop. pop is the concurrent drama. the drama is sponsored by your local news radio. the radio is the body of a very young girl. the girl is a wasteland. this is the allegory: a voice walks into a bar and orders a body. the bartender is an inkwell. the inkwell is the scourge of a millenia unmaidened. the girl of the moment wears nothing but white. the girl of the moment eats nothing but summer. this moment is always already over. to comprehend the pre-season collections one must employ a derivative commandment.





this is the girl of the moment : a starling sipping tea from a holly leaf : a honeytart baked in pearbrandy : the girl is a moment of : a recipe torn from a futurist cookbook and soaked in ice cream before steaming the girl of the moment is caffeine detritus : the girl of the moment evokes the scandinavian arpeggios in early spring : the moment is nude lips and bronze shimmer-statue : the girl of the moment is taupe! the moment is cheap rhine wine : the girl of the moment is picnic-basket the girl of the moment is straw-brimmed : the girl of the moment is beribboned : the moment is highly breakable alabaster glass : the girl is vaguely chateauesque.





this is the girl of the moment : the girl of the moment is drag. drag is the unofficial party trick of the season. the season is a retrospective of the life of the media. the media has been wounded. the dresses are chestless to showcase the scars. scars are the up-and-coming accessory. the accessory is the murder of a girl in the making. the moment is transient, that is to say, feathers! the hairband is the new waistline. the metaphor is the new stitch.



bio: carina finn is an mfa student at the university of notre dame. her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in cutbank, storyglossia, seven corners, melusine, connotation press, & elsewhere. she has won two academy of american poets prizes & been nominated for a pushcart. she blogs @ ladyblogblah.wordpress.com

Four Poems

by Amanda Montei




Four Poems

1.
Today they announced that the failure age is twenty-nine. That for women it comes three decades earlier than it does for men. “Why is it that people think they understand their bodies?” she says. “How can you know that your insides yearn for salad?” He is on the bearskin rug in the corner of the apartment, eating a violin bit by bit, and yearning for a salad. “Like the man that ate the airplane!” he says. “Like the man that ate the world!” Yesterday, she asked the old woman in the park what she loved. The woman said, “Queen Anne’s lace.” She didn’t know then that Queen Anne’s lace was a flower. (She thought it was a doily-type thing the woman might wear on her brittle bony shoulders, an old delicate shawl that would break apart in hands. She liked the idea of frail-on-frail.)

2.
Her favorite thing is cats that bat at your hand but really they’re just batting at the air. “It’s sweet the way it seems they’re always grabbing at something they can’t quite touch,” she says. He says his favorite thing is the bearksin rug, which he is dusting with a feather duster. He says his second favorite thing is unexpected eye contact. “It’s glorious when you realize you have sexual tension with everyone you meet,” he says. She hasn’t seen the moon in days. She can’t stay awake for it anymore. “My least favorite thing is gin,” she says. “My second least favorite is conversation. My third least favorite is wrinkles.” He falls asleep on the rug, and she goes looking for the moon.

3.
She will write a story about women who feel like objects even in the eyes of women. (They are incapable of seeing themselves as people, as friends, as anything other than sexual. They are constantly searching for satisfaction, attraction, even in those they have no real sexual interest in.) She will write a story about a woman who is looking for the moon, who travels the world trying to find it. (Such is the plight of so many young women. They define themselves in terms of others.) When she finally finds the moon in Biarritz she is blinded by it. The glow is too specular, too iridescent, too much like teenage glitter.

4.
(She has high, round cheeks and looks like she is sucking on the sides of her mouth, like those druggy models. She wears a thin sparkly wrap over her ears, like she is covering the fact that she doesn’t actually have ears. Like she is covering her coiled coiffure. She squeezes his hand whenever anything is funny or scary. Her fingers are muggy on the palm and her cold rings warm to nervous skin. When she doesn’t know what someone is talking about she always pretends she does and then googles it later.) The flower, there on the screen, reaches out, stems like lonely separate fingers stretching from a long night curled. She thinks that Queen Anne’s lace also looks as if it’s grabbing at something it can’t quite touch. They decide to walk through the night. The sky is painted pastel, a swollen peach with blue-gray mold-fuzz, tantalizing in its death. She catches the moon in her eye, but as they pass a high building, it winks out and she can’t get her eye on it again. “Isn’t it upsetting that the moon is always out there but you can’t always see it?” she says. “Doesn’t it feel like it’s running from us?”


Bio: Amanda lives in Los Angeles, where she is completing her MFA at California Institute of the Arts. Her creative and critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ms. Magazine, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PANK, Nanofiction, Nighttrain, and others. She blogs for Ms. Magazine semi-regularly.

IDEM THE SHAME

by Amaranth Borsuk





IDEM THE SHAME

A Valentine for Gertrude Stein


The redingote’s not for riding, not a bit, but a bit
revealing, the skirt’s shirring, a spur and a gathered
hem. A hem. A hem. A selvedge stiff
with wincing. So to divest you and also best you.
This is their mode.
Worsted weather and elsewhere
little spits and little spaces for sheen.

A dress of steam.
In the dress, a seam.
A seam and a self and a lustrous surface.
All this for seeming.
But a dress to address, I undress.
To address a dress, I digress, a digressive shudder,
a Dutch neck and a damask shoulder arrayed for gazing.
A ray of piping, a tailored taffeta possessed.
I pass passementerie, a fancy way of lying.
All this shows want of starching.

There is no shame in a drop skirt, there is yolk
and limning. Plain as poplin—a plaited pun
without any faggoting. There is jupe and jumping
and juniper bunting.
Of tiny shoes I can say nothing.
So I choose.
I choose Choos.
Now let us proceed with our notes on shopping.



Bio: Amaranth Borsuk is a poet, book artist, and scholar. She is the author of a chapbook, Tonal Saw (Song Cave, 2010), and the collaborative artist's book Between Page and Screen (www.betweenpageandscreen.com). Excess Exhibit, a book of conjoined poems written with performance artist and poet Kate Durbin, is forthcoming from ZG Press. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Field, Eleven Eleven, Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT.

OKay.

by Alexandra Marzella


OKay.


My hand dresses my body.
My mind moves my hand.



My hand types black words on white pages.

Today I am not myself.
Today I am my most hated foe.



I lean against the partition we created for her.

So she would stay.
So she would design. So she would be happy.
So she would be proud.



Was it selfish.

Relating her, to me, to the clothing we’d make side by side.
To the poems we’d read and write.

Forever together in notion or specks.
She descended early. She fled before the fight even started.

Her body, so eccentrically adorned betrayed her.
Her wet legs and shredded shirts no longer protect her.
There is no hard exterior.
Her fashions exposed her. No black spandex, nylon, cotton to defend her.

Whether I write, or I draw, or I watch, or I stare.



I am not myself today.

The black replaces the blue.

The sheer floral curtains adorn her room.
They are the brightest light.



I can’t help but to smile.

Can’t help but to photograph them while the baby sleeps.
At her missing feet.

Healing in the city.

My words, my garbs, determine how far in a day I go The threads, led or fibers, hold us together.

They are one and another.



Each other.


Bio: Alexandra Marzella is an Apparel student at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently taking a contemporary poetry class and writing her final paper on fashion and poetry, or the intermixing of the two. She believes these art forms can and do go hand in hand. Her work aims to meld the two subjects together, cohesively, and eloquently. To her, there is no argument, or misunderstanding. It just is.

Clogs

by Becky Peterson

Clogs

Many things become unclear when you start talking about clogs

The difference between what’s practical and what’s fantastical

I am talking literally about clogs here, not representations of clogs, clogs as labor

or genitalia; the larger meaning of clogs and the purposes of clogs in fashion

When I go to Holland everyone is wearing cowboy boots

I learn that to wear clogs there is to evoke the farmer

A friend once told me clogs are not attractive to men

Though there could be a sea-change in special circumstances

What is ugliness anyway and being popular

I was born in the ‘70s in the face of utility

At times it seems like what is happening is this is a fantasy world

Where meaning lies in webbed shapes lying across the surface

Planks are there to prevent me from teetering off into the water

Clogs do the same--I mean, prevent water from coming in

Bio: Becky Peterson has published critical essays on the intersection of poetry and dress in Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literatures, Culture, and Theory, and in the forthcoming collection Habits of Being: Clothing and Identity (University of Minnesota Press), as well as an essay on film and fabric in Textile: A Journal of Cloth and Culture. Her poetry has appeared in POOL, The Indiana Review, 21 Stars Review, The Bedazzler, and Denver Syntax, and in the chapbook Metropolitan Bird Culture (Bigfan Press). She holds an MFA in poetry-writing from Mills College and a PhD in literature from the University of Minnesota.

I am an Institution of Shadows on a Street Black as Windows

by Kari Larsen

(Printers Devil)

I patterned shadow as a child using words. I only did portraits, fixedly, I loved faces in negative space, and the way faces drain and manipulate what surrounds them. I scrawled walls of text to form what wavered after faces. Text in art, I was taught, was expository, and in frustration I burned my work. Text demystified image: words could not be misleading, possess a unique efficacy, confront or distract, waltz out from behind a tree knowing everything, dressed in their hard black lines.

I dreamt of a suave omniscience under a nearby tree. His voice was stern and straightforward as a hand on my shoulder and replete with meaning betrayed as much by the innocence of syllables as Morse code is by the keening straight key. I wanted to be at all times slightly off camera with my reserved posture ready to step out and quantify, elegantly and ominously, what was hidden. To get to the bottom of the nature of fear and be so cool about it as to let my cigarette burn at my side: I wanted that in my voice. I wanted that to consume my scenery.

I wanted to be Rod Serling but I was not very literal-minded. My desire was addressing his affect; his image did not impose upon my effort. Clothes were the best place to start since that took less discipline. Discipline was integral. The outfit is an all-encroaching command: he taught me this.

I dress so words would waver after me. I dress so I will not forget what my mission was. I adopted a uniform: a black dress. In a black dress I obscure and insist. Like I am wrapped in thick, layered smoke. I derive pleasure from the limitation and what it forces me to transcend: I wear only what forces me back to my work. What frees my legs to explore corridors, does not misdirect by means of signage, what aligns itself with my personality with all the ease of natural authority.

The seduction of repetition, the creation of mystery by means of a lull, the suggestion of fixation and mania—I am riveted by this as I wear it around me, as I learn what to do with my words. I keep myself in a whir; I keep pushing myself out from behind the tree. Printer’s apprentices were called printer’s devils because they would turn infernally black with renegade ink. Until you know how to wield it, stay submerged in the fire.


Bio: Kari Larsen dwells on the banks of the mighty Susquehanna.

Ad Fontes

by Ingrid Pruss

I cannot explain the motivation but can certainly capture the glee of the late January morning I committed to purchasing a file of 50 designer fonts for Windows 2010. It was a snow day. Though I hate shopping, the pleasure of this online purchase was deeper and purer than the hot pink pashmina I dreamt of wrapping around my shoulders all winter long, having saved five dollars a week for the past eight months in the hopes of having it by Easter Sunday. But there was something more mysterious and tempting about the black shadowed letters with their tiny hooks of ALGERIAN, a quality infinitely more seductive than a cape could ever be, something that lent an erotic air of authority a soft, bright shawl could never confer.

I was enamored of 50 choice spices, fragrances, hues, fabrics, textures, moods, cloaks in which to watch my words parade across the page; it was like having my own private fashion show or a grown-up version of Barbie and Ken or, as I imagined it, Camille Claudel and Rodin whenever desire dictated.

Sitting at my desk, the font choices loaded on MS Word 2010 making me feel like the proud owner of the complete box of Crayola crayons–the one that-included-gold-and-silver-and-a-pencil-sharpener--the long, sleek, expensive box Mom said I didn’t need because I wasn’t really an artist. Having these fonts, however, I could confer the title artist upon myself and have the opportunity to live up to it.

Add to that the choice of colors from kelly to forest green and fuschia to lemon yellow, and I wondered if any piece of writing would ever be finished or if I’d defer the end so I could revel in the process of trying on as many outfits as possible on every single word, just to see how they looked – taking them off the hanger, zipping them and unzipping them, buttoning and unbuttoning them, and hanging them back up -- comforting myself with my mother’s false promises about ice cream, “the novelty will wear off” which has not happened yet.

The carefree confidence of capital letters in AR BERKLEY, extended my identity just as I imagined a coveted Mont Blanc fountain pen might; it gave me a wild but sane sensuality as if wearing a black felt fedora, with a large red ostrich feather perched on its brim, to run errands about town, looked respectably eccentric instead of brazenly crazed. There was something tucked-in yet laissez-faire about its boldness, a quality rather like Herrick’s kindled wantonness.

The scripted fonts set my language free, allowed the syllables to sound their way out of my body fearlessly, as if my words needed a costume for safety, a disguise for immunity, similar to an author’s nom de plume. Though this made no rational sense, it was liberating. How strange that a simple typeface could create such wind for my words to set sail on, but if you glanced at Vivaldi, you’d see the amplitude of its simplicity. So I pared down all the phrases I made as hiding places and stared down the small square of space that scared me – the truth of my place on this planet, even more miniscule in this galaxy, Perspective is everything, and when I saw it, I knew who I was, where I fit, and how everything would fall out of its place ultimately, so I sat and fleshed out my words, letter by letter in flagrant celebration of imperfection, homage a la vida mortale.

I wanted these 50 fonts more than a Renaissance-bell-sleeved velvet dress or over-the-knee red suede button-up-the-side boots. I wanted them more than sparkling rhinestone shoulder duster earrings or a Weiss aurora borealis headlight-style antique brooch. I would wear the fonts far more often than anything in my closets or drawers.

And these highly stylized files of ink could dazzle me into believing myself a member of the belletristic benevolent writerly aristocracy long enough to redeem even the most abject poems and prose from the depths of my own darkest censor.

(Photo by Barry Lipman)

Bio: Ingrid Pruss teaches English at WCSU (4/4), and has published in the JAISA, the George Herbert Journal, Violence Against Women, and Quay. She's been teaching 26 years, 22 at WCSU. While her specialty is 16th and 17th century British Poetry, her passion is to teach students to develop their own imaginations, to create their own de-familiarizing images. and to think for themselves. She asks all her classes to make multimedia projects with visual and verbal images in addition to writing papers.