"muck and seaweed - shimmering beneath the surface"

The new Thirteen Myna Birds is up, offering new poetic pieces from Donavon Davidson, Cher Bibler, Emily Strauss, and featuring six poems by Amber Bromer with her bagpipe stomach and rainbow colored firecracker blood.

Fingers are fluttering spiders - through a knothole  - muck and seaweed - shimmering beneath the surface - severed hands that left a small offering - box where the flaps don’t quite come together - a howling wind - flesh or the stone inside?

http://13myna.blogspot.com/

When you find out that someone from your past died

What are you supposed to do and how are you supposed to act when you find out that someone you knew and really liked many years ago has died?

I FEEL sad, but I don’t know what to do. Scott Gallaway was a college friend; we were in the same BFA Creative Writing program in the mid 1990s; and I just found out via facebook that he died a few days ago of cancer. He was only 39.

I've not seen him in recent years (other than on his facebook page), but I had a small bit of contact with him online. Less than two years ago, in July 2011, I found out about his cancer, and mailed him some poetry chapbooks and we shared just a few emails - but that's it. He crossed my mind numerous times, including these last few years, hoping he was feeling/getting better.

A number of people were posting photos on his page; most of them from many years ago; and I thought about maybe adding one there; but it sort of bothers me a bit how when someone dies, they suddenly appear to be receiving more attention than they did when they were alive.  (If you’re going to be really terribly hurt and sad and sorry when someone dies, then maybe you should try to pay more attention to them now while you still can.)

I know that doesn’t mean people were not paying any attention to him when he was still alive; I know the sudden rush of correspondence and photos are related to remembering and honoring – and that often in life, people's thoughts, feelings, attentiveness, and attentions are kept inside their heads - and they tend to open some of that up and share it more in the midst of tough times, such as when someone dies but is still so deeply remembered and missed.

It's terribly sad when someone my age dies. 

(A contemporary poet, whose creative work I have not read in recent years either.)

***

The past. He's in the front middle.

Blood Pudding Press Poetry Chapbook Contest Results! – Three Semi-Finalists and Two Winners Announced!

This was a tough, challenging choice for Blood Pudding Press to make, as the contest entries were filled with so many interesting, well-written, diverse offerings, brimming with oodles of their own unique talent and flare.

Ultimately, the two chosen to be published by Blood Pudding Press were the two I decided were the best fit for my press, content-wise and stylistically and emotionally.

They offer utterly unique, emotionally raw, gut wrenching, powerful pussy-centric poetry that doesn’t fit into the mainstream – that doesn’t come across as academic OR as ‘outsider writer’; that comes across as its own oozing entity.

The three semi-finalists -

1.  Paula Cary – Sister, Blood and Bone

2.  Allie Marini Batts – Wake Up, Breathe, Keep Breathing 

3. Paul David Adkins– Pharmacology

***

The TWO WINNERS, who will have their chapbooks published by Blood Pudding Press -

- Lisa M. Cole - Renegade//Heart  

- Lora Bloom - Poking through The Fabric of the Light that Formed Us: Songs and Stories to Read in the Mirror

Big congratulations to those two winners, whose chapbooks are unique and powerful and amazing and Blood Pudding Press is honored to be publishing them soon.

***

More details will be announced when the winning chapbooks are formatted and created and brought to life!

Relationship Shape Shifters

I don’t have any particular sexual fetishes (although researching fetishes and hearing about other people’s and even experiencing other people’s sometimes turns me on), but if I did have a small fetish, I think it might be sharing lots of details about me to lots of different people.  Too much information sharing, by some people’s standards.

I’m not talking about details like bank account, phone number sort of stuff.

I’m talking about personal brain wave details related to my true thoughts and feelings and artistic passions and forces and sources and leanings.

Of course there are exceptions. For example, I don’t think people should be frequently forcefully blurting themselves out in other people’s faces or spaces.  But within their own space, I think people should often feel free to express themselves as frequently and as openly as they choose.

And on a semi-related note, why should a strong, deep, in-depth romantic relationship be kept a secret?

Maybe some people have fetishist slants towards the gleeful joy of secrecy.

Not me.  For the most part I don’t desire to be kept a secret .  It  makes me feel like I’m hidden in a back room, waiting for him to be in the right mood for me.  Or like I’m frequently put on hold and sometimes I barely even exist inside his brain.  Or like I’m not powerful or important enough to be anything ongoing.

If he acts like I’m incredibly special and meaningful, but only does so in front of me and keeps it secret in front of others, how is that supposed to make me feel?

(Like a strange underwater pearl?  Like a broken treasure lifted up and soon to be thrown back down?)

It makes me feel like he might be interested in/communicating with quite a few DIFFERENT women, so he doesn’t want to make any ONE of those women openly public. To me, that’s okay as long as he’s straightforwardly honest about it – and isn’t secretly acting as if each ONE is his favorite, when he actually has several different favorites. 

If he says he doesn’t know what to tell me, does that mean he doesn’t relate to honest, open, ongoing communication anymore?

Obviously every two people have some similar interests and some differences (and it’s a matter of how those outweigh each other). In any case, I think it’s important to be yourself and express yourself your way. I mean what the heck is the point of diving yourself in with a partner if you faked it at the beginning? Unless it’s your latest sexual experiment – or unless you feel like staying committed to fakery all your life. 

If you exaggerate what you are/are not interested in, depending on the interests of your latest partner, what the heck is that all about?  For example, she’s not a religious type; she might have her own spiritual leanings, but they’re not related to standard church and god stuff – so you’re not a traditionally religious person either; in fact you’ll downright make fun of overly religious types.  Until your next partner is god-loving and suddenly you love god too.  Either that or you’re a sudden shape shifter.

You've suddenly shifted towards the next partners leanings and are no wearing a fake cross necklace.  

What happens when that cross breaks?

broken god temp rises... (temp blog posting new poem)

so-called validity

everyone’s focus is different; you choose

to focus on being broken

(to use that as your excuse

when something doesn’t work for you

or when you don’t work for someone else)

so broken so broken so broken so

you won’t keep trying; you’ll back off;

you’ll temporarily hide yourself

(you’ll validate that as trying to heal yourself),

then you’ll suddenly launch yourself into

someone else to temp focus upon; broken god temp rises

everyone chooses how to refine/define

themselves and others.  i don’t think you’re broken.

i think you have a twisted wing span.

nobody else can hold you long enough

to glue you back together, because you don’t want them too.

you don’t want to be glued to anyone place.

you want to twitch, crack away,

not let anyone else stick to the way

you tension thread your own skin

then call its damage broken

as though something else dive-bombed you with needles

Mid-Life Crisis Bad Dream?

It was me and him and another woman.  I didn’t know her very well and my mind and heart got really bad vibes from her (including the vibe that she’d fake it and lie to get what she wanted; personality traits that I pretty much despise), but what could I do?  I sure wouldn’t choose to hang out with her one on one, but he apparently liked hanging out with the both of us, and I really liked him (probably way too much), so I went along with it.

It reached a point at which I was supposed to guess the other woman’s age.  He & I were of similar ages (38/40), so I assumed she was too, but I’m not good at guessing age based on looks.  She looked young; she looked attractive; I figured she might be a little younger than him & me; maybe 35-ish; so I decided to guess a few years younger, just in case. I guessed 33.

She spurted out a playful sounding laugh and at first I thought it was based on her feeling delighted that I thought she looked younger than she actually was. I was wrong. 

I’m 23, she said in an annoyed voice.

Then I was annoyed at him for being so into a woman who was way more than ten years younger than both of us. Really!?!  I blurted out, in semi-disbelief. Next thing I knew they were both glaring at me.  A 38 year old man who I thought had felt very strongly about me personally – and a 23 year old woman I couldn’t relate to at all, but whom he also seemed to feel strongly about. I did not understand their connection and so I sort of freaked out, thinking he would try to work me out of my freak out and tell her to tone down her rude laughter.  “Should I just leave?” I asked.  “Do you want it to be you and the 23 year old?”  I was sure he’d say know and try to calm me down. Instead he looked at me with an unsmiling expression and glared out, ‘Yeah’.  A feeling of semi-devastated disbelief came over me then.

Me: Really?!?

Him: Yeah.

Me: Are you serious?!?

Him: YEAH!

Her: You heard him.  Get the hell out of here.

Rude, mean, gleeful smile.

 ***

Not a fun dream at all, since it involved real people and felt realistic - and even though the ending really surprised me, that surprise ending felt unfortunately realistic too.

When a relationship oriented ending surprises you.

When a man you thought felt truly strongly about you suddenly changes his mind - and then chooses to replace you with a woman way younger than either of you – a woman from whom you can clearly sense the vibe of fake chick who will say and do what she thinks he wants to hear, in order to take him away from you and he can’t sense her fakery.

When a bad dream combines age and relationship issues and causes you to make up feeling as if your looks and your personality and your life experience has no appeal and doesn’t really matter.

When you’ve become easy to replace with an uncaring mean chick almost 20 years younger than you.

When a pretty mean chick who laughs in your face when you lose is the one he chooses.

New Poem Up (& Down) & At You

New poem of mine up at Underground Books, the Kitchen Poet - "What he's really sticking in" -

http://www.undergroundbooks.org/2/post/2012/11/poem-juliet-cook.html

 

"I was a slice of hot red velvet cake zippered into
a malformed morph. He knew he wanted a bite or two;"

(The first two lines. Read the rest by clicking the link above.)

Limited Edition Poetry Chapbook - The Spare Room by Dana Guthrie Martin - temporarily available again in print

The Spare Room by Dana Guthrie Martin is a contest winning Blood Pudding Press poetry chapbook, originally published in 2009, and sold out in 2010. It is now being made available again for a limited time - from now until December 2012.

This artfully woven and disturbingly resonant suite of twenty poems by Dana Guthrie Martin combines myth with real life in unlikely ways and draws uniquely thought provoking parallels between torture scenes, sideshow attractions, scientific anomalies, and what it means to be a contemporary woman trying to stake out her own existence as an individual and as a partner. Sex, pain, isolation, and temptation are just some of the hot button themes Dana Guthrie Martin deals with in this unflinching, intense, and brutally poetic collection.

The wonderfully unsettling cover art for the chapbook is by Keith Part2ism Hopewell.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/113956071/limited-edition-poetry-chapbook-the

Late Night Halloween Poem

Bloody or not, here I come

               
My open limbs suction cupped dirty tentacles.
Sweet tendrils got sucked into smithereens.

I’m not angel hair anymore. Jewels cracked

into visceral chunks writhing out misshapen.
Green worms burst then crusted into zombie flesh.

Delve in and swallow, and then spit partially digested

bloody pieces, string out my overloaded canals.

Hot beet thighs fuse with mutant monster eyes.

Mutilated strands clog brain waves down

drains. My heart is a disabled fondue cauldron.

My cake hole dollops on/off garbage disposals.

Please turn this blood bath doom spurt into new flows.

I am an alien witch broom created from pumpkin guts.

Let me rise up whirring mango froth through thigh highs.

Let lightning stings affix primordial feather-zings.

~Juliet Cook~

(previously published on Lingerpost)