Let me come with you, to make sure you select the right victims. Let me walk with you down towards the event horizon. You don’t know this yet, but that to which you yoke yourself will become your temple and a ticket to all of Asia. You think: present at the creation means causality. I say: post hoc ergo propter hoc. The eagle has landed and she’s on your cart. You should take it as a sign because I know they will. You ask, later, where did I fuck it up? And they say, a farmer can become a king. There’s no space between farmer and king, just an ox cart and a knot and you’re different. Not Odysseus different, that was just a little fairy dust and flash. That’s manipulation. Alchemy is actually easier. Click your heels together three times and say, “There’s no place like home.” You didn’t think it was that easy? Baby, nobody does.

Your son, who feels the alchemy in his fingers—his hospitality, and his avarice, will do the magic for him. He begs for the transformation to be reversed, but the best he gets is a glinting river and a daughter he can’t touch. Ask for the wrong things, and you’ll get them and wish you hadn’t. Ask for the right things, and you’ll get them, but they won’t seem familiar. How did I fuck this up? But you didn’t. It’s a different river every time.

In his garden the roses grow themselves. All sixty petals and a scent dervishes whirl to later. A scent that, through the dirt, will bring the distant strains of fluidity and the break towards alternate universes, possibilities. Desire, with musk, entwines around their graves.

Your mother was meteoric iron. Your future is the discovery of lead. You get scared of where it might lead, but you don’t want it to end. The discomfort, lean into it like a table saw and see who’s lacerated. It may not feel like you, if you’re still a farmer inside while the King reigns. But then, this poem didn’t go where I thought it would either.

Let me say it another way. I want to wash off the gifts of the past but they are like gold in the sunlight.

Michelle Auerbach’s work has been published in Van Gogh’s Ear, Bombay Gin, Xcp, Chelsea, and The Denver Quarterly, and anthologized in The Veil UC Berkley Press, Uncontained Baksun Books, and You. An Anthology of Essays in the Second Person from Welcome Table Press. She is the winner of the 2011 Northern Colorado Fiction Prize and has a book of poetry forthcoming from Durga Press.

“I don’t care if it’s a lie, as long as it’s entertaining.” Who is she talking to? The police.

Counter/anti-/ubersublime

The pattern is necessary to enjoy the variation

Prosthetic stuff & inverted money shots

The point of time and the purpose of god—the appointed time, crucial time

“Knowing Danish, I don’t know Danish”

A book that makes a monument of itself is not allowed to complete the finite form. Is there any completion to the infinite EXCEPT IN THE SUBLIME?

Child point of view is good for the disenfranchised. America is a nation of desperadoes.

“Mom Camp”

FUCK FUCK

FUCK

hahahahaha Pixar hahaha

Liberal hippie Fair Trade critiques, pat-on-the-back morality

Jubilance?? fatty bounce “flight in blubber”

“so much of slapstick humor” WTF

UGH FUCK FUCK

“which makes me feel great”

“Grad School Notebook” is an ongoing series in which OH NO Editor S.E. Smith transcribes her notes. The notes are composed sometimes during lectures and sometimes during intervals of train travel. Quotations denote things that were actually spoken, just like they do elsewhere in life and literature. It is called “Grad School Notebook” because that’s where it all went down. Grad school. And in a notebook. Both places.

When a man loves a woman, they journey

into the Cleveland, Ohio of their youths.

What better to greet these weary pilgrims

than Key Tower, the Western Reserve,

exceptional K-12 education?

Deeply discounted motels

raise their savage maws in approval.

Here, in a darkened room,

the lovers perform a dance

called the Hungry Tiger.

Even an unsilenced cellphone,

a bully loudly slicing

a sandwich with scissors,

could ruin this crystalline ritual.

You may be the finest Inuit boot model

ever to two-step it across the tundra,

but even the strongest succumb.

Sound the bellwether miracle alarm,

if you like,

but if you’re meant to tiger,

you’ll tiger.

These lovers must log eons

of rehearsal and recording hours

before they ascend the mountain

of public betrayal.

There, the man and woman

enter the holy computer lab

to post pictures of the dance.

Like a photon which feels fat

as both a particle and wave,

they regret and accept their betrayal

the instant of its occurrence.

But regret is only another step

in the Hungry Tiger.

Like pocketing pens

at an orthodontist’s office,

carpet-bombing a horticultural exam,

making air quotes at a man

with his sleeve stuck in a bin

of binder clips,

or watching beauty

fade out of world

while the storm turns west

over the Baltic.

Kyle McCord is the author of three books of poetry including Sympathy from the Devil (Gold Wake Press 2013).  He has work featured in Barrow Street, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Third Coast and elsewhere.  He’s the co-founder of LitBridge and, along with Wendy Xu, co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry. He’s the recipient of the 2012 Baltic Writing Residency. He teaches at the University of North Texas in Denton.

A billboard for automobiles tells me size matters, and this is obviously a reference to the question surrounding penis size. There may not even be a question of whether or not size matters to anything else. Of course it matters. A tsunami is worse than a wave, and you shouldn’t buy a couch that you can’t fit through your front door. So I knew I needed to have a bigger penis.

But then I figured, even better than having a single big penis would be to have an army of uniformly sized penises. That just seemed obvious. One penis, no matter how big, can only ever fill one hole, and the value of a penis is its ability to fill a hole, whereas an army of penises, a penis army, could fill an army of holes.

So then I began recruiting, but it quickly became clear that finding a handful of uniformly sized penises would be difficult, never mind an army. So I settled for all different shapes and sizes, but it was disorderly and they would get hard before the battle was under way and soft when I needed them most.

So I made a training video with my own penis. Then I realized that it didn’t translate well to video because the lighting wasn’t so good and my penis needed to be bigger ,if you remember. So I recruited the biggest penis in my army and plunged it right into the video, and the lighting was really good because I hired a person and the hole was all shaved and clean and stuff, so it would be clear to my army exactly what to expect.

And then when the training video was done, I just watched it a lot by myself and I forget something. I decide one night to go back to that billboard and project the training video onto it so that everyone else who sees it can just bring their army to the billboard and there it is. Then I go looking for my army but they are all hiding in different holes and won’t even come out when I say “olly olly oxenfree.”

I guess I’m saying something about performance, but maybe it sounded like I was saying something about armies. Every strong nation should have a strong army, I’m told. A strong army is one that can get away with killing anyone no matter what. Good luck being stronger than that. Also, if you can pay somebody to kill anyone you want, or even just anyone they want, that’s even better than if you do it yourself. “Support our troops” is an important idea that cars already seem to know, especially if the cars are large-sized. Size matters, yes. America matters.

Stephen Colbert taught me he is America and so can I. He gets it. He does things all the way. He taught me that torture was a must-do because it keeps my country safe. Safety is a thing I have to want.

Poems are so safe. Please hide me in a poem.

Terrance Hayes says a poem is more animal than machine. Says a poem can limp across the room even if one leg is shorter than the other, even if it has no legs. What room? That’s what I want to know. I’d rather have an army of machines. Robot cocks. There are no crippled soldiers in my army, that’s for sure, or if there are then I turn them into hardened veterans by giving them drugs. Blue pill brigade.

Hayes says that as soon as you tell “blue” to be a color it becomes a mood. I get this. For instance, I order my cock army to come, and instead they all roll over in unison. Bark. Hang their tongues out and beg. Beg for some treats. Snatch scraps.

There is no room for boyesque in my army. At least not the boyesque described by Seth Oelbaum in “The Right To Be a Monster: Boys, Girls and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man” (Montevidayo, November 2011). Quit pussyfootin’ around; that’s what I say after a night of drinking with the soldiers.

“I am infatuated with war and am concerned that my interest in violence subjects me to discrimination from the 21st-century poetry populous.” What the fuck? If you are infatuated with war why do you give a shit about what anyone else thinks of you? Recruit a fucking army, you lazy wannabe general. Pack a pistol in your pants or shut the fuck up. Whip it out and point it at your enemies. Point it at your friends. Pouting about fairness on a blog? That’s some recess shit right there.

Of course you call this the boyesque. Only a boy would think whining would accomplish anything. I don’t give a shit about poems written by “boys.” Boys are idiots. A boy can’t feed himself without suckling from the tit that is his parents’ kitchen. Boys shove their crushes on the playground because they don’t have the balls to come out and say, “I like your goddamn face.” Boys pull hair. Boys smash their heads against each other. Boys can’t spell. Boys piss their pants ’cause the bus ride is too long. Boys whine to mommy. The only good thing about being a boy is that it means, should you survive long enough, you will one day be a man. Seth, perhaps you will one day be a man. Should you survive long enough.

The Gurlesque, sure, that makes sense to me, but a mirror image based on gender binaries? It’s reactionary and derivative. Girls are badasses. Boys are little bitches.

If you are “infatuated with war,” then make love to it and spawn nasty, violent, little war babies. But don’t enter them in beauty pageants. Don’t go looking for ribbons. These are ugly fuckers. And if one comes out pretty like a bombing pattern, break its nose. When child services shows up at your door, welcome them in, lock the deadbolt, sit them on the couch, and continue polishing your shotgun. Be the cliché. Just don’t expect praise when you go to war; expect protest.

“But the boy is exiled: he must make his own book tour.” The men are already touring. Douglas Kearney blows up every building he walks into. Struts around with grenades hanging from his manly, superfluous nipples. Pins pulled. You bemoan the fact that among FENCE poets, the girls would beat the shit out of the boys. First off, so what? Second, did you forget that Kearney was a FENCE poet? All the poets you mention in your essay are white, so maybe you did.

Or, maybe you didn’t accidentally erase his name from the FENCE roster. Maybe you remembered him but knew better than to call him a boy. If this is true, it is a rare moment of manlike recognition in your essay. I find it difficult to give you the benefit of the doubt, however, since you label Nick Demske “boy.” Demske is all man. His balls have dropped and dropped and dropped and he blows loads that would make you cry. (When a boy becomes a man, his testicles descend and begin producing semen which can be fired off like shotgun shells through a process called ejaculation. You may experience this yourself someday. Should you survive long enough.)

More likely, you overlooked Kearney and mislabeled Demske because, as you state, you are a boy. Only a boy would claim to be “infatuated with war” but fixate on a battle of the sexes, of gender. Only a boy would think he is entitled to be line leader. Only a boy would be threatened if the teacher gave out more gold stars to the girls. Only a boy.

So where my boys at? Santorum, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Beck. Bush, Romney, Rove. Anyone still fighting fights that were fought on the schoolyard, i.e. boys vs. girls. Anyone trying to “take [their] country back.” Palin, Bachmann, Coulter. Little boys, too. All these boys pouting about how hard they worked for that milk money. Talking about how they shouldn’t have to share if they don’t want.

You claim that poets are the 1%. The audience for poetry is 1%. Because the poetry wars have been fought by boys. Nobody gets tickets to see something they can see any day of the week on the local playground. Poets are not the 1% because “they are seers.” Poets are privileged, sure. Lots of us anyway. That’s why it takes us so long to grow up. But poets are not “special,” and we sure as hell can’t “do what [we] want.”

Poets are only exceptional as the 1% who actually listen to words. Poets are the 1% of people who bother, for some reason, to spend time, so much time, testing words and recording the results. Everyone uses them. Carries them around like a tool belt. A lot of the boys I mentioned even use them to build really slick machines. Really slick. Poets are the ones who actually look at the parts that make up the machines.

Machines. Animals. Poets inject words with dangerous medicines and measure the side effects. Put rabid words in a cage with “healthy” words and watch. Put docile words in a cage with promiscuous words. Put the most social words in solitary confinement. Crowd the most introverted words. Mix ‘em up some more. More. More. Let the words go free with homing beacons. Spend a year tracking them down.

We aren’t elite for doing this. Obsessed, yes. And rare for having such an obsession. One percent in number maybe, but not in class. Since we are the only ones committed to this absurd task, we must publish our findings. But we must publish them where someone besides us will read them. And if those places are guarded, we must recruit an army. Lead our soldiers to their glorious death until the bodies become too numerous to ignore. The casualties becoming, themselves, the record of our experiments. This is our responsibility. We cannot do whatever we want. This has fallen to us and we are better off for it, worse off for it.

Me, I like doing what I’m told. Doing it all the way. Until it gets messy and obvious. Look at me: I’m a straight, white male. Play the part to its absurdity based on the instructions I’ve been given. Announce it as a marker of identity. Leave little cum stains on the “default.” Big stains. Smeary stains. I like making a mess. Lumping sex in with text, text with travel, travel with privilege, privilege with penis, penis with jokes, and jokes with spunk. Stew it. Tell a joke in an upside down way. Get a laugh from a disturbing thing. Now the laugh is the disturbing thing. Why did you laugh? You’ve never seen a foreskin circus tent before? Everywhere I go tents are made this way. A big thing must be a penis. Must be. So I’m told. So I believe. So I explain with a loud and obvious thump.

I’ve been on the sidelines, but I’m recruiting a limp dick army. If they won’t take orders I will light my little soldiers on fire and throw them through the windows of the aforementioned little boys with the big mouths. I will aim for their big mouths. Fill their throats with flaming cocks until they choke, belch smoke. Kick them in the stomach until they vomit up so much charred foreskin. Push their faces in it. Call them bad dogs and put them down with a shotgun spray of hot, sticky, poetry seed. Make a video of the whole thing. Run it as a commercial during Two and Half Men.

If you’re going to be male and write war, then put on the man pants. Do what you’re damn well told to do. Do it all the fucking way. I don’t want tantrums from boys railing against what they’ve been taught to be. I want poems from men who embody those lessons. The naked monstrosities they become. Show me a soldier so obscenely obedient that he actually makes me question the orders.

Forget fairness. There is no fairness, only fighting.

“I am in a position where I can write about Hollywood, persona and film from the inside. I am not writing about it like a tell-all book but instead I transform the material in one arena into material of differing significance in another. The source is film but the result is something more universal.” –James Franco, in an interview with David Shook

“I am waiting to write the poem that guts you, James Franco.” —Kristy Bowen, I Hate You James Franco

Green Room

I saw James Franco in person at the Jimmy Kimmel show. It was the night Lady Gaga was to perform from her album Born This Way, and I had been invited to the green room since a good friend of mine from graduate school is married to a Kimmel and knew about my work with Gaga Stigmata. My friend was my in. This is what we call networking, having a connection, and, in the case of Franco, it is one of the numerous crimes leveled at him and his subsequent opportunities and visibility in the art and writing worlds. In my case, my friend and her husband tried everything they could to get me on stage to meet Gaga, but I was trapped in a crowd of sweating, hair-bow rocking teens and I couldn’t move. Networking can only take you so far, and when I was supposed to seize the moment, I froze.

“This is your chance!” my other friend, a photo editor for Hollywood.com, said. She had come with me to keep me company. She is a tiny woman, but she was ready to shove me through the crowd and onto the stage so that I could meet the pop star I had been analyzing/telepathically working with for two years. I was thick in the midst of a book on Gaga, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to meet her in the flesh. I didn’t know what to say. “Hi,” seemed dumb. “I like your work,” seemed even dumber.

So I decided not to move.

At the time, I didn’t know or care much about Franco. Early in the night, I saw him in the green room, as I was pressed against the rope waiting for a glimpse of Gaga, drinking cheap wine so I’d be less nervous. Franco was whisked past the rope, inches from me, smiling at the crowd and waving like Marilyn Monroe. He was there to talk about a movie he was in; I forget which. He seemed very Hollywood, handsome and blasé.

To attempt to define the James Franco Effect, which is a performance so slippery and undermining it is almost never recognized in the moment in which it happens, it helps to begin in the green room. The green room is the space the performers go before they perform. The green room is never actually green; it is just a room we agree to call green, a holding tank for performers who are becoming.

Performers go out from the green room and into Hollywood, which everyone agrees is artificial, polluted, and fake. Hollywood is the scapegoat of the world.

But the truth is that the green room is real, and that we are all fakes. No one is a greater ambassador of this art of fakery than James Franco, whose performance is forever green, undeveloped, beginning.

TO BE CONTINUED

Photo: Daniela Olszewska

There is something kind of overwhelming about the Houston Indie Book Festival, and I think it’s that everybody cares so hard. I sensed more of that wholesome supporting-each-others’-projects environment than I have at half a baker’s dozen of AWPs. Not that AWP is known for inspiring such fellow feeling or anything, but until recently, all of my literary publishing experience has taken the form of temporarily editing and promoting university-funded magazines. I cared about them, absolutely, and I invested plenty of time and energy in their successes, but when it came down to giving the elevator-pitch version of why somebody should buy and read a copy of Bat City Review, for example, I had a wealth of time-tested and not particularly personal material to fall back on. I had a vague idea of what the magazine’s founding editors were going for, but even better, I had four or five years’ worth of publishing history from which to extrapolate the magazine’s curatorial perspective.

OH NO is way more personal than that to me – necessarily so, because I started it and am one of a scant handful of people who work on it, and because its aesthetic is based on the entirety of what I’ve learned or thought about poetry and fiction rather than a razor-fine catchphrase. Every time somebody approached our table and asked, “Well, what is this thing?” I froze in the same way I freeze when asked to describe my own work. It’s not that I want for conversation topics or points of entry, but I lack the necessary distance from which to discern which of these angles are possible to communicate, or even better, which are possible to communicate without sounding like a sanctimonious jackass.

This might explain why my roommate, whose only editorial involvement with OH NO involves buying me the occasional bourbon rocks and listening to me vent, kicked my ass at selling the thing. At one point I came back from a cigarette break and walk around the the Menil to overhear him telling a potential OH NO customer that the magazine was sure to go up in value by 20% on eBay in a few months. Goddammit I hope he’s right, but I can’t quite imagine myself saying so just yet. Still, it worked; she bought a copy. Good job, bro!

But hey, I would rather be overwhelmed by the tangible presence of an audience than nearly anything else, and the Houston Indie Book Fest made it clear that there are lots (I mean, thousands of people came out) of readers who value what indie presses do. Not to mention all the rad indie publishers we met, all of whom are wealthy with information about not getting scammed by Vistaprint and who are just in general great hangbros. GOOD JOB, HOUSTON. Good job, everybody.