Editors' Notes

Maria Damon and Michelle Greenblatt
Jim Leftwich and Michelle Greenblatt
Sheila E. Murphy and Michelle Greenblatt

A Visual Conversation on Michelle Greenblatt's ASHES AND SEEDS with Stephen Harrison, Monika Mori | MOO, Jonathan Penton and Michelle Greenblatt

Letters for Michelle: with work by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Jeffrey Side, Larry Goodell, mark hartenbach, Charles J. Butler, Alexandria Bryan and Brian Kovich

Visual Poetry by Reed Altemus
Poetry by Glen Armstrong
Poetry by Lana Bella
A Eulogic Poem by John M. Bennett
Elegic Poetry by John M. Bennett
Poetry by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
A Eulogy by Vincent A. Cellucci
Poetry by Vincent A. Cellucci
Poetry by Joel Chace
A Spoken Word Poem and Visual Art by K.R. Copeland
A Eulogy by Alan Fyfe
Poetry by Win Harms
Poetry by Carolyn Hembree
Poetry by Cindy Hochman
A Eulogy by Steffen Horstmann
A Eulogic Poem by Dylan Krieger
An Elegic Poem by Dylan Krieger
Visual Art by Donna Kuhn
Poetry by Louise Landes Levi
Poetry by Jim Lineberger
Poetry by Dennis Mahagin
Poetry by Peter Marra
A Eulogy by Frankie Metro
A Song by Alexis Moon and Jonathan Penton
Poetry by Jay Passer
A Eulogy by Jonathan Penton
Visual Poetry by Anne Elezabeth Pluto and Bryson Dean-Gauthier
Visual Art by Marthe Reed
A Eulogy by Gabriel Ricard
Poetry by Alison Ross
A Short Movie by Bernd Sauermann
Poetry by Christopher Shipman
A Spoken Word Poem by Larissa Shmailo
A Eulogic Poem by Jay Sizemore
Elegic Poetry by Jay Sizemore
Poetry by Felino A. Soriano
Visual Art by Jamie Stoneman
Poetry by Ray Succre
Poetry by Yuriy Tarnawsky
A Song by Marc Vincenz


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The Prophet of Whimsey

Preached that child-abuse recall gaols and substance abuse hellscapes, (Really all the worst things in life, in an être de mise, general sense) are really profound, in a metaironical, semiotic, parabolic, like way, if fictionalized as an omni-dimensional character/mental disorder golem, Let's Call Him Todd, (seriously that's his given name, mom was nuts) who ironically, un-ironically enjoys Trix is for kids breakfast cereal, as he gives an exegesis of Kant's COPR (1788) w/r/t bowling a 300 game, in spite of being retarded with a spine bent like a bass clef and ugly, (A crepe-skinned albino, monobrowed, with one nostril, like way smaller) This look is sickly, strangely erotic to another savant idiot character, Gracey, who argues with her imaginary camp counselor friend about their, masturbation rituals, utilizing the diction of a JSTOR article about, Rutherford B. Hayes, as she freebases 'yadda-yadda' (in junkie argot—originally contrived from Seinfeldian paradigms of a certain decade, AKA some anagram long enough to choke a donkey better than Paul Bunyan's mythic three-metre dick, and followed up with paragraph upon ¶ of nano printing on a microdot's sucrose hull in that like, prescription label flatulent doctored Kabbalistic jargon) as her alternate personality, Earl (who thinks of himself, not only as G's twin, but a twin conjoined to her by elective surgery at the hip) views an archaic MP4 of an episode of Family Feud dubbed in Esperanto, scratching at copious nonsense his otherwise violently normal, nameless roommate, (the cipher pays its half of the rent by postal order) wrote in magic marker on his face (for real: Gracey is just a byproduct of Earls' altered state, duh, didn't ya catch that, pillow book biter?) The indelible purple alphabetics on the clean-shaven nasal-labial trough goes (with poor number agreement): 'David Foster Wallace wrote with an odd deepness of authoritative, caustically felt, comedic generosity of pharmaceutical, indeed, hospital-grade, prophylactic prolixity, about the stage business of chittering peeps who produce hyper-specified voids outta the raw deal of occurrence and hoist black electrician's tape on refrigerator box cardboard signs over them that read: Profun–'     But on the other hand, (the top-left one, see, made possible by that elective surgery bit previous (Earl, of course, has four arms and three hands (his body-image twisting over itself like the treble clef))) said roomie had enacted the expressive with a different, special, burnt umber, broad-tipped magic marker and temp-tattooed the following: 'Joseph Robert's poetry is quite good, Joseph Robert's poetry is quite.' And that's when it hits Earl, the craving for Hostess Cupcakes™, (The rarest kind, half-baked with a pinch of pinched Pynchon spice, coated by a substitute-laden frosting of Philip K. Dickishness (Scanned Darkly Chocolate flavor), with just a dash of Salt of the Earth Stock Archetypical Personality, brightly packaged by hyper-remunerated Madison Avenue firm types in Armani subcontracting in association with a culture vulture consultant picking at the bones of Ridley Scott's late-early 80's (1984) dystopian vision, thoroughly indigestible) Like OMG, practically fustigating his appetite's galvanic percolations of the olde gastro-intestinal apparatus: with the dopamine crave comes the flashback fugue of that briefs-soaking dream he had about bowling, Bowling with Let's Call Him Todd on the steps of the Supreme Court, The Supreme Court of CanadaLand [sic], with the severed heads of Mannequins of the ghost of Charles De Gaulle; Gracey's genitals self-Lubricate, And, guy, it's like whoa, holyshizzat, it's on like the eponymous Donkey Kong™! Plus he had slept with his half-sister cum mother-in-law twice last Xmas (Don't pretend hard enough to even ask! (but it's OK (wink, wink))) Though, as I will inform you, one might (the full implication being that the reader therefore must, if they are not to be labeled a cocksucking, (not that there's anything wrong with that, if this act of sexual congress, fellatio, is performed on a consenting adult who happens to enjoy it load after load: there, let no high-functioning though mildly schizoid agoraphobic man-child say this screed is in anyway not un-PC, truly (truth being a subjective phenomenon in text books assigned at fine American (and elsewhere) Universities) every honest effort has been given to appear offensive and extremely edgy without ever becoming so, as that would offend the cosseted hipster ethos, which is really snobbery with more cigarettes and less naked talk of investment opportunities, and let's face it, we would be more tolerant of the lesser bipeds wearing jelly-shoes, at least to their faces, than say a merchant banker (outside of a Monty Python skit), no, joking!, there really is a lot of goodwill and humanistic joie de vive here, and not just saying that, must have left the heart in another pants' pocket, yup a doodle yuppie, at the dry-cleaners) insensitive cretin by their book group (not to their face)), expect (E+G)xLCHT<0 are in denture-crushingly huge denial 'bout the blatant incest-baiting-to-make-it-literary trope as well as the integral of the linear function of their relationship, as t approaches the limit of boredom (put in well-hung laymen's terms, that's the number of slices of 0 thickness one can shave off 1 bit of junk, or stuff).

This, and other junk and stuff as well, ctrl+X and ctrl+V'ed together, Makes a mélange, a big IT, an IT, like so sincere, impish and real, And way like a googolplex light-years above snark and pretention, Because it's soooo whack-a-mole whimsical, and so spaketh'd the Prophet, Adding that addicting addiction is addictive too, and clever-dumb-numb, Though terrible, natch, so grab Death by the balls and rush the Reaper, (His mummified scrotum tastes of fruit leather and aspartame cola b/t/w, Or so his Lazars Bobella, a hermaphrodite street kid, straight dopes us)
The P.O.W.
(Taken during a small skirmish during The War with Drugs: tortured in stocks, Locale: Heartland Hanoi Hilton, 1way tix, RSVP non-essential):
He was the man,
(a crypto Calvinist, sure, and no escape)
The man with the chemically-cloven corpus callosum,
Whose left hemisphere had prattled over what the right one had done, Whimsical inanities, that tax-payer-subsidized scholastics put on the: Page; screen; stage; face, of like, things, (for private profit) That massive tumescence of language being condensed condescension, And a far, far, boo-boo, waah-waah cry from S.Fing.A, rotflol! Psychoactive synapse snappers when, w/ regrets, hoarded in lethal but, In accordance w/financial+geometric law, finite, quantities and ingested
—FTB RIP KIA AWOL MIA PUTD KTB BTF TITE QTRN AA (not alco. anon. But Adios Amigos),
Or, the groundlings plumbed Shakespeare like way better than thou, Prophet of Whimsy.

Alas, "At last, poor Yorick I skullfucked well," remain the Ultimate words of the POW's gospel (the death of Irony brought about naught but necrophilic [sic] violations of its mortal (ORLY?) remains by those who topped it, the very same those who found it so repugnant while it yet lived, while it yet got on with getting on down with its groove thing (aforesaid groove thing, as far as the executioners were concerned, was pseudonymous Irony biting its thumb at its would-be killers' preciously precocious fantasies in which their self-serving sentimentalities were noble and just and proud and like, well, frankly better than anything the World could hurl at their egos,(and by ego what Irony really meant was its murders' empty scrotum'ed, pre-testicle-descent event inner-children dressed in drag, teetering in mommy's loose-sliding, gigantic high heels (the gender confusion (con carne) brainaches gets duller here (with poor number agreement), if one pushes for inclusiveness, let it go 3k PBPUs (3,000 Paul Bunyan Penis Units) ahead of the standard Studies questions (Gender, Women's', LGBT, African-American (simply put that one there for inclusiveness; all characters' races have been assigned by lottery proportional to the percentages of the latest census data (even if they've been so shambolically (i.e. impishly) described up to this point that you could have had no idea this was the case,(Note that the above does not apply to Pacific Islanders due to the truth, sadly, that during a difficult period in the author's life (not the real one mind, but the quasi-fictionalized authorial voice persona (who happens to be of predominantly Dutch/Polish descent but tells everyone that she is "Mostly Irish" b/t/w) the striking fellow who worked the cash register (swarthy, oily complexioned, spine like an elbow of over-cooked macaroni and with one hand, like way smaller) at the local convenience store was rude on a baker's dozen occasions and, c'mon, the quasi-fictionalized Pacific Islander community must bear at least partial responsibility for these baker's dozen outrages, n'est pas? (as the Frogs would croak), Does it rankle, this inappropriate, willful insertion of ethnic issues at this point? Whatever, as long as it tickles some emotion or activates the mechanistic function of the prescribed proscriptions of social 'thought' (AKA 'a knee-jerk reaction'—in Salt of The Earth argot) and thus makes things more 'interesting'), et cetera, et cetera, ad Sartre (was gonna put "ad Sartreum", but decided to dial it back a bit, you owe me one: I am such a cunning linguist, and kiss me, I am mostly Irish)))))).

This gospel the POW's lesser disciples zombied on up to the West Side, Watering down the pain, watering down the word count, watering down the Confuse-A-Cat-Limited plot structure (not much more than a metastasized take on The Killer Joke sketch sadly), but cranking up the MESSAGE, man, Crankwhoreing up the WHIMSY!

(Pointedly refuse to bring up Rutherford B. Hayes, Educator (that cynical but effective waver of a bloody shirt), let alone camp counselors (imaginary, sanguinary, ritualistically self-referential to self-abuse shenanigans (routinized onanistic rites), or otherwise), atthis point(wink, wink))

Yessssssssss, suitable to the palate of disturbing readers who treat Intelligence Quotient points like, women, man, who treat objects like Novels, dude. (Apologies for bringing you two into this mess, Joel and Ethan) Finally, the dirty little secret? Sure, sure. I'm bone-weary of Being coy. The straight dope: Whimsy is an addictive lure for those Stranger-than-fiction weirdos who wish they were more, though not Entirely, normal, a drug that permits them to enjoy feelings of relative Worth and solid standing, as they read of unreal, whimsical constructs (i.e. what passes for a protagonist and foils these days) that despite (indeed because of) their too-precious, precocious nature BELONG, At the very least, To the twice-damned narratives that spawned them.

(Puh-leeez)
Grant me the serenity to finis


Joseph Robert detests poems about orchards and racists, not poems about racists, but actual racists. He is 190 centimetres tall, is a firm believer that the Guinness in Dublin is the best due to the rats in the vats, and drinks Bushmills whisky. He likes visiting orchards when the fruit is ripe.



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