Issue 03

Luftmensch!

Will definitely keep you in mind if anything comes up. But that is my job, to keep you in mind. This was hope meant as hope but I feel like something is being taken away from me. Maybe that is the mercy here—that I should not dwell on myself and let others do it for, keeping me in mind. That said, how could I wait for the holidays now? Or open a card? Or fashion yet another fresh desk calendar from my life insurance company, with its sturdy cardboard lean-to of a leg. How could I ever stop my hands from shaking for tab A into slot B? Don’t you want to the last man standing, to see how it’s done? I must have stood for too long (if anything comes up). I must have really risen like a balloon this time, because today I can see that hundreds, thousands, millions have let go of the ropes, let go of my tug and pull on their weary arms informed by their feet, too, made sore for the children lining the avenues who weren’t and aren’t even alive yet. And I do entertain the notion that I sucked the air out of the room on them, indeed, before I ever left the hanger.

Already the weather is looking better from up here. Never mind me. The moon says I am easy to work with, a real understudy, a team player, one who shows promise, a diamond in the sky repeating my mother. And that said, let’s revisit this keeping me in mind of all people! If it even produces a cough not unlike blowing out a birthday candle on a cupcake, I am set free. And to your anything, to what comes up, just know the air gets thinner as I rise. Know that my ropes snap in the coldest of winds and they feel like whips, my gentle and mildly wasteful buoyancy a thing of the past. Know that they will more than strike pain—they will draw blood. Know that only the highest can rain on a whole parade, and you cannot imagine the garden one can see when everyone opens an umbrella below. More to the point, know that I will kick at your blue fingers should you ever reach for my ankle, my bare foot, with their blackbird wings trying to reach the power of that proverbial butterfly that stirs up a hurricane, while the rest of me joins the wide insatiable mouth on the world, of blue sky so up close, all that I can see.

The Unphotographed

They are a people of color, too, a vast family of extinguished carbon. We have, however, these images, the first and last, often the only one ever taken, which tolerably suggest and allow for this ethnicity of sepia tones, of daguerreo- and tintypes, that race of the sun-picture. They wore such albumen complexions, breathed to life with these hygienic, almost tribal tattoos of rose ink to blush the cheeks. (And is it so unhealthy to dwell on them? To walk through Babyland and wonder which picture goes with who?) Prized for their immaculate stillness, they could be posed in how we should spend all our days in nothing but dreams or contemplation—especially those girls with immaculate and consumptive brows freshly sponged with vinegar, holding a rose, a catechism, or a book of verses—or those youths as though they fell asleep at a drinking party—the only thing missing being their lodge pin. Infants in their mothers’ arms, as though drugged from the last time they nursed, their christening dresses fitted over limbs still supple or easily snapped into place, posed with siblings still showing the hurt look of being chided not to smile, not to fidget—this when photography was another kind of art, one summoned at all hours like medicine, when its invention could set above even that of chloroform, when it captured only a little of this noble trait, like a Hapsburg lip, that of our ancient anonymity, which was once as common as air, somewhere, wrapped around Neptune, perhaps. We would explode if we ever breathed it. 

My brother shouts to no one in particular, an insult he had once known, old hurts fragmented yet orderly— a new land in his empty pockets. He damns the bulb hanging from the ceiling and fires his toy gun at random intervals until he lays it on my mother’s dress, a dry riverbed between us. Ηe spouts all kinds of threats, a long nickering white marble thoroughbred with bruised lips, propelling his wheelchair furiously toward the picture of our father. “Can we leave the bulb on till I'm asleep?” he says as he runs a hand across his eyes dimming away the past. He lowers his voice as if he feared waking someone, his mouth drawn tight—it never means one thing: It’s the face of an insect gazing through his eyes; it’s the sharp smell from the weeks-old vase of hyacinths; the shame building in the big-headed child, the wars of our boyhood over his shoulder. My brother’s enemies are shadows, the hawk’s response to an airplane for which neither the sky or gravity can be blamed.

OCTOBER
 

I put a story in the sink about it, mean
as a rattlesnake, everything already
browning. Honey you have nothing to be 

afraid of, not these glowing lemon sap
girls, muddy socks, threading carpet, 
silence. Copper wire. Friends share. 
I'm not sure who I'm saying this for: we all
know the benefits of cross-stitching. Your throat 

will string itself for haunted shelving, hands
putty in the sink to lick the salt
from my shins.
In this kitchen I gum shards
of plate, use my hands to feed. This 

is something new: I left
its plastic by your feet. Looking young
is a forgiveness, is a claim, is a way
to shake things back. Is a way
to make repairs, to smooth the flat

plate of forehead, sinking
come spring. Of not waterproofing
all the spares, letting the boots crack
through. On the drive home, you speak, 
slow, to carry the time: 

can you imagine
what this would do
to a human body

PRETTY BABY MORPHTHING
 

Brooke Shields needs a tampon, needs a lighter, needs
a god. Splits Waldorf skulls like apples – call her
Camille. Ivory soap between her & her Calvins. A naked
ten in Spiritual America. No more than a Tupperware chain
of confidence, tight swell, post-partum Michael Jackson
was white too. The Midnight Meat train, yes sir, they’re just
asleep. Assaulted dream, a caramel cloth thing with sailor
boys, making anything dramatic with vague science. The press
of mother-in-law’s tongue, of cutting quick. Feeling it all reach
at once, biting
              come back into the corners.

Our faces fall—
faded, reflected in
dark mirror water.

Morgue table or shoreline-
perhaps both, with children splashing
in waters that take life from those in search
of it. 

I wriggle my toes, push down on stones that
pebbledash my skin and cut saturated flesh—
stinging as salt crystallises
in sun drenched wounds. 

I see faces in the waves,
and voices in the swell,
names no one knows.

Begin here. 
Height, weight, bruise and bone.
The why incision, the how incision, 
shoulder to breast, and again. 
Breast to stem. A beginning after the end. 

Tongue and teeth, a fence, no, a net,
to hold in the taste and texture of roe.
The throat, the voice and breath, 
the now absent thrum
and vibration.

The brittle cage, the large heart, 
where the body's dark wine once ebbed and flowed, 
rivers and streams and dams, veins and arteries
and fatty silt. 

Continue.
The livid flank, the ropes that tie the stomach down, 
the world consumed,
bite by meaty bite.
A never empty table, a full glass, 
a knife.

Cigarettes and salty olives and the legs, 
my god, the legs on those women,

the legs on that wine.

      Some wolves keep their dead
                in one place—easy to catalogue
                the losses when the bones
                can be counted. These wolves
                remember the shape of land
                before beasts built roads,
                stories passed from snout
                to snout; stories kept close,
                warming bellies with the smell
                of deep forest, running stream,
                the collecting mosses under paw.
                Ghost imprinted forests
                                hung like shadow play curtains.
                The wolves’ bones shift in earth, beasts
                metal claw shovel them loose.
                The wolf watches, sniffs the air for memory,
                the smell of new nothing, and shifts
                back into the darkness—sometimes still
                spotted at night, always disappearing.

Bill Wolak—a creative writing professor, poet, photography, and collage artist who hails from New Jersey—contributed all of the psychedelic artwork to our third issue. Due to the nearly 2,350 miles between us, we weren’t able to sit down for a cup of joe in the same coffee shop; a conversation mediated by the Internet was our only option. Below, Wolak talks about his technique, obsession with the human form, and the occasional all-nighter.

Spilled Milk: Tell us a little bit about your creative process. 

Bill Wolak: It gets harder and harder to work during the day because of the constant interruptions. Therefore, I usually have a longer period of sustained work at night. Sometimes I work all night until dawn.

SM: How do you know when a piece is “finished?”

BW: When I think that I’ve completed a work, the best thing to do for me is to put it aside for a few days or weeks. Then after some time, I take another look at it. Sometimes I will find something missing or I will decide to simplify what I have done. But it’s always a good idea to let it rest for a while.

SM: What risks have you taken to get where you are?

BW: To make the commitment to work in the arts is a risk itself. Failure seems to surround you, especially when you’re just beginning. Then, little by little, you publish whatever it is that you’ve been working on alone for a very long time. The process is very solitary, and sometimes there is very little positive feedback about your work. The artist, any artist, has to develop a certain fearlessness just to go on. Then it’s necessary to cultivate a state of relentless striving to make the connections necessary to get your work published. Also, you must overcome the fear of the constant rejections.

SM: What inspires you? Generally or, like, at this very moment; what are you obsessed with?

BW: The human form is one of my obsessions. I always come back to the face and the body. Sometimes my work can be extremely abstract. But in most cases, somewhere lurking in the piece is the influence of the human body, nakedness, sensuality, sexuality, or ecstasy.

SM: Do you see your poetry, photography, and collage work in conversation with each other? How so?

BW: Sure, the poems, photographs, and collages begin as dreams or obsessions or hallucinations that I begin to play with. Lines of the poetry appear as titles of collages. Images in the photographs influence the poetry and so forth. As long as you keep creating, there is always a conversation going on between the various modes of art that beg for your concentration, your undivided attention. Out of that interplay, some development, some innovations may occur.

SM: What are the raw elements (figurative or literal) of your collages?

BW: For the most part, I use engravings and prints from all books to make my collages. Sometimes I use the old cut and paste method, and sometimes I employ digital techniques. It depends on the possibility that is opening up imaginatively as I am working.