1) Plot Hole
The light at the end
of the tunnel turned out to
be a gaping plot
hole in my argument,
so, I was forced to freestyle.
2) Psychic Warfare
I’m still convinced that
someone in their employ was
waging psychic war-
fare upon me in order
to gain access to all my
family’s secret recipes.
3) Places of Residence
Is there a name for
the frequent dreaming of one’s
former places of
residence, specifically
dreams of still living there-in?
4) Daffodils, Sweat Bees, Helicopters
Daffodils in an
old salsa jar half-full of
well water, sitting
on an old deck table in
the sun, while sweat bees circle
around like helicopters.
5) Progress, If Not Victory, So Much
A
mile
or two
of sun-cracked
two-lane blacktop with
about three feet of a gravel
shoulder, sloping off to a ditch by the side of the
road, an old mailbox full of bullet holes,
over-flowing with who knows how many days?
weeks? months? of mail; and there’s something
about the smell of
newly laid tarmac first thing in
the morning that for
some reason
always
makes
me
think
of
progress.
Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry,
six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders,
notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be
(loosely) construed as a novel, and countless
love letters, never sent. He is currently an artist-in-
residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted
P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an
editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection
of poems is “Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023).”
He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster
named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe,
and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the
Gasconade River, where there are also many strange
and wonderful woodland critters.
Poetry from Bruce Roberts
To Be, Or—Oh Never Mind!
Yes, Mr. Shakespeare,
We know your works have been
Read, and absorbed,
By a robot.
That’s modern culture, ala 2023!
Yes, you were famous once,
We know,
But what’s important today
Is the skill of the robots!
Yes, your plays are amazing,
But they can be imitated,
Even improved upon
By robots,
by non-human
technological entities!
In fact, we’ve shown
One of our bots your letter
Protesting their existence!
Here’s its response--in your style:
“It’s a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
signifying NOTHING!”
Feel free to contact us again!
]
Creative nonfiction from David Sapp
Clare Short for Clarence At sixteen I got a job at Ron’s Pizza to pay for gas, books, and records and to save for a camera. The shop was a tiny, white unremarkable cube on Coshocton Avenue, once named “The Milkhouse” in the 60s where, like everyone else, we picked up milk and ice cream after Sunday mass. As a pizzeria it was filled with ovens, coolers, bags of onions, cases of tomato sauce, and the aromas of fresh dough, cheese, and finished pizza – the best in town. It was there that I became acquainted with Clare, short for Clarence. Clare was a shy, amiable Hotei, a pudgy man of about thirty or forty who lived with his mother somewhere in the neighborhood. Clare was labeled mentally retarded as in 1976 the kinder intellectually disabled designation did not yet exist. The word “retarded” was used clinically, matter-of-factly but also had derogatory connotations. On the playground children often called one another “retard.” Clare always wore a bright orange hunter’s cap and a blue winter coat. Only on the hottest days did the coat remain at home. He stuck with long sleeves, though, with his top button buttoned. Never shorts. Clare was proud of his Sears bicycle, a streamlined model from the 1950s he’d had since he was a boy, tricked out with white wall tires, two lights, two mirrors, and a speedometer. Every couple of weeks he repainted it, covering all the original chrome in a thick red or blue enamel. We speculated the bike was held together with paint rather than welds. A big kid really, Clare easily offered a wide smile and was willing to befriend anyone but was instinctively wary of everyone. I got the impression, after a few conversations, that the neighborhood boys teased or maybe abused him. When business was slow and Clare stopped in, Ron, the owner, a petty, insufferable lout who attended an obscure and highly evangelical church where people spoke in tongues, asked Clare questions to illicit humorous responses for our amusement. Ron thought Clare was always good for a laugh to pass the time. It was well known that Clare found body hair repulsive and regularly shaved head to toe. Occasionally Ron would say, “Hey Clare. Look,” and stroke his bear-like arm (not usually hovering over a pizza). Clare recoiled, distressed, almost nauseous in disgust. It was apparent that this was some kind of trigger for Clare. In the summer, Clare mowed a narrow strip of grass around two sides of the shop. Ron paid Clare with one can of soda. Just one. I wondered, why not two cans? How about five bucks to pay for some of Clare’s bike paint? Hell, why not a pizza with Clare’s favorite toppings? I never saw Ron offer one slice of pizza to Clare – as if his generosity would invite some kind of bad luck contagion. Clare had his own peculiar way of saying things, his sentences pressed tightly and cautiously through his teeth. “Heey Deeve” meant hey Dave. “Bat-trees” was batteries. “Sheeze” was gee. “Shcooze-me-sumbuddy” translated as excuse me somebody. Occasionally he announced, “Heey Deeve. Got new bat-trees for my beek (bike).” After mowing, Clare downed his single soda in one long, noisy gulp and belched loudly. Once, this customary and predictable belch occurred with a customer present. After the customer left, Ron admonished Clare saying, “When there’s somebody here, say excuse me.” Thereafter, any time he belched, no matter who was around, Clare declared, “Sheeze. Shcooze-me-sumbuddy.” For many years, Clare’s phrase was fondly mimicked by those who knew him. Following Clare’s “pardon me,” he nodded his head vigorously ten times to his left and ten times to his right. In other situations, if he was upset, there were additional nods with greater intensity. Clare exhibited several compulsive routines, but the head nodding was the most pronounced. At sixteen, I didn’t know what obsessive-compulsive disorder was (OCD was not yet used so casually and pervasively), but I recognized in Clare my own anxiety and my version of weird, inexplicable compulsions. Our rituals were a means to make sense of an uncertain world. When I got my new camera, I took Clare’s picture and he was thrilled, even hamming it up a little, nodding happily to the left and right between snaps. I still have the pictures somewhere, but I don’t need them to remember him. Some ten years later, after Ron and Ron’s Pizza were long gone, after college and on the cusp of marriage, I happened upon Clare riding his bike in circles near the restrooms at Memorial Park. I imagined picnickers and soft ball girls were leery of him if they didn’t know him. I guessed Clare simply liked the flat concrete surface there. I heard that his mother died and he lived in a group home across town, an alien neighborhood with new kids and anxieties to navigate. He was much thinner, I thought gaunt, and now talked to himself in repetitious phrases. He looked weary, drawn inward. I called out to him, “Clare!” After completing three more requisite circles, he paused, looked up, recognized me, smiled, and said, “Sheeze. Heey Deeve.” And continued riding. David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.
Essay from Z.I. Mahmud
Image of a light skinned young woman with a knit sweater and short blonde hair up in a bun holding a copy of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which has black and white cartoon images of a family up against a black background and green and white text.
Critically examine Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” as a graphic novel. Or
Discuss the significance of the veil in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Or
How are the Islamic fundamentalists represented in the book Persepolis? What suggestions does Satrapi make about the relationship between faith and fanaticism?
Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” is the woven into the new found literary form positing the new found respectability of book length graphic novels—-accessible, vernacular and with mass popular appeal—-historicized memorabilia corresponding to mass murder, massacre, genocide, holocaust, brutality, harassment, execution and bombing amidst Iran-Iraq war. Fragmented, disembodied, and divided between frames suggestive of psychological trauma as connoted in the epiphany of “The Veil”. A visual chronicle of childhood rooted and articulated through momentous, and traumatic and historic events about the verbal and visual practice of never forgetting.
An unsmiling veiled girl sitting with her arms crossed in the center of the frame. She situates the exposition to the reader “This is me when I was 10 years old […] This was in 1980.” A hand, a bent elbow, and chest length veil separates herself from the class photography as spacings within pictorial frame purports disruption of her own characterological presence. An icon of single eye, directly engaging the reader, dangling over the book’s very first gutter, reminding readers at the outset that we are aligned with Satrapi’s penetrating vision and enabling retracing of that vision: “I give myself this duty of witnessing.” A crowd of masses throwing their fists in the air in front of a stark black background represents Islamic Revolution and then the veiling mandate of 1980.
Persepolis narrates the trials and tribulations of precocious Marji and her upperclass leftist parents exasperation with the Iranian political regime; and Marji’s pricked consciousness ; holocausts, homicides and suicides of friend circle and family relations; havoc wreaked by Iraq-Iran geopolitical crises and Marji;s fierce and dangerous outspokenness eventually inspires her parents to deport her abroad at a safer sheltered asylum away from the trepidation and perturbance; her mother becomes comatose state of being as Marji departs Iran.
Satrapi’s text is framed diegetically and externally to the introductory injunctions of “never forgetting” as Uncle Anoosh, the naxalite prisoner advises her niece during executionary wish-fulfillment: “Our family memory must not be lost. Even if it isn’t easy for you, even if you don’t understand it at all.” Satrapi’s multiple autobiographical voices illustrative of the vignettes of selves——-Satrapi’s older and recollective voice registering of overarching narrative text while the younger and directly experiencing voice registering of dialogue and throughout pictorial space——the visual voice.
States of being of memory and matter of factness reinforce Satrapi’s renegotiations between versions of herself showing us the visual and discursive process of never forgetting. Satrapi unfolds the procedure of memory through spatializing form of comics, which visualizes and enmeshes overlapping of selves and their locations. Persepolis’s presentation of pictorial space is discursive. Satrapi displays the political horror of producing and marking ordinary childhood by offering what seems to the reader to be the visual disjuncture in her child’s eye rendition of trauma.
This expressionism weaves the process of memory into the book’s technique of visualization. Satrapi’s stark style is monochromatic—–there is no evident shading technique; she offers black and white. However the visual emptiness of simple, ungraded blackness in frames showcase the depthness of the condition of remembrance as pointed out by Kate Flint’s words: “maybe elicited by the deliberate empty spaces, inviting the projection of that which can be seen only in the mind’s eye to an inviting vacancy.”
Persian miniatures, murals and friezes of public skirmishes appear as stylized and symmetrical bodies, surfeiting mere mimetic representations interlaced with the Persianness of historical avant-garde. “I was born in a country in a certain time, and I was witness to many things. I was a witness to a revolution. I was a witness to war. I was a witness to a huge emigration”——collective ethos of harrowing sense of death casts her imaginative selfhood to a culture pervaded by violence and retribution. Penultimate panel of “The Letter” suggests the Iranian landscapes and the grimly grotesque configuration of horizontally stretched out and abstractly stacked corpses/ mass dead bodies. “We had demons demonstrated on that very day we shouldn’t have: on Black Friday. That day there was so many killed in one neighbourhoods that a rumour spread that Israeli soldiers were responsible for the slaughter.”
“The Cigarette” in “The Persepolis” demonstrates three-tiers of imbrications of the historical routine [execution] and the personal routine [sneaking cigar] depicting blindfolded prisoners about to be executed against a wall, directly above and below frames in which we view Marji in that prosaic, timeless rite of initiation: smoking her first cigar. This retrospective mode of narratorial address to the audience from within the pictorial space of the frame and the body politic of tender hearted Marjai is unusual in the text; blurring of voices and register here works with the blurrings of the historical and the everyday registers that is also part of the narrative suggestion of the page.
Ethical, verbal and visual practice of not forgetting is not merely about exposing and challenging the virulent machinations of historicization but is more specifically about examining and bearing witness to the intertwining of the everyday and the historical. Its polemical resonance lies in the fact that visually virtuosic is required to represent the political trauma that plagues Marji’s childhood. Persepolis is thus the reimagination and reconstruction that retraces the literal growing child body in space, reinscribing that body to generate a framework in which versions of selfsome stripped of agency, in which some are possessed by it——-in productive conversation. Persepolis’ feminist graphic narrative harnesses visibility politics magnified by the lenses of visual ethics aesthetics showcasing the censured and censored through representation and resymbolization.
McCloud pointed out that segmented pictorial illustrations in the form of comic book or graphic novel transforms the temporal relationships into the spatial matrix. Pictorial framing can be related to ideological framing——-the filtering of information, of news, of times, of identities, of nationalities and gender——through templates and through structures of feelings that produce predetermined judgements of values narrativized translations of experience. “We the kids in America” become the epitome of the youth generation’s voice as an ideological frame narrative symbolic of Western cultural imperialism intruding as a lurking anthem in the Marjane Satrapi frame-within-frame fantasy of Western counter cultural identity in the image of Kim Wilde.
Satrapi’s bricolage and appropriation, borrowing, mixture of heterogeneous culture resonates both state societal interpellation as pedagogical and civil societal interpellation as performativity that both function as frames and mirrors of self. Both constructs of fictions of the self. Marjane Satrapi’s grandmother advices the granddaughter: “But there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance […] Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself”, while the latter embracing folding cuddling of the former. “I smelled my grandmother’s bosom. It smelled good. I cannot forget that smell” resonates Proustian motif with the advice bestowed upon by the family matriarch about the jerks she is destined to meet throughout her life.
Lacanian terms of prelinguistic and extralinguistic formation of subjectivity—-the contrast in Persepolis is not only between a prelinguistic visual reflection of the self and an adult linguistic reflection, but the non visual bodily and sensory reflection of the self in the matriarch other and the visual and the exilic reflection of the self outside home and nation. The mirrored frames of the panels function in Persepolis as subjective fragmentation, unstability and uncertainty. Satrapi’s exodus life is as diasporic selfhood re establishes the cultural icon of hijab as the symbolic icon of familiarity of national and familial belonging casting off claustrophobic marginalization: “so much for my individual and social liberties […] I need so badly to go home.”
Marjane Satrapi’s contrasting frame of panels demarcating bachelorette virginity and consummated maidenhood by her reflections of brightly smiling long hair, makeup and short wear with trimmed laces, and sitting in front of a window overlooking a garden of birds; and Marjane’s reflection of a girl smoking cigar, wearing black pants and shirts, sitting in front of a dark night. Adulthood and independent agency reciprocate her mother’s amity with the tenderly hugging in the event and divorce of the daughter with the fiance Reza. Iran’s borders/cultures/geopolitics were clandestinely breached by the import of Westernization though the imposition of hegemonic tradition and culture such as Nike Shoes and Michael Jackson Badge smuggled by Satrapi’s parents from Turkey. Shallow consumerism by emulation of Western fashion overthrown to indictment that ultimately enforced diasporic exodus. Marjane’s expedition in pursuance of cassettes entails her knowledgeable and feisty dealings with the male black marketeers. Verily the confession of her affirmative tone justifies her duality of personae looming with the void of claustrophobia and xenophobia : “I was nothing. I was a Westerner in the Iran and an Iranian in the West. I had no identity.”
Patricia Storace critiques the transcendental transformation and brings to light the transmogrified narrative technique to the effect of transvaluation that uses style “which offers a benevolent, trustworthy world, like a fresco in a nursery and the matter of fact breaks our hearts with it, creating confrontation between what is drawn as adorable with the world that does not require its claims to protection, hope or love.” Satrapi is intuitive, inquisitive and precocious and her quest for identity causes a self questioning of gender, class and social status as cultural markers——self-reflection as the narrator of her illustrated past greatly contributes to the value of her memoir. “In a cartoon world she [Marjane Satrapi] creates, the photographs function less as illustrations than as records of actions, a kind of visual journalism. On the other hand, dialogues and descriptions are changing unpredictably in visual style and placement on the page within its balloons, advancing frame by frame like the verbal equivalent of a movie. Each element would be quite useless without the other; like a pair of dancing partners, Satrapi’s text and images comment on each other, enhance each other, challenges, questions and reveal each other.”
Further Reading
Hilary Chute’s The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Spring-Summer 2008, Vol. 36, No. 1 /2, Witness (Spring-Summer 2008), pp. 92-110, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York
Babak Elahi’s [Rochester Institute of Technology] Frames and Mirrors in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, symmboke, 2007, Vol. 15, No. 1 / 2, Cinema Without Borders, 2007, pp. 312-325, University of Nebraska Press.
Ann Miller’s [University of Leicester] Marjane Satrapi’s: Eluding the Frames, L’Esprit Createur, Spring 2011, Volume 51, No. 1, Watch This Space: Women’s Conceptualizations of Space in Contemporary French Film and Visual Art [Spring 2011], pp. 38-52.
Poetry from Jacques Fleury
Possible Causes and Effects of Cited High Blood Pressure [Originally published in Fleury’s book You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self] If your Father died of heart disease If you have Sleep Apnea If you have irregular sleeping schedule If you are overweight If you have a late night binge eating habit If you take caffeinated Energy Supplements If you Drink Caffeinated Tea and Hot Chocolate If you Use heavily salted spices like Chicken Bouillon Cubes If you’re not getting enough “regular” cardio exercise If you’re inconsistent with your daily meditation practice If you ruminate about the past: its afflictions and perceived malfeasances If you harbor resentments regarding sociopolitical and racial injustices If you feel constant stings of Minority Stress through Micro Aggressions of racism If you are BLACK! The Only Way to See the Stars… [Originally published in Fleury’s book You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self] I often wonder why I smile even when sad Thudding of my heart hearkening back To recidivist scars running my fingers Over the scabs abrading the cut of the Blade and making my way in a world full Of hurt people who hurt people A pejorative and abortive choice So smiling instead of snarling helps me Remember even if bliss turns to distress To see the stars is through the darkness…
Prose poetry from Brian Barbeito
William Shakespeare Look What You’ve Gone and Done, or European Starling Birds and the Winter Morning Sky Born it was not the morning but the afternoon in actuality when all the Starlings did alight in the tree. it was however in the next morning that I remembered them and thought about them. they were still and to me, stoic for they didn’t really bother w/the wind or the world around them. the history of birds, their origin and migration routes; their interaction with rural landscapes and metropolitan areas, is as vast as the history of stamps, of books or of anything for that matter. but for me then, it was just a flock of birds in a tree. I didn’t know where they arrived from. I didn’t know what their ‘game’ was, or their ‘trick.’ I just knew that they blended in as if they were not there. nobody jumped from branch to branch. nobody talked. nobody else arrived and nobody left. hmm. real certainly,- they didn’t seem so, and more like a painting or dream; or perhaps a moment in a poem. nice, I thought. but I am a naive one and always have been so. I decided to read about them. someone had the idea of introducing every bird Shakespeare mentioned into North America. and it turned out that though they controlled some insect problems,- the Starlings were overly aggressive and caused many problems to things like crops and even infrastructure. I wondered about them, about the ones I had seen. maybe they were cold (I am a bleeding heart). later I glanced out there again. the Starlings had gone. only the branches remained,- vacant. and they weren’t talking either. and now the sky is born again. there used to be a Christian proselytizer that promoted his metaphysics by the lake to every manner of passerby. when the weather got bad, - cold, or a storm was coming, he would leave. it meant to me he was only an average devotee. a true captain is supposed to go down w/the ship so to speak. it is really the sky, for better or worse, that remains, not bird or person. the sky will one day whisper against reason and logic to some mystic, some seer, not, ,’Beware the Ides of March,’ but simply, ‘See. I tried to tell you. Stick with me. I am the forever kind.’
Poetry from Eva Petropolou Lianou
A precious man The nights and the days come and go without a smile The days are so big without a smile The nights are a waiting for a call or a message It is so expensive this time away from your eyes. You are my precious pearl.. A diamond hide in the mud.. Waiting the time to hug you and kiss you. You are my treasure hidden from the sun Waiting the day I meet you again.. Waiting your look.. Waiting your lips.. You are my precious pearl hidden in the oyster deep in the sea. You are my precious man. You, the face I did not see for years You, You are the most amazing human being But i cannot touch You, The beauty is hiding in small pieces in your body and mind... You, I can explain why But i know my what... You, That one day you crossed my path Forces of love or passion touched me Without reason... I am looking the east You are looking the west Miracles happens every day You, A passion I can live in a privately moment Love I give Love will never be understood You, In an another space of galaxy You, My ideal My secret Garden You, The moments I never had You The distance between two countries A bridge i will try to build to reach you Good night poem What a caterpillar maybe call the end A butterfly call it the beginning of a beautiful journey... The stars are so far but we can see the lights And feel their heat As i am thinking of you Days and nights are together No distance Only sun Only Moon And for once they are together In this beautiful sky Thinking of you The days Think about you My heart My body My soul Wake up And Dance in a circle Imagine u are here Imagine u are close to me Imagine our life starts This is my wish My prayer As you are my hope My inspiration In those long years of loneliness... ❤️💐💐💐 Love poem Your smile... I dream a future with you I dream a blue sky Sunset to a an island I dream a white house And have a view to the sea I dream a future close to you.. And i get a bad dream Sleeping alone Feeling weak But in my heart i am not alone because i feel your heart beat I feel your breath EVA Petropoulou Lianou Multi Awarded Author children literary Official candidate for Nobel Peace prize Greece