I almost saw The Master in Tel Aviv, after cinemas in my city ignored it for some obscure reason; I almost went to Tel Aviv to see it. It’s interesting to think of it in ideological terms, even though there is clearly nothing ideological about movie distribution, but what if this is some subtle conspiracy to deny us, non-Tel Avivians, with this particular viewing experience. After all, The Master deals with the making of a new religion, or so the trailer leads us to believe.

There is something mythological about it, or at least there is sense of myth in the making while watching the trailer– post-war, lost boys, omniscient father figure. I’m listening to the “Reckoning Song” over and over again in an endless loop because it somehow echoes the same type of curiosity that propels me to want to watch The Master. We will be old one day, but religion is for the young who already embody a sense of missed opportunity.

So I do want to see The Master on the big screen, but so far I’ve encountered resistance among my circle of friends – they’re not familiar with Paul Anderson’s work, the concept of Scientology doesn’t strike them as appealing, the narrow space between cult and religion doesn’t occupy their thoughts. Is it really just me? Am I the only person who wants to be swept away by new promises of old ideas?

You would think that in Israel of all places, The Master would take root, or at least use our symbolic geography as a temporary home – throw fists in the air throughout the Valley of Elah, pray for redemption while grasping at the Wailing Wall, baptize strangers in the Galilee Sea. But it has been dropped and abandoned in Tel Aviv, until the inevitable closing date.

Inbar Kaminsky is a PhD student in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, her doctoral thesis explores the alternative to corporeality in contemporary literature. She has recently published an article in Philip Roth Studies on Operation Shylock.

But where are the seals of the bodies in the tidal pools? We have pockets for this kind of thing. Pouches, we have them. Bags, small drawstring purses, coinpurses with stiff cardboard sides or rubber sides, we have backpacks, even plastic grocery bags grabbed in a hurry and filled with everything. But the hands inside the wave stripped pockets open or yanked clothes away from the body, and the bags, purses, backpacks, passports, name seals, insurance papers, photograph albums and stuffed animals disappeared.

Did you belong to the household of the deceased? Do you have their National Health Card? You are required to go in person to the place of issuance. Be sure to check whether this still exists. In the days between the death and its legalization, you make your own maps. The handling fee is ¥200 per certificate. Applications are handled at each branch office.

The first requirement is to acquire a death certificate issued by a doctor. But where are the doctors, where are the hospitals now? Where are the ballpoint pens (black only)? Where are those certificates, in which filing cabinets? Piles of paper dumped out of drawers have burnt and blown away. In the sterile white hall of a ward you turn a corner and the far wall’s completely gone. There’s water on the floor. Within seven days, that’s the requirement for the certificate, stamped with your own seal, you who apply for the doctor’s certificate, you who have come on foot or by moped or by bicycle, carefully lifting the wheels over places where the road buckles up completely. You who lifted the heavy pack onto your back at the first alarm and began to climb the hills, going farther, farther, past the place where your neighbor insisted he was safe, past the row of scraggly trees, up the road until far below you, the ocean was a black field with a white line in it, coming closer.

In order to obtain this death certificate, you will need both the hospital death record and the deceased’s identifying documents. When you apply for the death certificate, you can apply for the Certificate of Permission for Burial or Cremation at the same time. You can walk down the beige corridor and when the building begins to move underneath you can look briefly at someone passing to see whether they feel it, too, or whether your earthquake-sickness is tricking you again. You can hold onto walls. In certain undisturbed offices you can sit on leather settees or comfortable chairs and sign papers. From the windows of these places there may be views of a park. Everything may seem normal.

At the bottom of each page, your seal.

*

There is no limit, in cases of death not resulting from an infectious disease, within which a body must be buried or cremated, but it cannot be buried in the first 24 hours following death. (Law No. 48 of 1948, “Law Regarding Graveyards, Burials and Others”, states that “a corpse or stillborn fetus shall not be buried or cremated earlier than 24 hours after its death or birth, except as otherwise provided by ordinance”.) Weeks later families still post photographs in plastic sheaths on the lower half of the corner shop’s window. The death cannot be assumed to have happened when the body is found.

We station ourselves on the coast and watch for things that look human. They shine in the darkness like pieces of fat. With nets meant for big fish we bring them in. Hiding from the Coast Guard and the deployed Americans and the Red Cross and the teams of cleanup volunteers. We wash them. We wrap them in towels and sheets we take from the destroyed department store. We carry them to the morgues, and when the morgues are full we carry them to the gymnasiums, community centers, back entrances to hospitals, wherever the other bodies are being held. We bring kerosene when we find it. It takes 38 liters of kerosene to cremate a body, and the fuel is in short supply. The ash contains pieces of bone. You know this. You have seen it being transferred into the urn.

*

Assuming you have your seal and the documents identifying your deceased. Which is to say that you have found the person you are looking for, after calling their name when the first siren sounded, after a brief argument about just how high along the road out of town would be safe enough and don’t stop to take a video and I’m leaving! and after walking on, more pissed off than anything, because the anti-tsunami walls were high and things like this just don’t happen. After walking higher and seeing the wave wash out the place where you had been.

There are no remaining spaces for burial in Tokyo. Good thing you moved out here, to the coast, where it’s calmer. Where you came for air and cheaper transport and a job you thought you’d like, proximity to the sea. So far north, where you can see deer sometimes, not far from your house, on the campus of the university. And where, often, you can spend the evening walking in the hills that line the coast, while water lifts into foam among the black rocks. There is room here for the very unusual embalmed burial, and so of course for cremated remains. You’ll have to figure out how to manage all that—transportation of the body, cremation, an urn, a grave plot, a gravestone. A permanent grave plot will cost about a million yen. A gravestone, ¥700,000. You will wait in the crematorium with the other two or three families whose deceased member will be cremated today, and the small flakes of snow which began this morning will change to larger ones, and these will in turn become wet lumps of ice which stick to the window and run down it as they melt. It will take two hours, provided the kerosene has not run out. If it has, you will come back, and come back again, until there is fuel. The walk to the crematorium will become habitual, almost irritatingly familiar. Going here again? you might catch yourself thinking, when you’d rather be checking to see whether there are new warnings about green vegetables, or whether the FamilyMart has flour back in stock.

You will find a soggy black-and-silver envelope in a pile of papers on the street. You will dry it out. You need an envelope for condolence money, and they look like this.

Éireann Lorsung is the author of Music For Landing Planes By (2007) and Her Book (August 2013), both from Milkweed. Other work appears or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Burnside Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Collagist, and Bluestem. She edits 111O (111oh.com) and co-runs MIEL, a micropress (miel-books.com).

Log, Etching, 15 x 22″, 2011

Thunderbird, Lithograph, 15 x 22″ 2011

Cloak and Dagger, Etching, 15 x 22″, 2011

L’Eggs in Mirror, Engraving printed in relief, 15 x 22″, 2011

 
 
 
Lauren Pakradooni holds an MFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her interdisciplinary work incorporates drawing, printmaking, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and sound. She gravitates towards exploring space, making use of the graphic qualities of print, enveloping character of sound, and the literal space of sculpture and performance. She has exhibited and performed her work internationally, holding residencies in Doha, Qatar, The Netherlands, and most recently in Wassaic, NY.

For several years, Pat Shannon sustained what she describes as an extended non-verbal dialogue with newspapers.

It was the year of many staples, which was better than
the year no one cared. Tommy knew I was about to have
an agenda so he said, Don’t have an agenda. I will sleep
with my face pressed against a copy of Das Kapital –
thinking big, effecting change. If they were asked to
define capital they would say, Establishing individuality
while walking all over a dead earth. Avi says, When shit
gets weird, drink it down. She also says, We’re
indecorous. People surprise you. Year after year they
keep painting their cabinets. Today everything I looked
at was very expensive. I call Tommy and say, Come on
over we’ll talk about the year everyone died. I can’t see
you and find you at the same time. The road less gone is
gone. No use lying this is exactly what it looked like.

One hundred days in

Everything reminds Avi of Tulsa. She finds herself
sleeping with a broadly educated work force – a literal
translation. She wakes up dying. What needs to happen
is nothing at all – a mild passivity. I can understand
needing Jesus. We’ll respond to vice by laughing. We’ll
say, What’s gotten into you? One hundred days in and
we’re working hard to re-elect the president. After that
we’ll enjoy staring at the television towards highly
opinionated versions of ourselves.

Fatalism

When Tommy asked me where I was last night I said, idk
tommy I wz probably worrying abt dying. When he
asked me how I got there I said, idk tommy I’m a fatalist
driving a car. Having read the essay in question is no
excuse for being a total dick. Let’s for once in our lives,
categorize people by how they categorize themselves.
We’ll write a manifesto. We’ll title it, If you’ve been
defeated and you remember raise your hand.

It was all very typical

I tell Tommy that a nude colored bra is not a present. In
California, when a boy likes you, he takes you to the
beach. In Tulsa, he takes you to the mall and you watch
him buy shit for himself.

I have to stop describing people as brilliant

Direct attempts to build self-esteem generally don’t
work. I laugh sometimes and don’t blame Tommy for the
blue on the placemats on his mother’s table. Just like I
don’t hate the man at the gas station humming Run
Around Sue. As I walk out with the Ring Dings I say,
The internet isn’t killing me it’s turning my life around. I
hear in Rome there are no traffic laws. I hear my ex is
doing fine. We used to laugh at ourselves fucking, we
used to fatten up to die. He called me his little bird. One,
there are images of egrets but no verbs. Two, now
people let me put you wise. Three, an egret is a bird.
There are pictures of it on the internet.

It looked pretty dark

If you have the Communist Manifesto in your pocket you
should probably have Das Kapital. I say, Das what?
Tommy says, Das Kapital. I don’t want my life to
become Bacardi Lime or Casual Fridays. He says, On the
ground in Syria there is unrelenting anger. I could care
less about Das Kapital. I feel fine about Syria.

Rituals of Defeat

What if I told the president he couldn’t run on an
anti-infrastructure platform. What if he stifled
laughter or he coughed or said to get over myself.
What if I shrugged and said I knew you were going to
say that. What if I rested my hands on my chest in
what is an easily identifiable personal ritual of defeat.
What if I decided to write a letter to Tommy and then
I wrote in my nicest handwriting long time no see but
then I realized I meant long time no talk so I erased it
and wrote it again. What if I then circled my fingers
around my wrist bone, observed retrospectively as
another ritual of defeat. What if the fingers got
tangled that time. What if I tried to be cool or maybe
if I stopped doing that or if I subscribed to multiple
notions one of which would be, watch out.

Feminism

Avi says wait for the O and leave, at the bar reading out
of some femme magazine. You wish you owned some
femme magazine. How am I. I’m fine, fine I tell Tommy.
Earlier in the day, he got his tax return and bought
Legos. I try to call the president to say, Tommy and I
are in the love club and I will never get out of Tulsa. This
isn’t the worst thing that could happen, this isn’t even the
best thing that could happen.

Dana Inez is a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College. She is from northwest New Jersey and received her BA in Psychology and Criminology from Rutgers University. Her poems have been published in Bone Bouquet journal and her fiction is forthcoming in Unsaid Journal.

Nightfall hot and edgy; Emily at an angle
of repose, down to damp tick, watching
edging on the windows, craving wind.

A triple meter plays
         in the parlor; floors
         screak as Catch crosses
to the player’s needle
         set at edge again,
         viola and crackling.

Insisting on sinking eyes, and finally, a slab
of snow where wall would be, a widening
crack in the slope prior to avalanche

Any Surface on the Same Plane

You’re Catch’s little girl somewhere sighs
      from stoops, and keys are clacking;
           trigger-sound. I lift my skirts
                 to dash past no gold letters

but signs instead for Poultry Exotics
      and Frozen Grapes and Do Not
           Drive Into Smoke. Now galloping
                 past Sassafras Point, through

Drilland, Helnway – paper mill in place
      of tannery – ’till finally I am still
           with burlap – his snoring or
                 the ceiling fan? Lamp black

or black ivory? Muslin and twill
      underhand or denim like sailcloth?
           These various affections are an alloy
                 detrimental to repose – skin caught

on jaggers. I wake to train, draw the red
      moreen against Gownsville or empty
           mills or an outline of swell and sweep –
                 this the coming home in raw twilight.

Implements of Animal Husbandry

Straw chopper, cinder block

Not a bumpershoot but sheers

The godevil next to crock

Milking stool or surrey here

Glad rags or water cups

Crock and peeps, potato bins

Some chestnuts, some beech nuts

Croupers, springs, and star bits

Bark Stacks

Process marks the skin.

In the leach house, hemlock bark bits
and steaming water churn to tannic acid –
cooling tank-turned.
                                    Shoveling bark pulp
is better than shoveling cow shit.

Less boiling, the bate house. Men on
the wheels, tumbling hides with chicken
manure to trace out the lime.
                                          Knife quick?

Sent to the beam hands, nearer the beginning,
process located – coverings stacked,
through wash wheels, tail and hooves cut
clean, and two days sunk in the vats.
Now fleshings come off,
                                       slippery and scraping
and stuck and stunk rotten.

Finally fixed in the finishing house, feeding
hides to the splitting machine or
hand-stained in the coloring room,
                                                            floating them
on the dye. Strange continents.

Former outlines.

And of course, a trailing industry, bosses
sealing buildings, buffalo giving
out.
          Hills hemlock bark-stripped. Tan
packs not towering.

Stephanie Anderson is the author of four chapbooks, including In the Particular Particular (winner of the 2006 DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press Chapbook Prize) and The Nightyard (winner of the 2009 Noemi Press Chapbook Prize). A full-length book, In the Key of Those Who Can No Longer Organize Their Environments, is forthcoming in Summer 2013 with Horse Less Press. She edits Projective Industries.

An excerpt from her poem “Mist Nets” was also published in Two Serious Ladies.

Red-eye slough on her animated like, clear jag, nay redness, broke into pieces. Those pieces into pieces, ay. Auto-hero mother dosing high chance with real mews at her mouth, frill on her winered jaw. All sang in sun-dark there, way alone, local. Lazy coins gave out as bet to some old thought. Con the row. Fat ailbox beckoning, he lance “been” under the loom, more pieces incandescent. A dance, that last gas at the far-away morrow. And I like the seat of jeans positioned under the machine, ready for that conical mirror to lace me.

OVERPASS

In red void light changes. Skips like a stone, splinters off into the music of number. Such breaking sharpens. One sharpens not so easy. Lacquered into sad local garb whorls prism at the foot of the glass-glinted hill/at that body of water/absolute womb. One stands. One thinks of standing. Action and thought, translucent or invisible? Contaminated. Diagonal shoots to break the neck of light division. Diagonal shoots to kill. The presence of grain in pure vision. Muted over a ribbon of space: Braying human. Perfume of tobacco. The cassette rolls over, clicks, and starts again.

INTERLOCUTER

So rings ulterior jilt in the ides, my talisman.
Taupe east. Two pieces of idiotic lettuce
for dinner. I tell dog life is hard, ford
the whinny. Tell me, dog, hear me say it
back to me. The tome unfurls: my holy
last gold-crusted ornament, miles along
that hieroglyphic tabloid, an incorrigible
tear mates form to dye my image—I smear
that defect’s name, dry purr, become
what smell? What slippery center light?
Refer to the previous garbage.
I lift it to the brightening beacon.

UNDER THE DARK LIGHT OF THE GENERATOR

Colic frisks the lapel in nine tones
meant to depress & destroy

the new sanctity as dispute
warbles over the lauded goblet

into the public center, each ogre
tongues an ounce of whatever

piss on the dead is meant
to offend the living.

ALIENS & BOGS

Cutting your throat open
sticking my foot in the cut
wriggling my toes in the square
of your breath like a megastore
come to push worthless doubloons
from your useless aperture
and your fat jiggles
and your throat is made useful
as I fondle my dresses
in an earthquake-safe corner
looking at you looking
I cut a dish in your face
with my mind’s long fingernail
and the font changes

Ally Harris has poems in Agriculture Reader, Cutbank, Tarpaulin Sky’s Chronic Content, inter|rupture, Poor Claudia, and BOMBLOG, as she was a finalist for their 2012 Poetry Contest judged by Ben Lerner. She graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with an MFA in Poetry and currently teaches composition to aspiring veterinary technicians in Portland, OR.

Marie Gardeski is an American artist living in Indiana. She creates small, delicately detailed drawings featuring seemingly sweet subjects in strange (and sometimes slightly scary) situations.

Daisy Atterbury is based in Brooklyn and Santa Fe, and she works in video, sculpture and other media. She runs NM Poetics, a small art school in northern New Mexico. Her work can be found at daisyatterbury.com.

I.

A short story flops
along the banks of the river
until it is thrown back in.

A song escapes into the yard
and loiters around the neighborhood.

My mama sent my novel to stay
with a family who lives in the country.

II.

It depends on what you mean by real,
by algorithm, by meat containers,
by Ada Lovelace, by physical world.

You argue that an idea is only a way
to perceive existing data, like a new kind of microscope,
but I argue that a new perceptual tool
simultaneously expands the data.
You say I shouldn’t confuse the model for the subject.
We walk down the street, kicking walnuts ahead,
catching up, kicking.

A man passes us, carrying a hot dog,
which is exactly my point, although you’re not having it.
I say that observation is a miracle,
and by definition, miracles have impact on their subjects.
You say that I am cheating
by going into woo-woo stuff.
I say you won’t have any fun if you
insist on invalidating strange territories.

It depends on what you mean by fun.

III.

The frontier of a skyscraper at nine p.m.

Bathrooms locked. Missing lights.

Steel bones creaking with the wind.

A woman, pressing the seams of a cubicle wall, whispering,
“I believe in the long game.”

On This Island

Every Scrabble box only has Q tiles.

A Sega Genesis longs to be penetrated
and a five and a quarter inch floppy longs to fit.

Wallflower electrons charge the margins.

There are drawers filled with bent second hands,
still twitching.

The primary objective of the private detective
is to transcribe the owlish cries of the freshly scorned.

The Gospel According to Joe

He listens to the whale song of the ultrasound,
eyes closed. Yep yep yep yep yep, it sings to him.
Blub wub blob wob wob, says the doctor.

He catalogs sensations for future scriptures:

How it feels as if somebody is raking
a set of keys over his gallbladder;

How getting dressed is like
navigating an Escher sketch;

How every morning a ghost
fixes him two pieces of toast and two eggs,
and some mornings he only throws
up one each.

Sacred and scared might as well be
the same word.

He keeps waking up in the thin hours of
the morning and dialing his mother’s number,
even though she has been dead ten years.

“Sorry, it’s Joe again,” he says each time.
“Oh, how are you, sweetheart,” says his not-Mom.

Borb lorb brorb rorb rorb.
He opens his eyes.

He stares at the image and strains to describe
the tears that crest his jawline.

Sara Renberg is a Portland-based poet, musician, and programmer. She is the author of a chapbook called Victory Guide.