Welcome to the Post-Katrina Resurrection Corpse, back from a dank hiatus of one year in a formaledehyde-poisoned FEMA trailer. We festered, we raged, we contemplated suicide, and in the end, voted for life because we are a Corpse already and we hate to keep on dying, just like the ideals of the Republic. Our guest-editor for this issue is the formidable poet, publisher, New Orleanian, and homme-du-monde-et-de-lettres, Bill Lavender. Bill has ploughed through the accumulated debris in our trailer, turning over towers of submissions and lovingly removing mold and giving new lustre to tarnished but potent weapons. We will continue to exalt, irritate, surprise, be loving, merciless, and obscene, just like you. Our Bulgarian genius, Plamen Arnaudov, has updated our technology so that the Corpse may flow continually, with updates posted as quickly as the zeitgeist requires. We also welcome Vincent Cellucci, poet and chef to Our Gang, so that we might eat well while we tryst and plunder. You reader, can register and join our raiding parties, and ride with the Resurrected Corpse. Onward! And bring your own horse.
When New Orleanians returned to their homes after the Storm they were struck by a smell that has no equivalent in recent American history: a stupefying blend of decaying animal flesh as layered as the city’s history. The sweet rankness of animal and human death floated around the city like it might have in the aftermath of a Yellow Fever epidemic of the 18th century, but added to it was the putrid efflorescence of 20th century grocery store meat blossoming inside thousands of refrigerators. For a week or so after the Storm, when the city wallowed in its filth and misery without help from the United States of America, which they had mistakenly believed they were part of, people helped each other drag the taped-up fridges unto the street. Rows and rows of white metal boxes cradling inside generations of maggots began to fill the narrow streets of America’s oldest city.
Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker in the National University, a Jew in Nazi Germany, an ombudsman in the Defense Ministry, a communist in the post-Cold War era, an artist without gallery or portfolio.... A pacifist in Bosnia, a housewife alone on Saturday night in any neighborhood in any city in Mexico, a striker in the CTM, a reporter writing filler stories for the back pages, a single woman on the subway at 10 pm, a peasant without land, an unemployed worker... an unhappy student, a dissident amid free market economics, a writer without books or readers, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains of southeast Mexico. So Marcos is a human being, any human being, in this world. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalized and oppressed minorities, resisting and saying, 'Enough'!
–El Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.
—Peter Ustinov
The marginality of intellectuals is a myth; even in the resolutely hermetic world of Washington, their voices are heard.
–James Atlas, 19 October 2003, in The New York Times
a dearth of lumen the oasis of fresh pond alongside a road one number can describe all the objects inside your house I like the idea of being a bottle of milk or heavy cream doesn’t everyone sleep in persian blue satin sheets like cucumbers in a box of snow
Patients with recurrent perseveration as part of a fluent left temporal lobe aphasia often consciously intend to produce a requested target on confrontation testing in the clinic. However, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, they will have a perseveration happen to them...
Romanian poetry, like Romanian film, is quite the rage these days, in translation or written directly in (interstitial) English. “Foreign” or vernacular-interstitial-creole poetries are gangbusting the well-manicured lawns, the faux-romantic hollows, and the fractured dictionaries of current AmPo, like ruptured oxygen tanks. The barbarians are here, Seferis, and they are so-o-o-o cool. Here are a few by George Vasilievich, Magda Carneci, and other dark-sound vocabularists.
The summer before Katrina, New Orleans was spinning out of control in a boozy maelstrom of guns and drugs, murder and corruption. Flush with tourist dollars, the sweltering city felt overripe and frantic, like some blowzy hooker who, late into besotted middle-age, sinks to new depths because she hasn't got much longer to live. In July, after my gentle dog-groomer friend was shot to death in a demented crime of passion, I wanted to run onto Canal Street, hold up my hands, and scream STOP, NEW ORLEANS, JUST STOP.
New Orleans: Katrina Postcardby Matt RobertsI come home one night from the bar, on my bicycle, to find what sounds like a garbled message on my voice messaging service to be what is possibly the neighbors next door arguing. I listen for a little bit, unsure of whether or not this is a recording on my phone of an earlier discussion or the... >> more
How Everyone Came to Put on Their Coatby Willie SmithNever mind how I got it. Maybe I helped pay my way through college working part time as a museum guard. Lifted it one night from a case. Or I attended an underground auction where, for a price, such objects can be had. >> more
from "Surveillance"by John Lowtherleading to that book significant hold it but putting it aside its solid black back forget me >> more
In the west, in America specifically, there has been for a long time now the separation of church and state – that is the separation of religion from the state of being alive. Religion has been relegated to the reliquary and rules, in the... >> more
Three Poemsby Sheema KalbasiNothing is all I am Nothing overloading nothing Closing the doors, Opening an extra into an empty space, Nothing ensues but a further war. >> more
+loveby Brad M. Elliottresting quietly i expose myself in the grocery store isle to christians who make me uncomfortable and listen and hear nobody only the wind through the leaves in the evening i think of crab cakes the wood the pensive hill the rippling nipple the rude step >> more
Sarduy & Eggersby Beatriz HausnerCobra and Maitreya by Severo Sarduy, Suzanne Jill Levine trans. Dalkey Archive Press; What is the What by Dave Eggers, McSweeney's Publishing. >> more
Welcome to the Post-Katrina Resurrection Corpse, back from a dank hiatus of one year in a formaledehyde-poisoned FEMA trailer. We festered, we raged, we contemplated suicide, and in the end, voted for life because we are a Corpse already and we hate to keep on dying, just like the ideals of the Republic. Our guest-editor for this issue is the formidable poet, publisher, New Orleanian, and homme-du-monde-et-de-lettres, Bill Lavender. Bill has ploughed through the accumulated debris in our trailer, turning over towers of submissions and lovingly removing mold and giving new lustre to tarnished but potent weapons. We will continue to exalt, irritate, surprise, be loving, merciless, and obscene, just like you. Our Bulgarian genius, Plamen Arnaudov, has updated our technology so that the Corpse may flow continually, with updates posted as quickly as the zeitgeist requires. We also welcome Vincent Cellucci, poet and chef to Our Gang, so that we might eat well while we tryst and plunder. You reader, can register and join our raiding parties, and ride with the Resurrected Corpse. Onward! And bring your own horse.
