Welcome to Episode 14! We’re having so much nerdy fun with these and hope you are, too. This week we discussed one poem a piece by Hilary Jacqmin, Keith Woodruff, and Kierstin Bridger, each submitted for different issues. Another Slush Pile first!
Welcome to Episode 14 of our podcast! We’re having so much nerdy fun with these and hope you are, too. This week we discussed one poem a piece by Hilary Jacqmin, Keith Woodruff, and Kierstin Bridger, each submitted for different issues. Another Slush Pile first!
First up was “Private Lives” by Hilary Jacqmin.
Hilary S. Jacqmin earned her MA from Johns Hopkins University and her MFA from the University of Florida. Inspired by Baltimore performance art group Fluid Movement's elaborate water ballets, Hilary aspires to learn synchronized swimming. This summer, Hilary has kept busy by going to entirely too many concerts (including Beyoncé, Weezer, and Jason Isbell), baking a sour cherry pie in honor of her Door County, Wisconsin family heritage, and seeing Hamilton on Broadway
Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2011, edited by D.A. Powell, The Awl, Pank, Subtropics, Passages North, AGNI, and elsewhere. You can also read her article on "killing your darlings" here!
This poem struck a chord with everyone at the table. It’s hard to write a poem about boredom that isn’t, well, boring! We were right there with her in her grandparent’s house, trying to pass the time.
Next we discussed Keith Woodruff’s “Bride of Frankenstein Blues,” submitted for our Monsters issue.
Keith “from the Black Lagoon” Woodruff has a Masters in creative writing from Purdue University, and lives with his wife Michelle and son Whitman in Akron, Ohio. His work recently appeared in The Journal, Quarter After Eight, American Literary Review, and is forthcoming in Wigleaf. His haiku have appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Mayfly, Acorn, A Hundred Gourds, and in Big Sky: the Red Moon anthology.
We all sympathized with poor Frankenstein trying to find love in the modern dating world, but this poem also sparked discussion of “pick-up” artists. We wondered what Frankenstein’s Bride would say about his pick-up methods? Regardless, the poem was accessible to all of us.
Last, we read “To the Girl From the Reformatory Town” by Kierstin Bridger, submitted for our Locals issue!
Kierstin is a Colorado writer and winner of the Mark Fischer Prize, the ACC Studio award and was shortlisted for the 2015 Manchester Poetry Prize in the UK. Western Colorado is full of incredible writers, and for the past several years they’ve been performing Literary Burlesque! This year they pulled a switch-a-roo on Oh Brother Where Art Thou. They changed it to Oh Sister and combined themes with The Odyssey. Kirsten says, “It was a smash, and so very collaborative.”
You can listen to Kierstin read from her book, Demimonde, here.
We were intrigued by the imagery in Kierstin’s poem. Although none of us grew up in a “reformatory town” the emotional language put us in the mindset of the “girl.”
Over the years, PBQ often accepts work, contacts the authors, and then gets told there’s been a revision. Almost always, the original is better than the revision. We discussed why this might happen, and how difficult it is to know when your own work is “finished.” Let us know what you think—do you continue to work with your work once you’ve sent it out?
You can find PBQ on Twitter @paintedbrideq or on our Facebook.
Don’t forget to visit our Facebook event page to discuss this episode, and subscribe to our iTunes account!
Read on!
Present at the Editorial Table:
Kathleen Volk Miller
Marion Wrenn
Tim Fitts
Jason Schneiderman
Caitlin McLaughlin
Production Engineer:
Joe Zang
PBQ Box Score: 3:0
-------------------------
Private Lives
They have retired
to lost pines
and BurgerTime.
When our tan Malibu
grinds up
the switchback
to their mock-
Tahitian Village
in the Texas hills,
the grandparents
can barely stand to touch us.
But “Little David,”
they cry out, until
my father blushes.
Kindness is cold
champagne coupes
at 5 and 6 o’clock,
then Jeopardy. A walk
through bull pine,
clearing brush.
Whatever can be done
with us? My sister’s
fist is purpling
with cactus spines;
my mother’s stomach
bites; this week, I will not bathe.
The grandparents shy
from our commotion. Secretly, we flip
through The Handmaid’s Tale.
Our shared air mattress
crackles like a seed. We’re trapped:
now that we’ve come,
they won’t let us go out
past the dry creek bed.
Next year, they’ll never
even leave the house.
Why is their clubhouse
impermeable,
a miniature Pentagon?
And why can’t we order malteds
at Lock Drug? Mother says
“We can’t ask why.”
Inside, we play
endless Rummikub.
Uno, uno.
“There ought
to be a religion
for people who don’t know
what to believe,”
grandmother frets,
her bad eye winking
like a cut-up moon.
Outside, a loop
of fire ants
works a burnt-out
stump, persistent
as pump jacks,
and night’s an oil field.
We are too young
to know what granddad did
with catalytic crackers
at Shell, too dumb
to talk duplicate bridge hands,
Gravity’s Rainbow,
or split stock,
but we think hard
about the hardwood
in the Lockhart
smokehouse
and how granddad’s
bread machine vibrates
like a Gravitron.
Sometimes, they notice me.
They say, “What are you writing?
Are you writing about us?”
They say, “That makes me
so nervous.” I want to tell them
there is so little
that I can write. Almost nothing.
Perfume like propane. A tickless clock.
How quickly they both turn away.
Bride of Frankenstein Blues
Consider the moon, my friend,
how its absence conjures this unromantic air.
Here in the bar, smoke unwinds like bolts
of slow lightning across the gauzy light;
everywhere you look
mouths, small dark graves, chew on drinks.
Now the music gropes its way
through the crowd looking for phone numbers, drags
itself onto the wooden dance floor.
This is no night for finding brides.
Still, you try, touch her wrist during “talk”
& spring the classic recoil. Her black eyes, twitch like nerves,
the head cocks bird-like,
spindly arms jerk back from your touch & clasp up
her breast sacs as the goose hiss splits
her blue lips.
These damn castles are cold.
Some nights, alone again, arms outstretched on the stairs,
you think you might prefer
the murderous torches. Anything to light you up.
To the Girl From the Reformatory Town
You wrestled against the clutches of brothers and cousins, etched lessons
in your muscle, broke tendencies, rerouted synapse with unwritten
chapters entitled, Risk, Pain, and Tolerance. Though pale and tender as
your own, you clawed your way into their flesh; red scratches and waning
moons of bruise. You carved a language of ferocious prey and warning but
more startling than the DNA that curled from under your nails was the
power which made you surge, the breathless current of survival that ran
like a lightning rod through the center of your axis as you spun in and out
of years knowing blood tracks would either catch up with you or become
abandoned to faster byways and untranslatable modes. So you walk, never
looking over your shoulder, one step in front of the other, past the
fermenting bumper crop yard-fruit. Never mind the dirty shoelace untied,
the frayed, grey string dangling over the trestle bridge track. You need this
grip of heat, the hot rail under your feet. It's like the static warmth the
addicts wear like skullcaps, the chokecherry buzz after needle pierce and
plunge. Keep your hair blown back, baby, and charged with the horizon
line. Ignore the periphery of prison men in orange. Their 40 ounce cans
and spent shells are their business not yours. Disregard the jackrabbit
carcass and its fur which still clings but will sail away soon like dandelion
seeds. Remember it's not a charm and their sentence is not your sentence;
you can't do that kind of time. Keep going, never say, it'll all blow over
someday because lies like that scatter, fade, sink back to soil. They'll
transform into fragments so sparse, so swallow-drunk, the next generation
will skip the deciphering stone, misspell the story of you, digitize and
archive it on some pixelated and odorless, dot com.