WRITING
SARAH MARIE
Sarah Paterek is a student of English and linguistics. The brunt of her work explores a number of archetypal women in relation to her own lived experiences. She can be found at sarahpaterek.wordpress.com.
Instagram: @deepwebegirl
Untitled
porous, pious
My hands fold in front of me like a dagger.
my heart, a leper
brewing floods in the black velvet of sleep -
noah, noa, noir.
Help me, God-he, give yourself to me
and I to oblivion.
GALATÉE LARMINAT
@galateia_sarai is a french psycho sex killer, writing about her Dionysian rituals and doing some naked photo booths in the parisian subway.
Instagram: @galateia_sarai
Ennui profond. La chorégraphie sourde et monotone de la pénétration réglée fait s'évader son imagination un peu plus à chaque à-coup. Le mouvement régulier opéré par la verge endurcie, la répétition des bruits de succion identiques, et les halètements saugrenus lui font réaliser à quel point elle s'emmerde. Dans sa tête, elle bat la mesure. Culbute. Tant pis, son corps la prend cette décision de putain. Le défilé militaire cède place à un rituel orgiaque délirant.
Fini le missionnaire langoureux place à la lucha libre. Elle le plaque au sol, il est incapable de faire aucun mouvement et, frappé de stupeur, le visage de celui qui se présentait comme maître d’un art se voit affublé d’un air hébété. Pussy power. Elle allume la lumière, elle ne fait plus partie de ceux et celles qui s'effraient de la moindre mise à nu. Son index caresse avec ravissement et timidité la fine ligne de poils bruns qui relient le creux de ses seins à la naissance de son pubis tandis qu'elle frotte son bassin contre le sien. Frénétiquement. Encore plus fort. Son regard se pose sur sa pomme d'Adam. Il faut sacrifier l’agneau. Elle serre.
Extreme boredom. The silent, monotonous choreography of clockwork penetration makes her mind wander a little further with each thrust. The steady motion exerted by the hardened penis, the repetition of identical suction sounds and the odd panting all make her realize how much she's bored stiff. She's counting the beats in her head. Upheaval. To hell with it, now her body's making the fucking decision. The military parade gives way to a wild orgy-like ritual. Enough with the languid missionary sex, time for some lucha libre. She pins him to the floor, he's unable to make a single movement and, in awe, now the so-called master of his art has a confused look on his face. Pussy power. She turns the light on, she's no longer one of those who fear the slightest kind of self-exposure. His enraptured index finger shyly caresses the thin trail of brown hairs going from the hollow between her breasts down to where her pubis starts, while she rubs her pelvis against his. Frantically. Even harder. She sees his Adam's apple. The lamb must be sacrificed. She squeezes.
MAXWELL CARLSON
"Inspired by the teachings of Zen Buddhism, Jnana Yoga, psychedelia, and universal teachings of love, I use my creative process to seek flow states. This flow causes a perceptual shift in the boundaries and potentiality of our nature and gives life to creative though. Likewise through the action of creating we are shifting our consciousness towards states of flow. The biblical adage of "as above so below" is taken to heart and the source of creation is sought to be known through the act of creation."
Instagram: @mcarlson444
DARK MOMENTS
These dark moments covered and dirt
Leave me with an option
To be the seed and take the opportunity to grow
Or to sit there and accept my grave.
Let me sprout!
Receiving the abundance of light
That upon discovering I bloom.
Not forgetting the dark
My source, foundation, and roots.
LOVE
The love is always there
The love is always there
Sometimes I think I've lost it but the love is everywhere
Lost in my mind
My thoughts give life to fear
Causing me to seek outside
Blind to what is near
Blind to what is now
Blind to what is here
Dissolving from my focus from the love I hold so dear
On occasion I find my focus
And it occurs to me
To stop all my thoughts
Sit still and try to breathe
I am gone and only bliss remains
Then I wish to never leave
And with the thought the bliss subsides
I arrive at illusory needs
I'm Bouncing up and down
And fearing that I will always be.
I need to regain focus
Stop searching and once again I'll see
That the love is always there
The love is always there
Sometimes I think I lost it
But the love is everywhere
MORNING SHITS
You've been gone. Adrift in a sea of dreams.
The tides shift and great waves knock against your vessel.
Your eyes are opened but you try to shut them again.
You battle with this awakening, you wish for it to not happen, but an eye that is not an eye begins to force itself open despite the strength of your will.
And there is nothing to do but run to the throne
And curse yourself for feasting on Za and drinking beer the night before.
I AM
I am Maxwell
I am Jesus
I am Buddha
I am ET
I am Shiva
I am God
I am You
I am everything
So join me in preserving life
So we can grow to know no bounds
To feel good for changing
Allowing the wheel to make its rounds
Enjoy the ride it gives us
Enjoy the pretty sounds
For if you want to become we
You’ll have a scenic route
But if you hold on to you
You’ll end up in the ground
Then right back where you started
And you’ll feel like you missed out
So become each other
You know that it’s the way
Do away with greed for comfort
Keep each other safe
Help one another
To find their rightful place
In the evolution of life
With love, creation and grace
We will become what we are
We are Maxwell
We are Jesus
We are Buddha
We are ET
We are Shiva
We are God
We are Creators of our own reality
Everyone and everything is divine
Treat us with the respect we deserve
Find harmony and love
And we will find heaven in the here and now
REMI NICHOLS
Silky Sacrifice (2020)
Moon blood on my pants
Chicken blood on my hands
Crescent moon hangs on
a dark veil of
twinkling dewey minds.
Two felines stalk and prey
upon the circle
of folks bundled
and them with like tides.
Upside down go Three.
Four shall be what is called on
when the spirit is brought so near.
Pierce through the neck
and open chest side.
Five is enough for me.
Twist the neck and out the blood
down into the bucket and set.
Pin the point between head and vertebrae
severing nerves that bind.
Six pagans call all corners
and thank the sacrifice for life
as spirit and chicken unbind.
Tonight we all shall feast
alongside fellow finds
upon the Silky Sacrifice.
Oh did I forget about the One,
or maybe it was there all along
thinks me.
Remi Star Nichols bases her art off of femininity, occult practices, and ethereal subject matter. She is inspired by the role of women in various religious practices and incorporates the female form into most of her art pieces. Like many artists these days her medium choice crosses a wide range from more traditional forms of art such as painting and sculpture, to film and installation. She is most influenced by her occult and Pagan background.
Instagram: @remi.star.art
SARA NATALE
Sara Natale is a poet and novelist living in South Florida. Her work has been published in Literary Orphans as well as in zines across Texas and Florida. Updates on her work can be found on instagram @Cyber_Bunni.
Instagram: @Cyber_bunni
“Screaming Begins”
Consumed by
summer frailty-
no more
withering away
in idleness.
Make great strides forward-
howling,
blossoming into
drunken impatience.
Ruminate on
aggressive curiosity,
the wild hunt.
Time passes
with sorrow underfoot-
busy wandering strange houses,
newly discovered earth.
Hollow sounding instrument inside
beating away.
Harvest poisonous crops,
feed your inner sick.
Out suffer those before you.
Express yourself
in gas station parking lots-
feel at home with strangers,
never leave the party.
Golden-headed visionary
seeks a better life.
Boisterous species,
undomesticated bodies in
glass vessels.
Children cower at the fate of adulthood.
Torture the young with oncoming days.
“Scars from Last Season”
She must be
a witch,
somnambulant-
devoid of conscience,
awake in the moonlight.
Clouds form above
the garden-plot,
veils fall at dusk.
Water hemlock sprouts
in starbursts of
white petals.
Immortal flowers live
between sky
and earth-
no Eden,
no way to cauterize
open wounds.
“7 Signs Your Guardian Angel is Trying to Contact You”
The floorboards
seize beneath your feet.
The brakes give out.
You hear crying in the walls.
Dead ends appear
at every turn.
Religious radicals shout at you
in the streets.
Empty bottles roll off counters
and shatter on the ground.
You suspect someone is
watching you.
You’re no longer
afraid of the dark.
MARGOT BAILEY
Margot Bailey is a soon-to-be-graduated philosophy student with a fascination for growing/dying things. Their writing draws much inspiration from Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Martin Heidegger, and the various friends and loved ones they've spent the recent years of their life in community with.
Instagram: @margot_plum
Forgotten Something
Love is the plan, the plan is death. Stars dribble through the night sky and erupt as brilliant gaseous pockets of potentiality. There’s little we see, little we don’t see, little we care to see. If you were to keel over right now, choking, unable to breathe, I’m not confident I would be able to resuscitate you. I would try. In time like a heavy quilt consumed by rot and malnutrition, the bones will break. In time like soft cactus flesh once vomited, in time like black algae— swift recourse, belief in transcendence of body before rot. Flame of oil lamp through foggy windows teases an angel from a hole in the rain soaked soil. It was atop a mighty blue mountain of iron and quartz that you first spoke to me of death. Ascending trails of powder blue and copper scree, the flesh of our torsos bare to the sun, you spoke of the mountain’s scaly flesh also exposed, and as the wind ran its fingers through our hair you reminded me that it has longer, greater fingers which run through the pines below. You mused on your soft, wet innards, the blood and guts which arose from dust and will in time return. The mountain is more primal, it is of dust but for it there is nothing from whence to return— as our flesh does deliquesce, these guts of iron and quartz remain as iron and quartz, totems to eternity. That day we witnessed how pliant the flesh really is, how far it can be stretched and drawn out.
One day you arrive home from work certain you’ve found the bones of God. Your wife has no idea where this idea came from or how it found its way into your head. She is concerned about you. Leaves dance in the wind that evening and you are content with your discovery, ready to embrace piety and renounce life according to the flesh. Your wife is red-faced and whispering to her brother on the phone. You are noticing water-gliders on the surface of the stagnant creek and the fine black algae at its edges. There are no fish in this one, you remember your father telling you at some point years ago.
We are not elegant but we are driven. Always bound to rot, always we are driven toward the blossoming that succeeds it. Feral begets feral begets freedom and transcendence. Jesus was a feral begetting feral. Jesus was a proponent of rot and transcendence. You have found the broken bones of God and you are feeling transcendent. Your wife doesn’t want to get out of bed anymore. [At the mountain’s peak you held me in your arms and sheltered me from the wind whose delicate fingers had become claws. I liked hearing you speak of all the things you spoke of, and I liked your arms around my waist, subtle energies of vibrant life mingling between flesh— we were a superconductor that day, I think we were both waiting to be smitten by the wrath of a nameless deity— one fell swoop from the sky sending stone and charred body tumbling toward modest earth below. I felt as if we were intruding, pushing past a precipice into the barren dwelling of this deity. Neither of us knew piety then, but I felt safe against you.]
Love is the plan, the plan is death. You’ve always wished you were a boy, you’ve always been a boy. There was a stream out back of the house I grew up in, we would pull out slime and algae, pretend we were little alchemists creating some special potion of unspecified significance— we never capped them in any crystal vial or ceramic cask. There are memories of old bricks in school-yard afternoon running under languid sun, sweating and learning how to curse. There are memories of automobile collision in blanket snowfall, piloting a crummy starship into an unnamed star, into your own mind— drilled, hammered— quiet on the couch with lights dim and fresh bread in the cabinet. I am looking from your backpack by the blank TV to the locked door and back again. You are in the restroom processing backlogged emotional gunk. I think we are both considering heading south. Gums tough and pink, cold cup of coffee on the counter. It’s all medicine, it’s all medicine. Tobacco smoke leaves the car putrid in the morning, the lungs sweet and tired. I spent time in what used to be a mining settlement out west and learned how to be quiet and alone, ecstatic on a mountainside. I fell in love with my best friend, I was exalted and I was damned. I was a room full of expensive gasses suspended in vacuum tubes.
The body is dampened, breathing suppressed, the CD skips. Stained wood table-top board game we’ve played every night for three months straight. A small jar of raspberry preserves on the kitchen coutner, the way my eyes tremble back and forth like a stumbling colt when I haven’t slept for three days straight. Sparkling wine in a stemless glass, my mother making toast on the morning of the first frost. I am wondering where my words went when I notice, for the first time, a drop of red paint on my second-hand leather boots. I am questioning concerning futility. Neptune in its icy stupor is condemned to the voidic fringes of existence, a spire of gold heralds good forune to those who will make the ascent. A silversmith reveals a chalice and tradition reveals an heirloom. Come hither forward into prophetic ecstasy born of desert solitude and yesterday’s dried salmon. I’ve fallen from some indeterminate height and I’m groaning, holding myself in the dry grass. It is july. It is too hot. I am dehydrated.
Wooden shelves we each took turns stocking, satellites gliding through adolescent night that I pointed out to you on my birthday. Sitting outside on a blanket by the fire, it was years ago. Maybe time is an illusion. If so, it’s more of a weighted quilt than a veil. [I’m walking down center street one grey-skied afternoon thinking of dinner-time plans with folks I haven’t seen in months I’m turning onto high street and I suddenly feel so exalted I feel as if I have stepped directly through the gates of heaven and into the hands of some ineffable Goddess this feeling lasts no more than six or seven seconds and I am back in the dirty city thinking about dinner-time plans with folks I haven’t seen in months and I’m feeling the warm pavement through the thin soles of my shoes and I’m turning onto east third and now I’ve forgotten where I’ve left my car.] We’ve all forgotten something. You look at me and pose a question I can’t grasp an answer for. You’ve fallen from some indeterminate height and you’re groaning, holding yourself in the dry grass. It is February. It is too cold. You are hypoxic.
Love is the plan, the plan is death. Today the mountain ridges are stiller than they’ve ever been, today I’m apprehensive to walk down the hill.
Margot Bailey
for to be swallowed, for to be held secure
rot the millenia, the aeons
a flood to swallow gestalt
to swallow any such lineage
such etymology of consciousness
a broken ground of exchange, an economy
of awareness situated over quivering fault lines
gaping earth to swallow dreamly gallows
hollering along blank teleology with empty language
face-down in dense carpet fibers, an abstraction
pointing backward into glowing amber oblivion oblivious
to the lament of an obsolete technology lost in sand
delirious coastal winds, deleterious minerals lost
beneath dense bleached beard fibers vining
toward a staggering heart scraping blood
through crystalized veins held in wait by a promise
of parted waters and
void-mind
chanting its own negation
the imperative of the terminus blares within a vacuum:
the diacetyl analogue of being-toward-death
procured from grey waters perpetually stilled
perpetually breeding mosquito mind
[this hail of crystal skulls]
for to be swallowed within inclement weather
for to be steeped within this dark night
this warmth of memories in an oven
for to be held secure within a womb of mud,
a throat
full of soil
limbs as branches bare of leaves
a sap that stains the pages
of a manual with no reference
the bulb, the rhizome, the fibrous roots,
constant flood rots the millenia
the aeons
Margot Bailey, December 2019
last edited: February 2020
SKY HAZARD
Schuyler Hazard is a painter, photographer and poet currently based in Los Angeles. Her painting practice is centered around abuse in the home, and the loss of innocence, and is informed by personal experience. The stuffed animal bunny is a motif throughout, a replication of one she had since birth, to stand as a double, distancing herself from the work and allowing room for the viewer. The works use a blanket as substrate and support and a range of non-traditional materials for mark-making. Each element is critical in conveying meaning to the overall narrative. In her poetry practice, the same themes are explored in a different medium - the emphasis being on loneliness and longing, rather than violence and neglect. She is currently working on a book, combining her poetry and drawings along with family photos to merge two parts of her overall artistic practice.
Instagram: @bakedzitti
Bedtime Stories
Did it even happen?
You don’t have to tell me I’m special anymore,
But at the very least
Look at me.
Cruelty is
Giving someone something so encompassing
Then ripping it away
Then denying existence.
Obsessive.
I obsess over
Hands on my shoulders,
Skin which I cannot sear,
Invisible marks that mar
And turn me into
Something I don’t recognize.
In my mirror
I see
Indentations.
Territory
Pioneered previously.
Weathered.
Conquered.
Victim blaming,
Vicious, vilifying:
Human emotions evade.
Grasping, gripping
The precipice of sheets,
The world drops off behind you,
The world recedes into
The tips of fingers,
The pressure of shoulder blades,
The bedtime stories we tell ourselves.
“Volcanoes”
Sleepy
Sighing
Softening
I breathe in
And exhale a symphony –
A quietly humming
Adoration.
The antithesis of longing,
The absence of worry,
Goosebumps.
Feels like floating
Feels like falling asleep before you
Feels like falling
Into
The indentation just above your lip,
The way your collar rubs your neck,
The way you turn towards me in your sleep.
All of these things
Close my airways.
RV BLACKSEA
RV Blacksea is a writer based in Los Angeles.
Instagram: @hagathacrusty
Out of Bounds
Boundaries
Brown
Bodies
Brows
Furled like a map
Dark
Sharp as a dagger
Or so they say
Feeling threatened
(as always)
Framed
Drawn
Contained
An Unreliable Narrator
These are not your boundaries
They're borders
Barricades
Buffer zones
Bothered you felt the need to draw yourself
This makes you bad.
White goes first, everybody knows that
Setting
Staging
Saying
Playing
Tag -- "you're it!"
A subject
Frozen
A candlewax
Melting
A body
Diseased
A boundary
Bound.
DIANA ESPINOZA
"Through this poem/manifesto, I aim to clarify the ways in which I have come to define the nature of consent. Channeling through the lens of my prior experiences, this is a step forward in a process of coping through personal trauma."
Instagram: @arteplanette
In an active effort to
reclaim ownership of my body,
I have compiled a list of things that I can only deliver in a most earnest context.
Memories reversed,
unlaced and frayed at
the edges, overturn my
stability,leaving me dazed.
Moments rejoiced, now cast a shadow of doubt over an
impression of my own self-awareness, that I had
carried proudly for so long.
Now, I find myself choking on my own thoughts,
while my mind races through a cycle of revelations.
I feel vulnerable.
These are some things that I have learned so far:
-
Sometimes the way to learn your boundaries is to realize they have been violated.
-
Mistakes can stem from discomfort, which often leads to compliance. It's okay. Compliance is not a valid form of consent.
-
Sometimes compliance can be a defense mechanism- it can be a conscious choice.
But it still does not imply consent.
-
Enabling someone to indulge in a habit that they're trying to overcome is a
violation of their trust and a direct act of disregard for their wellbeing.
Enabled compliance is not consent.
-
There is growth in realizing your boundaries have been violated. Though facing this realization firsthand, may feel chilling, uncomfortable, potentially even isolating, it is a sign of reaching a greater level of comprehension. You are strengthening your awareness and your relationship with your body. You are engaging intimately with your inner self.
An Ode To The Men Who Have Violated
My Boundaries, The Ones Who Have Violated
Others’ Boundaries & Beyond:
Your ”size” doesn't gauge the degree of your
entitlement to satisfaction. There is no power
dynamic between us, besides the boundaries,
we should have established.
Get to know your own boundaries and don’t be afraid to establish them with your partner. Be conscious of your future partners’ boundaries.
If you don’t know, ask for consent.
If you don’t respect sex workers, and there’s
porn in your search history,
I hope your computer gets a gnarly virus.
It’s okay if you can’t accept the extent of your partner’s sexual history. Take it as an opportunity to acknowledge and respectfully establish your boundaries. After that, leave.
Do not be passive-aggressive.
DO NOT SHAME OR DEGRADE YOUR PARTNER.
If realizing the extent of your partner’s sexual
history overwhelms you, that does not give you the right to disrespect them.
It does not give you the right to assume that your partner lacks boundaries.
Being in a relationship doesn’t mean you won’t have to masturbate ever again.
It doesn’t matter how horny you are,
it doesn’t matter how much you love each other.
Your partner is their own person and they are not responsible for your needs.