Episode 01: PBQ--WTF?

In our inaugural episode, we discussed four poems from Emily Corwin, and three poems from Leah Falk. I don’t think it was just our happy-to-launch mood that caused such an impressive box score...       In our inaugural episode, we discussed four poems from Emily Corwin, and three poems from Leah Falk. I don’t think it was just our happy-to-launch mood that caused such an impressive box score. Emily’s poems were all submitted for the Monsters issue, and with their very Grimm/grim fairy-tale qualities juxtaposed against their embrace of fun with language, we were smitten. Poems up for discussion were “pink girl takes a tumble,” “thwack,” “out like a lamb,” and “pink girl kicks the bucket.” Thank goodness some of us are at the editorial table remotely--we might have come to fisticuffs over who got to read these poems. (Listen to Emily read a poem at Split Rock Review!)    Leah Falk’s “Visiting,” “Commonest in Nature,” and “Islands,” can’t really be categorized as of a particular “type.” Each of these had us wanting to linger and didn’t disappoint when we did. Haunting (listen--you’ll get it) and redolent with history, unpacking these poems was nothing but pleasure. Read Leah’s ideas on “Why…some poets perform as though they had just come to in a bad dream?” at The Millions. Watch a video of a performance of her song cycles. You gotta Google this gal for more and more and more.   We’d love to know what you think--let us know on our Facebook page! Sign up for our email list if you’re in the area and even if you’re not! Follow us on Twitter @PaintedBrideQ and Instagram @paintedbridequarterly. Read on! -KVM   ----more---- Present at the Editorial Table: Kathleen Volk Miller Marion Wrenn Tim Fitts Isabella Fidanza   Production Engineer: Joe Zang   PBQ Box Score: 5=2 ------------------------   Emily Corwin pink girl takes a tumble squish squash        she walks   she dreams of woods trees hankering for child meat.   The way is wet and terrible what can she do         boo hoo   spreads her mouth real big, dry lips          doesn’t like water and she crackles.   feels so crumbly, she do               too gimped up          too scaredy cat   to skate across the river bone so skinny brittle   oh fiddlesticks.   she slips downhill like jack, like jill curls, rolly polly to the pit   she pulls the bad hip out and chews on it   Emily Corwin thwack  leg buckles and boom down she goes   into snow powder good for packing.   she tucks and rolls like a cold boulder glob crashes to his windowsill   ferocious little she             hunger-filled   her mouth frothing like half-starved pack of wolves—   all teeth and velvet.   Emily Corwin out like a lamb into the carrot patch into the april pussy-willow wildness she makes a mud cake shakes her pretty rhododendron hips and dips into the dirt clod smooshy. she sinks and sags—a screaming seed into the planet rock oh how it eats, it leaves the bone she comes up pushing daisies.   Emily Corwin pink girl kicks the bucket sprinkle her with fruit punch, sugar powder, glitter glue she’s tickled pink she’s sitting real pretty all the way to the crushed velvet coffin box.   girl with broken armholes girl with a heart spattered—strawberry pulp mushy under her blouse.   goodnight pink girl, back you go into crinoline into creepy crawlies your nose smothered with a calla lily   the bed bugs want a bite.   Leah Falk Visiting When her only boy first felt his throat crowd, she thought of her father’s boyhood fever which washed over his heart  like an ocean over sand. Sand: maybe a window once, in a house the ocean also claimed. Which is to say the body is for some a kind of furniture: in hard times hauled out to the yard and split for kindling. The color of her son’s hair: red, her father’s offering at the pool of cells once huddled in her abdomen. And their skin: pale, pink at cheeks and temples, a flush suggesting blood was only visiting the body. When the fever spread from throat to chest to joints, crumpling her child like rotted wood, she saw again her father close the bathroom door, heard the water soften what had gripped his heart. How else explain the rhythm of their home: irregular and buzzing, like a strummed guitar, the strings held down with insufficient pressure. Little clot of air between rosewood and steel. And here he was visiting again just like she’d always wished, sitting upright in her grown boy’s only body. As if it were a chair. His chair—the one he’d waited patiently for her to offer.   Leah Falk Commonest in Nature Sara Turing Seeds with plumes and wings. Bone, mostly lime. Fresh eggs so soft they hardly hold together. New-born babies growing old. Our bodies’ tiny bricks.   You said: I always seem to want to make things from the thing that’s commonest in nature. Then,   out of air, you made a machine.     What commonness you’d find if you were here – what shapes and colors would repeat, and at what wild,   silent rhythms. Come back, I want the worlds you would have found hiding in this one.     The brain’s loop and resistance. Blood, mostly water. Air and electricity. The birch in the yard, dead parts holding living ones together.   What would you make out of this now commonest thing: your face, still a child’s, reading   the amoeba crawls by changing shape, like a drop of water down a windowpane   swimming round to me each morning like the chorus of a hymn.   Leah Falk Islands Brooklyn, July 2014   We cycle toward the Verrazano Narrows through a strand of sabbath islands.   Teenage girls in black skirts go visiting like their mothers.   Fridays, sirens sing at dusk, reminding us to divide our bodies from the calendar.   Yesterday we woke to video of a man gasping his last rites.   Machado at a friend’s grave wrote y tu, sin sombra ya: how soon you are without shadow.   Where the river dams, glass bottles gather.   Somebody mutters: blessed is the fire-maker, holds a bouquet of wicks above his daughter.   Frame of twilights where we built our little cottages: we can’t live there still.   The sun a stern guard before the door to dusk.   A girl pedals toward the rail between her and the ocean, tumbles as if out of orbit.   Somebody says, happy is the one who can divide the light from darkness.   Whitecaps turn their backs on one another in the bay.