Episode 14: Martinis are Just Like Testicles

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 -------------------------   Hilary Jacqmin 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.   Keith Woodruff 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.   Kierstin Bridger 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.