Changing Latitude

               by Vernon Frazer


stranger harmony
exchanged carpet margins
excess struggle
white whiskers
wait till midnight central
*
to return home
the fire so surprised
serpentine shaking
company of gold
his warranty means that
*
glimpses declared
goodness or the barn yard
saw horse
big beast
roller coaster some distance
*
lonely road
prompted ambitious disappearance
bell groaned
coming mood
swimming new borders peacefully

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Vernon Frazer is a regular contributor to this blog. He appears in AlteredScale.com 1 & AlteredScale.com 2. He will also appear in the next issue, coming out in the spring.

Pray by Julianne Davis

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Julianne Davis will appear in AlteredScale.com 3, out this spring.

Artist Statement: I am a self-taught artist from the UK. I enjoy writing, art, and I sometimes make short films. I have two children, both feral.

if could be

(Click to sharpen.)

Parochial Historiography

18 – 20 Dec 2012

by Dan Ryan

Sat down at the table to read a holy book

Talking about a standard textbook of US History
a perfect hypocrisy in which
nothing is as its given or told as it was
a mythologistical and methodological book of lies
held up to be sacred scripture by
many a proud white American patriot
innocents mostly
with no sense of their whitewashedover eyes
misperceived perceptions of a real unreality
a desperately advertised history desperately pitched
and barrel – rolled
by stoned sky pilots flying on fictitious fictions
stoned on the meth of the great myth
innocents mostly
innocently perpetrating unto others
what was perpetrated unto them
dropping bombs of imaginary history on
an unsuspecting and unconcerned populace
all participants involved blinded by the
opaque smoke of myth
that great nauseating myth
getting high on the nausea and digging it
blind leading the blind down the back staircase of
time and memory
stumbling over loose and sometimes missing altogether treads
along hallways of uncomprehended responsibility
lined by doors of denial offering sanctuary from
unacknowledged atrositites
against oh so many that we speak of not
but of one - just one - I feel compulsive necessity to so do
if only to clear my mind heart and spirit of emotional congestion
the cause of which being the indecently faithful not – so innocents
continuously and all the while quoting chapter and verse from
the holy book of lies the pages empty of any mention toward
mentioning the selfishly selfish exploitations implicitly implicit in
the pioneers’ entry into Indian lands
the intentionality of their intent being to destroy in whole or
in part all things Indian
insanely and certifiably convinced of their cultural and
racial superiority
waving manifold manifestos of manifest destiny
in frantic franticness pushing Indians out of every and all portions
of the western hemisphere
aided and shamelessly abetted by an American government
honoring virtually and absolutely almost none of the treaties it signed
in disappearing and invisible ink the Indians’ Indian-ness dying
from an excess of death

I could go on and on and fucking on but in the ending reality
nothing is sacred

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Dan Ryan is a regular contributor to this blog. A poem by him will appear in AlteredScale.com issue 3, out in March.

Purgatory Hill's melaniejane

Purgatory Hill just released their second album, the magnificent Invisible Pistols. There is no doubt that pat mAcdonald—famous for "The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades," a mid-80s hit he penned for his then group Timbuk 3—leads the band with his raucous Lowebow guitar playing, piercing harmonica, foot stomping, and strangely mellow vocals. He also writes most of the songs. However, the band would not be what it is without its only other member: melaniejane. She plays small percussion, cello, keyboard, and provides backing vocals.

In spite of his fame—mAcdonald has opened for Bob Dylan and memorabilia from Timbuk 3 are on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—Purgatory Hill usually plays before tiny crowds in very small bars and clubs. On January 18 I saw them for no cover with about 50 other people at Frets in Green Bay, WI. After the show, melaniejane and I found the quietest, well-lit spot in the tiny place to conduct an interview. She talks about playing cello, tambourine, and other assorted things. Below are links to melaniejane playing both cello and tambourine.





melaniejane on cello (solo, covering "Come Together" by the Beatles)

melaniejane on tambourine (Purgatory Hill)

melaniejane on cello (Purgatory Hill)

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Purgatory Hill appears in AlteredScale.com issue 1 and pat mAcdonald will appear solo in AlteredScale.com issue 3, out in March.

See "Growing Up with the Music of pat mAcdonald, Part 1" on this blog. Part two will appear in April of this year.

pat recently published Space Kitty Blues. Check it out at the Purgatory Hill website.

melaniejane's website

He Said, She Said

by Susan Lewis

                Tell me everything, he coyly clamored. After which? she parried, pulling a muscular pirouette on the head he’d hoped to nail. Which put a certain crimp in their love & let live. They sampled cloisonne, Kama Sutra, & sous vide, but none raised the frisson of those (pre)historic misfires.  So they scuttled speech & met for froth & frolic beneath the smiling visage of the Dalai Lama & his Mischievous Monkettes.  But neither foul nor fair was the musk-laden air; no one knew what to toss and what to spare.  So on they siphoned nirvana & need, spinning their score with high-voltage static & copious doses of the sweetest, literal & figurative, statistically significant regret.

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A regular contributor to this blog, Susan Lewis is editing a gallery of textual poetry for AlteredScale.com 3. Her poetry will also appear in another gallery, edited by Mary Kasimor.

Susan is the author of  How to be Another (Cervena Barva Press, forthcoming 2013), Commemorative Edition (White Knuckle Press, forthcoming 2013), At Times Your Lines (Argotist e-Books, 2012), Some Assembly Required (Dancing Girl Press, 2011), Commodity Fetishism, winner of the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Poetry Award, and Animal Husbandry (Finishing Line Press, 2008).  Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in a great number of journals, including Atlanta Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Boog City, Cimarron Review, Eclipse, Fact/Simile, Monday Night, The New Orleans Review, Phoebe, Raritan, Seneca Review, Verse (online), and Verse Daily.  She is Editor of MadHat Press and Managing Editor of MadHat Annual and MadHat Lit. Her website is www.susanlewis.net.

stopgap

by Jefferson Hansen

perceived
finality
& affective
memories roll,
snapping synapses
into radical
new orders

the end is
merely 
stretching