Monthly Archives: April 2015

#RemixReallySystem, Derivative Works, Issue Four, Randomness, Text Files

#RemixReallySystem piece by Cathryn Cofell

Here is a vending-machine poem by Cathryn Cofell, based on a text file of words randomly selected from Really System issues 1-5.

IMPATIENT
Intent                                     negotiable                              half-formed
obviate                                  beach                                        memories
fifty year-old                      systems                                   as cellophane
name                                       as aura                                     as torch
engulfs you                          in swoon                                 falls
in hot                                       waves                                       larger than
plain                                         grammar                                obtained
death                                       tired                                          corvid

 

 

Cathryn Cofell’s poem Throb appeared in Issue Four. She is the author of Sister Satellite (Cowfeather Press) and six chapbooks, and performs her poems to the music of Obvious Dog on Lip. She serves on the WI Poet Laureate Commission and has helped launch Verse Wisconsin, the Fox Cities Book Festival and WFOP Chapbook Prize. Visit her at www.cathryncofell.com or on Twitter @CatCofell.

#RemixReallySystem, Contributors, Derivative Works, Issue One, Randomness, Text Files

#RemixReallySystem piece by Lea Galanter

Here is Lea Galanter’s contribution to #RemixReallySystem, based on the words in this text file.

William’s Dilemma

The skies that once existed laughed at William’s
plastic poems, though he tried to bury them
before he was forced to leave his nontraditional Dylan summer.
Theory can only be proper in raging hell
the Hydra said, so harbor your trivial tasks
deep in the purple point of possibility.

Not being good enough, he started running
down the fairy lane, passing flats of sparkling peach marmalade,
unable to withstand their allure.

Soups steaming in ancient ovens
whispered womanly wisdom into his mouth, saying
escape this foreign rhetoric, flee this red-eyed threat.
You are not putty that can widen the fetid horizon,
dissolving into black, and the physician cannot relate
to the lyrical falsehoods they fabricate in Korea.

Go now to that chapel in the Roman market
which vainly waits for clairvoyant July to bring
brightness to the immortal tombs.

 

Lea Galanter’s poem When Lost in the Woods appeared in Issue One.  She is a Seattle-area editor and writer. After playwrighting for many years, she ventured into writing poetry and has studied with several Seattle-area poets. She also has a background in theater, and has studied voice and performed onstage in Seattle. She is president of the board of DramaQueen, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting women playwrights.

#RemixReallySystem, Anagrams, Contributors, Derivative Works, Images, Issue Two, Randomness, Text Files

5 #RemixReallySystem Images from Susan L. Lin

Here are Susan L. Lin’s #RemixReallySystem pieces, handmade anagrams of words from this list of randomly-selected Really System text.

remix really system 1

remix really system 2

remix really system 3

remix really system 4

remix really system 5

 

Susan L. Lin’s poem When You Are Sleeping appeared in Issue Two. She completed her MFA in Writing at California College of the Arts, where she spent her days photographing toy dinosaurs and eating pie. Her novella Goodbye to the Ocean was a semifinalist in the 2012 Gold Line Press chapbook competition. Her short prose recently appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review,Ghost Town, Midway Journal, MadHat Annual, and Gravel.

#RemixReallySystem, Derivative Works, Randomness, Text Files

2 #RemixReallySystem pieces by Pauline Bickford-Duane

These two pieces by Pauline Bickford-Duane were based on the this text file of words randomly selected from Really System issues 1-5.

#1

A
flock
of sheep
climb this rocky
mountain, careful
as regular travelers who
understand the whim and wit
of nature. Not chased, not disorderly,
integrated with each other yet unconnected
from the world they leave behind. Parsecs pass
and the last sunrise spreads over the land. A buzz blooms
among them, a sonic communication that becomes not only wise
counsel but the opening to a discussion of what knowledge exactly these
silver hills hold, and why we must go there, to be as happy as others are in pictures.

 

 #2

Well, I thought I might see more clearly
if I stepped into a cafe and watched the people go by,
outwardly such a calm flock
and in pictures they always seem to have it together,
but now it’s clear,
the faces here aren’t happy,
they’re being chased by some inhuman buzz,
endless counsel that becomes abuse,
a sonic disorder of the mind
that unconnects people and blooms for parsecs
and integrates with every last person until|
even the silver-haired can’t remember
that happy environment that used to be about the land.

 

 

Pauline is a senior at Wheaton College (MA) and is double majoring in English and French Studies.

#RemixReallySystem, Contributors, Derivative Works, Issue Five, Randomness, Text Files

#RemixReallySystem piece by Geramee Hensley

Below is Geramee Hensley’s #RemixReallySystem piece, based on this stack of fine words from ReallySystem 1-5.

 

The Island & how we pray to be known

What a sight! The cellophane plane crashed like a swoon of systems failure.

What an impatient way to fall.

This half-formed beach has corvids instead of sand. On the edge of the gulf we scoop grammar into buckets.

Somebody says “we need to obtain a name” for the rhyme and sake of it. All these waves of syntax and not a single name.

Looking, we take torches into the forest. Instead of trees, fifty-year-old memories larger than death.

In this aura of negotiable intent, we tire. Tongues fumble for words to obviate our mouths of this hot silence.

 

 

Geramee’s process note: The first word on my list was plane. I immediately thought of Lost. I went from there. I knew that I wanted to include every single word and make this as short as possible. I also used all the words in their original form. I didn’t want to do any kind of conjugation/pluralization and wanted to use the words as is. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to take this list of words and get them all into something relatively short and tight. 

Geramee Hensley’s poem November is an anagram for fishhook appeared in Issue Five.  He is from Cleveland, Ohio. He attends Capital University where has taught a portion of a creative writing class. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief for the student literary magazine, ReCap and Managing Editor for the student newspaper, The Chimes. His work has been featured in Souvenir Lit Journal, Melancholy Hyperbole, The Harpoon Review, and is forthcoming in JAB.

#RemixReallySystem, Contributors, Derivative Works, Issue Four, Randomness, Text Files

4 #RemixReallySystem pieces by Miho Kinnas

Click here to read four 4-point poems by Miho Kinnas, based on words from this random selection of Really System text.

The 4-point form was developed by Miho’s friend and collaborator Shelly Bryant.

Miho Kinnas’s poem Earlobes appeared in Issue Four. She is a 2012 cohort of the City University of Hong Kong MFA program in Poetry. Her first book of poems, Today, Fish Only is due to be published in mid-2014 from Math Paper Press of Singapore. She now lives in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

#RemixReallySystem, Contributors, Images, Issue Five, Randomness, Text Files

#RemixReallySystem piece by Taunja Thomson

Taunja Thomson’s image-based #RemixReallySystem piece, built from these words.

Taunja Thomson - Part 1 - The Declined

Taunja Thomson - Part 2 - We Decline

Taunja Thomson - Part 3 - Bell

Taunja Thomson’s poem Skull, My Former appeared in Issue Five. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Poets’ Collective, The Cincinnati Poetry Review, and The Aurorean. Her poem “Seahorse and Moon” was nominated for the Pushcart Award in 2005. Several of her poems will be featured in the summer and spring editions of The Cahaba River Journal, as well as in winter issues of Squalory, Lime Hawk Journal, and Wild Age Press.

#RemixReallySystem, Derivative Works, Randomness, Text Files

#RemixReallySystem piece by Charlotte Fressilli

A #RemixReallySystem story by friend-of-the-journal Charlotte Fressilli, based on this pile of text.

The Perks of Loving a Cabbie

When I climbed to Heaven I could feel my feet sifting through granules of cumulonimbus the way they once dragged through Cape Cod sand and the heaviness made me so tired I had to stop and rest. Huffing my soul’s salty breath out of cracking lips, I strained to remember the summer hush of dry red wine passing through them, chasing down pasta, but I could not.

When you climbed to Heaven they offered you the escalator but you took the stairs. So slight you are, but somehow you made it easily and the wives of the cloud-workers stopped their stitching and watched you samba past their windows.

When I climbed to Heaven I went wondering. Weeks of ascent I spent feeling the crook of a wooden spoon still imprinted on my palm and I tried to sing the way my mother taught me but all I could think of was the Yankees and how that grass looks in the middle of the Bronx.

When you climbed to Heaven, the Rainbow Widows watched you glide on the atmosphere and they cheered out their assessments of your grace in quadrilles wrung from the scarves they dipped in pools of their syrupy paint.

When I climbed to Heaven, my steps seemed an allegory—what were they telling me?—and I thought on it ceaselessly but it made the trek harder and so I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth instead.

When you climbed to Heaven you did not question why. You have always understood better than I do what writers often try to say and only stand-up comedians truly know: when the time is right, you walk.

As I climbed to Heaven, I called out for reason, at least reason.

As you climbed to Heaven, you thought only of me and called out, “Cora!”

When we met in Heaven it was closed. We had disenfranchised ourselves. Our visit was unlicensed.

I sobbed and counted my sins: the summers spent huffing the vapors of wine instead of teaching what needed to be taught; the lies I had written in quadrilles and allegories to keep them hidden from even myself, buried beneath the pool; the weeks’ worth of assessments and replacements I had parceled out into granules of my time.

Then I looked at you, at the slightness of you, and somehow your eyes were dry. You switched your headlamp back on, took me by the hand and lead the way back down to earth on foot. It was only when we were among the trees that I realized—saw in those eyes—that the door had been open to you where it had been closed to me.

What could I do but love you for your sacrifice and thank fate to have been the wife of a cabbie. You guys have always understood better than I do what writers often try to say and only stand-up comedians truly know: when the time is right, you walk.

Charlotte Fressilli is a senior at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, majoring in English and Italian Studies. She acts as the Co-Editor to Rushlight, Wheaton’s literary magazine.

#RemixReallySystem, Contributors, Derivative Works, Issue Three, Randomness, Text Files

#REMIXREALLYSYSTEM PIECE BY J. Bradley

J. Bradley‘s #RemixReallySystem piece, based on this set of words:

Yelp Review – Medieval Times

You will draw a moat of seduction around salt and pepper shakers using only animal grease, skin. Worry not of errant lance shards seeking to pacify you. Worry not how the beer refracts your intentions. Worry what you look like when the photos protect this moment from revision.

 

 

J. Bradley’s poems Yelp Review: Planned Parenthood of Greater Orlando & Yelp Review: The Milk Bar appeared in Issue Three.  He is the author of the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), with art by Adam Scott Mazer. He lives at iheartfailure.net.

#RemixReallySystem, Contributors, Derivative Works, Issue One, Randomness, Text Files

#REMIXREALLYSYSTEM PIECE BY TERRY WOLVERTON (PART 2)

Here is the second installment of Terry Wolverton‘s #RemixReallySystem piece, based on this pile of words.

Become silver
I’m looking for alchemy. I want to transmute myself from flesh into precious metal. I want to increase my market value. I want to be around for hundreds of years, needing nothing more than a little polish once in a while. Fingers will caress my surface, eyes will appraise me. I would be able to dress up any occasion. I would be hard and shiny instead of withered and sickly. I would be able to hold my head up high in any setting.

The last council
You’ll never get that group together again, not after what happened last night. We knew there might be friction, but we hoped some good might come of it.  Nobody expected the fat man to start throwing pies at the skinny lady, and for sure no one expected her to take off her pumps and start thwacking the tired hunchback on his head. That’s when the snakes were let loose, and this caused Elinore to pull the fire alarm. Unfortunately the mouse was trampled in the rush to escape.

Land opening into the east, there’s a bowl with hide sides on the west but the opening is to the east. I saw rabbits on the property and hawks flying overhead. There is no more land once you reach the Pacific Ocean, if you want to travel farther you have to go into space; that’s just what people want to do now, book a one-way trip into the stars. It costs all the money you have and more but where you’re going you won’t need money, no Walmart on Mars at least not yet it’s a sense of adventure that brought us here but now we’re pressed up against the edge and feeling hemmed in

Hardly fell
I meant to take a big leap so that I would descend until my consciousness funneled to a small dot and disappeared so that there would be no one left to feel the impact but I miscalculated and instead I just fell a short distance and all the time I was yelling at myself about this stupid mistake and when the sidewalk appeared underneath me my bones felt a most unpleasant sensation of shattering

Environment blooms
You’d think it would take the hint—we poison it, overpopulate it, store nuclear waste in its womb; we burn it; we siphon off all its water; we farm it until the topsoil is dust that blows into the wind; we overheat it; we buy and sell it as if it had no sentience. Still the environment produces. It’s as if it can’t help it. It loves us despite ourselves, and the worst we do, the more it tries to grow.

Buzz go
She’s driven by a kind of speed that comes from a supernatural source she can’t seem to stop herself and she’s always in motion. The light that shines from her eyes is not like the sun or the moon but like some kind of artificially generated wattage that makes you want to put on sunglasses or pull down the shades. There can be no darkness in her presence, only that relentless illumination that assaults the eye but doesn’t really shed light; it’s a demonic power.

Parsecs
I wouldn’t know how to measure the distance between the sun and the next nearest star. I figure if I needed to get to that star I would suddenly understand how to do it. I wouldn’t build a tin can and try to fly there.  I would dematerialize and travel as energy and then could go wherever I want. Earthlings can be so literal and it’s too bad because we miss a lot that way. Big numbers tend to give me a headache. I’m smart enough but not in that way.

Terry Wolverton’s Sizzle & Chew appeared in Issue One. She is the author of ten books of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, most recentlyWounded World: lyric essays about our spiritual disquiet. She is the founder of Writers At Work, a creative writing studio in Los Angeles, and Affiliate Faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.