Bedouin Brother and Sister

Self Portrait

Shapeshifting

The Way the Wind Blows

Spirit of Manhattan(Cubist)

Man Playing Khyter

Memories of an Elephant

A Hole in Time

Masquerade

Dancer by the Sea

The Race

Conversation by Lamplight

Juanita Guccione’s life (June 20, 1904- December 18, 1999) spanned all but four years of the 20th Century. Cubist, realist, surrealist, automatist and abstract strains are all to be found in her work, but by 1970 she was painting electrifying works in watercolor and acrylic that elude the most considered categorization. For the better part of her career she had been impercipiently referred to as a surrealist, but her later work abandoned the human figure and juxtaposition of the observed world. This work, lyrical and astral, reflected a painterly independence hinted at earlier in her career.

In the spring of 2004 the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria acquired 174 works she had painted in Algeria in the early 1930s. These paintings will reside in a special museum wing. It is believed that she is the first American woman artist to be so singularly honored by a Muslim nation. Guccione, then painting as Nita Rice, lived for four years among the Ouled Nail Bedouin tribe in eastern Algeria. Her paintings from this period are devoid of the flamboyant romanticism of the Orientalist painters. She painted the Bedouin as friends and neighbors, reflecting the anti-colonialist attitude of her native land. These paintings were shown in The Brooklyn Museum in 1935, receiving a good deal of press attention.

When she returned from Algeria in 1935 the United States was in economic free fall. After the Brooklyn Museum exhibit, this work was then shut away as she immersed herself in an avant-garde then fomenting revolutionary artistic changes.

Guccione began painting as Anita Rice, then changed her name to Juanita Rice, then Juanita Marbrook, and finally to Juanita Guccione after marrying in the mid-1940s.

The French writer and poet Anais Nin, whose portrait Juanita painted several times, said of Juanita, “Our dreams are often diffuse and fragmented. Juanita makes them cohesive and clear, as clear as the daily world. Few people can paint the world of our dreams with as much magic, precision, and clarity. It makes the myths by which we live as vivid and dramatic as our diurnal life.”

(All images used by permission of Juanita’s son Djelloul Marbrook. Bio in part from her site at: http://juanitaguccione.com/)

Self Portrait circa 1936

Exquisite Walking Corpse

Bob Dylan once wrote:
How does it feel
to be all alone,
like a complete unknown,
like a rolling stone?
I know how that feels.
Friends who run away.
Companions in name only
who major in wanting and taking.
Kind words sprinkled
with the broth of condescension.
No fingers lifted to catch me when I fall.
Instead, people stay hushhush
and want to see the leper
tinkle his medium-sized bell
and cry Unclean, Unclean!
Lots of free time
for unwanted thoughts
to multiply inside my brain.
Gordon Sumner wrote:
Be yourself, no matter what they say.
I know how that feels too.
But being myself
is what caused me
to be thrown out of a car
near a dry lake bed,
being told to find my way home
as the vehicle drives off
and I hear laughter before it disappears.

Terry McCarty was born on July 31, 1959 in Electra, Texas. He moved to Southern California in 1988. Terry began writing poetry in the summer of 1997. From 1998 to 1999, he was a member of the Midnight Special Bookstore poetry workshop in Santa Monica. He has been a featured poet in several Southern California venues. Terry has also featured at readings in Las Vegas, NV, San Francisco, CA, Santa Cruz, CA, Berkeley, CA and Seattle, WA.

Terry has also appeared in Lynda and Lisa LaRose’s THE POETRY SPIRAL at Luna Sol Café (Los Angeles), Roni Walter’s BAKSTREEET COMETRI at the Comedy Store (West Hollywood) and last July’s SPARRING WITH BEATNIK GHOSTS reading at The Last Bookstore(Los Angeles).

Published in these anthologies:

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE CONTEMPORARY POETS
(VCP Press 2001 edition)
SO LUMINOUS THE WILDFLOWERS (Tebot Bach)
THE LONG WAY HOME: THE BEST OF THE LITTLE RED BOOKS SERIES 1998-2008
(Lummox Press)

Other books include:
I SAW IT ON TV (Lummox Press)
20 GREATEST HITS: POEMS 1997-2004 (e-book available on iTunes and Amazon Kindle)
IMPERFECTIONIST (Meridien PressWorks)
INTERLOPER (self-published chapbook)

We are all Van Gogh

I am the hairshirt you refuse to wear,
where did you put my left ear?

I don’t really need to know. Truth is
we all have an asymmetrical face.

You’re all those visits from icy mummies
I vainly waited for on Sunday afternoon.

Has it turned to amber in a jewel box?
Which of your lovers will throw it out

or will it be the maid who ripped you off
and lived it up back in Puerto Rico?

Here all the one-earred mutants pretend
some important person heard them,

so why then do they slosh in bloody shoes
to party with wary strangers, and why

inquire endlessly about that sinister ear
knowing how little we want to hear?

This is the world of bandaged Van Goghs
running out of sunflowers and starry nights.

Djelloul Marbrook is the author of two poetry books, Far from Algiers(2008, Kent State University Press, winner of the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and the 2010 International Book Award in poetry) and Brushstrokes and Glances (2010, Deerbrook Editions); and four books of fiction: Guest Boy(2012, Mira Publishing House CLC, Leeds, UK), Saraceno (2012, Bliss Plot Press), Artemisia’s Wolf (2011, Prakash Books, India), and Alice Miller’s Room (1999, OnlineOriginals.com, UK). His poems have been published by American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Orbis (UK), From the Fishouse, Oberon, The Same, Reed, Fledgling Rag, Daylight Burglary, among others. His fiction publishers include Orbis (UK) and Potomac Review. He maintains a lively blog and facebook presence. A retired newspaper editor and Navy veteran, he lives in New York’s mid-Hudson Valley with his wife Marilyn.

A Lonely Sea Of Memories

fighting a genetic history of mental disease

Fear, my omnipotent ocean
Beautiful dark blue vastness
Of all the soon to be forgotten
Turned to non-cohesive, memories
To remember like a cool ice drink of
Water under the hot Texas summer
Refreshing, restoring, rebooting
My past, when I was younger
Diligently working the south Texas fields
With my Mexican parents, my brothers
My father, rewarding us with a cold, water something
For a job well sweated, loads of fresh onions
To be delivered to the sea of food markets
As my secret unveils, losing mental capacities
As everyone with family history knew it would happen
Learning to accept it like my mother, my grandmother
I shall clutch Don Quixote cast upon a lonely sea
Hoping at best to be enjoyed, maybe even understood
As a man on his last voyage from that which eludes him

Juan Manuel Perez is the author of Another Menudo Sunday (2007), O’ Dark Heaven: A Response To Suzette Haden Elgin’s Definition Of Horror (2009), WUI: Written Under The Influence Of Trinidad Sanchez, Jr. (2011), and six poetry chapbooks. Juan is the 2011-2012 Poet Laureate for the San Antonio Poets’ Association. He has also been a featured reader at many poetry venues around the state of Texas and beyond. His work has appeared in descant, Elegant Rage, San Antonio Express-News, Arts United San Antonio Magazine, La Bloga, New Texas, Concho River Review, The Langdon Review Of The Arts In Texas, The Rhysling Anthology, The Mayo Review, many other publications.

Due to the length of the piece please click Here to read Swimming Under My Father.

Michael O’Keefe is an actor,as well as an author. Perhaps best known for his role as Fred on Roseanne, he has also appeared on such iconic television shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Outer Limits, The Waltons, M*A*S*H, Law & Order and countless others. Michael has also appeared in several films including Caddyshack, Ghosts of Mississippi, The Hot Chick, and Michael Clayton to name a few. O’Keefe holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College. His book also titled Swimming From Under My Father is available now. For more information please see http://www.michaelokeefe.com/

White House East Room, February 5, 1862 Ball (Source: Library of Congress).

The President, in a new swallowtail
coat, and Mary, wearing a white silk dress
inscribed with hundreds of black flowers, hailed
their invited guests: diplomats, judges,
Senators, Cabinet members — ushered
along by attendants in mulberry
-colored outfits, which matched the crockery
(Solferino). In the background was heard
the United States Marine Band: its new
piece, “The Mary Lincoln Polka.” Midnight
came, and the doors to the dining room flew
open, revealing a weird, dreamlike sight:
piles of duck, ham, turkey — in the center,
a model of Fort Sumter made of sugar.

Sparrow lives in a doublewide trailer in Phoenicia, New York with his wife Violet Snow and a few quiet mice. His most recent palindrome is Snack computer ebb beret up mock cans.

(Editor’s note for more on February 5, 1862 please see: http://thecivilwarproject.com/2012/02/05/150-years-ago-wednesday-february-5-1862/

Let’s Get Lost

Global Positioning System says
We always know your coordinates
But better than that
We have no need to know where you are
Because you do the job for us
Inner surveillance
Self-tracking mechanism
Fail-safe and worry-free

But I say
Let’s get lost
Drop our personas and disappear
For the longest lost weekend on record
Lasting the rest of our lives
Let’s say goodbye
To those tired old eyes in the mirror
Like a clueless guest
They’ve overstayed their welcome
Let’s say goodbye
To hustling back and forth
Between point A and point B
Believing we don’t deserve better
Let’s say goodbye
To same-as-yesterday jobs
Airtight families
Trance-inducing television
To the news we’ve all heard
A thousand times before
Let’s say goodbye
To cascading boredom

Boredom which guarantees
That even if we get rowdy
Even if we get loaded
Even if we get high
And leap out of rockets
Onto the far side of the moon
Even if we change our names
And re-enter the game
Plastic surgery
A fake passport
It’s never enough

Instead, the best medicine
In fact, the only medicine
Drop the whole thing
Don’t look back
We’ll drown our wristwatches
Enter a virginal landscape
No idea what time it is
No idea where we’re headed
Cruising the blissful unknown
Safe in each other’s company
Not caring who we are
Like grown-up versions
Of the children we once were
The children who were stolen from us

Michael Brownstein is the author of three novels, Country Cousins, Self-Reliance, and The Touch,as well as nine volumes of poetry. His most recent book is World on Fire, a take-down of corporate globalization and impassioned call for consciousness change.

City of Angels

In the distance, the L.A. skyline is a cluster-fuck of high-rise building; an industrial Goliath that obscures my need for a slice of blue heaven.
Whenever I walk her dystopian streets, it’s impossible to believe that angels reside within the hollow halls of greed, and more improbable to
imagine a host of winged seraphs rubbing elbows and offering solace to poor unfortunate souls trapped in meat cages, concealed beneath bridges and within the shadows of door frames, desperate for a sign of light, a moment of grace.

copyright 2012 Marie Lecrivain

Marie Lecrivain is a writer, editor, and photographer who resides in Los Angeles. She is the editor/publisher of poeticdiversity: the litzine of
Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in various online/print journals, including Haibun Today, Heavy Hands Ink, Illumen, The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and others. Her short story collection, Bitchess (copyright 2011 Sybaritic Press), is available through Amazon.com and smashwords.com.

It’s Complicated

Grandpa loved gambling more than Grandma, so just before he completely frittered away the family fortune, she threw him out. He always wanted to be an actor so he moved to LA and starred in a number of porn movies. Of course, I didn’t know him but I do know that Grandma had a “friend” long before Grandpa frittered, and it could be that Grandpa’s frittering drove Grandma to it or vice versa. Dad and Mom met in a bar, had us real fast and before Mom could spit out her first love child, Dad was loving every woman at work, every woman everywhere he went. He blames our love misfortunes on his loving so much. Way down the line, Mom fell in love with a co-worker and told Dad right when they were in bed making love that she was in love with somebody else, but no, she hadn’t done it with him, not yet but pretty damn close, and Dad says he went all soft and couldn’t love properly since then. A while later after he’d moved into a weird hippie kind of attic apartment with absolutely no furniture except a mattress on the floor and an ashtray, he met one of the great loves of his life. It wasn’t six months later that he told her he had loved another lady or two while he was loving her. He actually got down on his knees and confessed, and she stroked his head and never trusted him again. This went on for years. Meanwhile my oldest sister who was in utero when Daddy was doing all his first loving fell in love with heroin. Now that was an expensive love. Her bf who she lived with helped her pay for it by sending her out to love lots of guys who needed quick loving. Then he od. When Mom and Daddy found out, they were devastated, since Mom was living with the man she fell in love with while she was living with Daddy and this man was an alcoholic in AA and 20 years younger. And wow did he make a fuss about sister’s love habits. Soon Mom and Daddy packed sister off to a treatment center several hours away where she met a lot of very loving girls who had similar loves. But she didn’t love any of them. She did love a boy who there, only she was strongly advised not to because it might not be real love but just their both trying to recover from the same love. When she got out, she got a job at a talent agency, because she too wanted to be an actor like Grandpa, and met a guy who was the son of a famous actor who had an ongoing role in a top TV series. And wow, he loved her and she loved him and they went to a lot of parties in very hip after hours bars and met a lot of lovely people. She was so happy with this love. But one day she passed out at dinner and confessed to Daddy and Mom that she was loving heroin again. And so they had this big family meeting where Mom’s guy, being so well versed in loving alcohol, said he thought that sister’s guy must be helping her love heroin.
 Meanwhile, Daddy kept on loving one of the loves of his life, telling the friend who’d introduced them, well, how many great loves does a man get, he can count them on one hand or less. And the man who introduced them agreed as he’d only been able to count two on one hand and even that, he thought to himself was stretching it.
 Do you count deep crushes, he asked Daddy. Daddy didn’t think so. Sister wound up in another center, this time in Arizona, so far from home and her beloved boyfriend. As if southern Arizona wasn’t close to another country where in one day a person could get some love there. And you will never guess what happened to a cousin whose wedding Daddy’s love and us sisters dressed to the nines for because cousin was wearing a $10,000 strapless Vera Wang. Cousin began to love not eating. Not like any of us loved eating. I mean, we loved food but we didn’t love what it did. Anyway, we all loved being together, except Mom wasn’t invited. Mom’s guy said that after so many years of love and marriage if she didn’t qualify for a black-tie event thrown by Daddy’s family, well, then they’d just rent some videos, smoke some weed, and figgettaboutit. Daddy’s love loved him and we never did understand what was going on there but sister wasn’t in love with her, not that that would sway Daddy from loving her and other ladies. She finally got sick, so sick she couldn’t say anything about Daddy’s others and that’s when he said, Let’s get married, except he said it with half a heart and she heard it like he said it. So they broke up. And he was extra loving with us and she was extra loving with her loves but we could all see right through it. In a few months, a girl from work moved right in to Daddy’s apartment, not the hippie digs, but another, decent place he’d moved into some time, I can’t remember when. The girl knew full well that Daddy was still in love with another woman and that they talked a lot on the phone. How are you, he would say to his real love? And she would say, devastated. And you? He would say, same, except I have a girl here whose clothes are in the same closet where you hung yours. Oh, his real love would say. Why did you let her? Daddy was always quick on the draw and said, well, she makes me coffee in the morning. His real love said, but I did that too. And Daddy would say, yes, I know. There’d be a long pause and finally he’d say, she knows I’m in love with you. Meanwhile my family kept up its love life, no matter what. Mom and her AA love bought a house together. But a short time later, he told her he didn’t love her. Mom fell into hell what with having to pay the mortgage on her own. We couldn’t help her, no, we were in debt ourselves even though Grandma, you remember her from early on in my story, had made sure we grandbabies got our college educations paid for. We loved hard and that cost. Don’t you know that?
Mom didn’t and she got a real surprise. One day her former love broke into their house while she was at work. He took everything that anybody would love and give money for, except the dog. He took the pearls grandma had loved and left for one of us, he took Mom’s wedding rings, he took the stereo, how dumb can you get. Then he disappeared. Mom didn’t love that she had to sell the house and move. Then she lost her job and Daddy felt so bad that he announced to Mom that the mother of his daughters shouldn’t have to worry about where she lived and even though the settlement he gave her during the divorce let her buy the house and support her love, he wound up sending her checks every month so she could live in an apartment.
 Have I mentioned my other sister? She only loved one guy before she loved her husband and they got pregnant before they got married which is no big deal and they were so in love. Everybody loved her more than anyone else in my family because she is so smart and loving and almost has a PhD and is pregnant again and her husband moved out for a while since she convinced him to join a day treatment program, and they both had other lovers, she started first, but says the baby’s his and she’s so lovesick from her and her other lover deciding that it would never work and suffering and all right in front of her husband, her child, and her enormous stomach in which her next baby is living until she sees fit to come out and everyone already loves her especially my Dad who loves girls better than boys which can be ascertained from my previous descriptions. He’d die just die if a man he plays sports with would ever, and even though he’s old he’s still very handsome and lots of men hit on him and the rest kind of make fun of him like the friend who introduced him to one of his great loves way back, cause he’s been through a couple subsequent loves with younger women, most notably one near my age who came from a very religious family but loved to wear high heels and pancake make up and lace bustiers and she drove him crazy especially when he promised to love only her but wound up going to a whore house in Costa Rica from which she caught a disease he didn’t know he’d contracted and she never trusted him again and as part of loving him she tormented him by breaking up with him every few weeks sort of punishing him for all the love crimes he’d committed with all the other great loves of his life.
 Mom, she lives alone now, she’s never loved again.

Gloria Frym’s most recent books are Mind Over Matter (BlazeVOX, 2011) and Any Time Now (Little Red Leaves, 2010). She is also the author of two critically acclaimed collections of short stories–Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press)–as well as many volumes of poetry. A previous collection, Homeless at Home, won an American Book Award. She teaches writing & literature at California College of the Arts.

Prayer to Ganesha

O Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles,
we beseech you to remove the obstacle
Global Warming-denying Republicans have been
to doing anything about Global Warming.

Ganesha a nobler image of the sacred Elephant
than the desecrated image of the Elephant
usurped by a certain political party.

Haven’t elephants been abused enough—
from carnivorous cavemen spearing mastodons
to elephants abused by sadistic mahouts?
from the Roman Circus
to the Barnum & Bailey Circus?

1903: Thomas Edison stages and films on Coney Island
his highly publicized electrocution of Topsy the Elephant
in order to demonstrate alleged dangers of Nikola Tesla’s
alternating current, which, if it posed any danger at all,
it was to Edison’s own competing direct current.
America had used electrocution as capital punishment
since 1890, the year of Wounded Knee.
It took 13 years to get around to an elephant.

Elephants, along with whales dolphins humans,
among the most intelligent beings on the planet.
Elephants renowned for mourning their dead.
The fabled Elephant Graveyard, though,
is only a Tarzan fantasy. No elephants
were present to mourn poor Topsy.
Ah, how the elephants in zoos around the world
would mourn if they knew the remaining elephants
in the wild are so few and so near extinction!

They say elephants never forget. Yet the Repubs forgot
what got us into Vietnam, so went ahead and got us into Iraq.
Or maybe Cheney and Rumsfeld remembered all too well
and used allegations of WMDs as their counterpart to
a fabricated “Bay of Tonkin Incident.”
And now the stampede of Repub attack ads
trampling the minds of America
amid their favorite TV shows!
The berserk rogue Republican fake elephant gives
gentle peace-loving real elephants a bad name!

And now Madison Ave. would have us believe
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
is caused by an elephant sitting on your chest!
A species that killed countless elephants for their tusks
during the heyday of ivory greed and
big-game hunters merrily decimating
the African continent’s teeming wildlife
shouldn’t be blaming elephants for COPD.
The editorial cartoon Republican elephant,
not a real Asian or African elephant,
is sitting on the chest of America.
Yea, the rightwing Global Warming deniers
are sitting on the chest of the planet!

O Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles,
help us remove the obstacles
to saving the world before it’s too late!

Jeff Poniewaz taught “Literature of Ecological Vision” via UW-Milwaukee between 1989 and 2009. His 1986 poem book Dolphin Leaping in the Milky Way won a “Discovery Award” from PEN, the international writers organization. Allen Ginsberg praised it for its “impassioned prescient ecological Whitmanesque/Thoreauvian verve and wit.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti called Jeff’s epic “September 11, 2001” (an abridged version of which appeared in Van Gogh’s Ear and two major 9/11 anthologies) the “best poem I’ve seen on 9/11.” His last name’s pronounced POE-nYEAH-VAHSH and is Polish for “Because.”

Jeff Poniewaz, Allen Ginsberg, and Antler