www.metazen.ca

Nothing new will be published here. Here is an excerpt from an upcoming story:

“THERE ARE FIVE OF ME LIVING IN MY HOUSE. Frank, 2 is the youngest. He seldom cries but when he shits, his shits terrible. Frank, 18 is writing a fantasy novel that is set in a Japan-like world. He thinks he’s going to be the next Tolkien so much that we just call him Frank Tolkien. Frank, 41 lives in the biggest room in the house. He smokes cigarettes all day long and cuts the words out of old cosmos trying to turn them into literature. In the attic there is a ghost. He doesn’t come down much, we have to go up and see him. We feed him candle smoke and he tends not to be too haunting. I don’t know for sure if he is a Frank, but I am pretty confident he is my ghost. I am Frank, 26 and I live in the basement. I’m the only blogger of the Franks.”

www.metazen.ca

www.metazen.ca

www.metazen.ca

You will find some excellent writing by authors like Finnegan Flawnt, Howie Good and Felix Soriano as well as my perpetually shitty writing.

Actually metazen.ca is about 90% complete, so you can start finding us there now. Sorry for any hassle, I know I’ll beat myself up over it.

I just ate the little chewy paper wrapper from my muffin-bottom. I think it was the most nutritious part.

The massive nest was built on a soft cushion of bent grass.   Ants crawled from dozens of small holes, each of them carried this crumb or that leaf-bit. Every ant was working to provide for the nest.  A small row of ants carried large oval eggs into a large hole. I peered into the hole and I saw dozens of these eggs lining it. I decided this was the best place to commit my crime against the land of insects.”

“Stop,” Bradbury said. “I want to you probe into the memory for me. Speak in the first person. Become the memory.”

I loath Bradbury and his foolish mind games but play along none the less. I decided to speak slowly, for I knew my recall was important.

“I am like a hawk and I am shrewd, but unlike the hawk, I know the dichotomy of an ant. I know their morphology, their ecology. I know their behaviors because unlike the hawk, my predatory nature includes that of the National Geographic channel. My species has an entire science and market built around the destruction of the Formicidae. In my hand I hold a canister full of ant killing chemicals. I insert a tube into the egg filled tunnel and watch as the nearby ants erupt into a frenzy. Have they never known fear until now?”

“I press the nozzle on the canister and foam instantly fills the hole. The ants bath in it and some appear ecstatic; others are clearly aware that this stuff is dangerous. I walk away. When I return in an hour, everything is dead. The nest is no more than small ball of dirt and I kick it. The nest breaks open and all that I can see are thousands and thousands of still ants. I decide to zoom in for a closer look. One ant seems different than the others. I stare at this creature for a long time. It is dead, but it is elegantly dead. It is the queen ant. Her abdomen is much larger and shinier. On her back I can see the remnants of what used to be wings.”

“My father once told me that all queen ants are born angels.”

Bradbury nodded. “Continue with the memory.”

“I am distraught,” I continued. “I run back into the house and pull a pair of tweezers from the medicine cabinet. I take one of my sky-blue pills just to keep the anxiety at a moderate high. I return to the ant nest and I bend down and with the tip of my tweezers I gently pick up one of the small eggs. I try my best not to pop it like a milk bubble. I find a leaf and drop the egg onto it and carry it inside. It looks like the smallest spring roll ever.”

“I place it on the table and I google: Taking Care of an Ant Egg. An hour later my ant egg is covered in a pinch of dirt and resting inside the shoebox that once contained my Ralph Lauren Crocodile Loafers.”

“I go into the bedroom and find my girlfriend, Lili. She is sitting on the bed watching a show where psychotherapists go and get therapy from other psychotherapists. She says it is the most intense mind-bath you can take. I just play with my goatee and let out a silent fart. We are still not at the point in our relationship where I can openly fart in front of her. I pretend to scratch my back and wave the fart away. I count to three then jump onto the bed and lay next to her.”

“Tell me of the conversation with Lili,” Bradbury said. His tongue was licking his thumb.

“What do you think of ants?” I ask Lili.
“Ants?…or aunts?”
“Ants like the bug.”
“I don’t know,” she says turning back to her show. “They’re icky. Seeing a bunch of ants makes my skin crawl.”
“Icky. Yeah. What about just one ant?”
“Oh I suppose one ant is fine,” she says.
“One baby ant,” I say.
“One baby ant, what?”
“What do you think?”
She turns to me and looks into my eyes. I peer into her eyes looking for my next story.
“I don’t know, I think it would be cute. Okay? Can I get back to my show, they’re just about to start the Therapy-Showdown segment.”
“Alright,” I say. I kiss her on her freckled little forehead and return to the kitchen.

“And what happens next?” asked Bradbury.

“I sit for a long time trying to think what to do. Should I rescue more eggs? Should I have some kind of mass funeral? Should I announce an apology to the back yard insects? Everything seems too foolish, so instead I sing Pixies songs to the box, hoping to sooth the ant. The ant will never know what fate befell its kingdom. It will never know that I am both its father and harbinger of orphanhood.”

“Sing me one of your Pixies songs,” Bradbury said.
“Which one?” I asked.
“The one that you feel was most effective.”

“In a place they say is dead,” I sang. “in a lake that’s like an ocean, I count about a billion head, all the time there’s a motion.  Palace of Brine, Palace of Brine.”

“You know that egg will never hatch,” Bradbury told me.

***
So our time together ended and my debit did not get approved as he swiped the cost of my session.
“What did you do?” asked Lili.
“I promised to write him into one of my stories,” I said.
“Do you ever write me into any of your stories?”
“I write you into everything,” I said. “You’re the real queen ant.”

in my childhood, mom imparted this to me:
be careful where you put your happiness.
growing up i thought she was right because
whenever some horrid event befell me
i thought about her adage, & i moved my
happiness somewhere else: a safer place.

that used to be the way i thought till i started
getting faux introspective & listening to a lot
of blues a month after almost dying violently…

mortal agony congealed these recollections to my cozy heart
the way an oven might bond strawberries-that have wandered off
from the yawning clam of the pie crust-to the searing prison of its
sooty, black walls that glower their warmth out of gassed orifices:

the car that crushed around my car that squirted my body out of
the jagged passenger door. a ballast descended from the basket
of my diaphragm as my stomach rose into my chest: a holy ascent.
i fully appreciated the word fuck when death chimed through my
sensory register, and passing out felt easy with this cute profanity
gently lulling me into a fathomless unconscious of incarnate shadow.

waking to myself as an odd, butchered form resembling some promotional
product birthed by the meat packing industry that floundered upon advert,
i saw the staples skipping, rippling, and shining down my abdomen like an
archaic form of jewelry used to mark the damned under sumptuary laws.
i lept inside myself: i packed all of my most valuable possessions in that car!
i remembered i am a born american. i lamented objects, not my luscious flesh.
with all of the damaged goods lost, i was left with only a shellfish remnant of me.

when i stood with bones shattered, and my ribs
a hillock abloom with wildflower-like contusions
i felt that my mother told the truth, but she had
been far luckier with her wisdom than I’d been.
accepting i fell short, i edited her words selfishly.

here goes: when you place
your happiness somewhere,
do it with incredible frugality
because you’ll pay a fine for
littering no matter what; be
glad your choice is what kind.

out of some internalization of a stereotypical reaction, i ‘ll probably call the fine too steep,
but really i won’t tinkle out the word fuck like a tiny bell because when i die i plan to sleep.

“Working Memory” is one of three poems to appear in Metazen this week. kj has a fine dog, named mr. bear. he loves his goldfish crackers. he has work forthcoming in yellow mama, and grey sparrow press. one day he plans on buying a lifetime supply of cashews. until then, he just wants compliments, tacky photos, and compromising info. sent to the following email: khays45@gmail.com.

The average man in North America owns six point two pairs of pants. Andrew had four, maybe four and a half; He had just ripped the crotch out of his second-string jeans, so he wasn’t sure if they counted anymore.

This put him significantly below average, which worried him. It also spurred him to go to value village and buy three pairs of pants, putting him just above the North American average. Then he started wondering about what the European average was. Those Europeans are so very enlightened. Their men probably have ten or more pairs of pants.

This meant another trip to value village, and three more pairs of pants, bringing him up to ten, possibly ten and a half pairs. This was well above the North American average, and right around what he assumed the European average was. He assumed this would probably put him pretty high on the worldwide average. A lot of people probably only have three or four pairs of pants, maybe less, maybe none.

Then one day a travel show came on the television, showing Italy. Panning shots of streets full of immaculately dressed Italian men and women. He then realized that Italians were almost certainly higher then the European average, even as high as fifteen pairs (you know how metrosexual those Italians can be). Although he knew he was certainly not metrosexual, he was at least as good as any Italian man, and therefore should not have any less pairs of pants.

Again he found himself in Value Village, this time taking no care or discretion in picking out the pants, simply taking the first five pairs he found on the rack. Andrew didn’t think it would really matter, he hadn’t worn any of the other pairs he had bought either. As far as he was concerned, they still counted though. That was the beauty of pants from Value Village; they were already broken in. So if anyone ever checked, they would say “Yep, these pants sure have been worn, this guy is no liar.” Andrew would chuckle to himself, knowing that he had fooled those silly Italians.

Several months later the most profound moment of Andrew Harvey’s life came in the form of a MTV cribs episode featuring a rapper named Master P. In his house he had a massive walk-in closet, stuffed full of clothes. Andrew tried to count the mind-boggling amount of pants as the camera panned by, showing his enormous worth.

He decided there had to be at least one hundred pairs of pants there, maybe more. Andrew knew this guy was no better then him either. I mean seriously, he has a letter for a name.

So thus began the quest which would consume the rest of Andrew Harvey’s life. He was buying pants left and right, spending every spare dollar on pants, the costs starting to add up, even at Value Village prices. He briefly contemplated trying to work out a scheme to get paid in pants, but scrubbed the plan after wondering how taxation would work, and knowing he couldn’t stand to see his hard-earned pants go to the government like that.

Andrew Harvey is a Folk Artist, Off-Campus Housing Guru, Humourist and writer living in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Andrew was raised on the hard streets of Berwick, NS (pop. 3000), and recieved a degree in History from St. FX university in 2005. In 2006, after a year abroad, The inexplicable allure of the rocky shores of Newfoundland, and the promise of Cod so thick in the waters that they slow the progress of ships, and can be taken into the boat by hanging a basket over the side, brought Andrew to Newfoundland. After the realization of the state of the Cod fishery, he decided to stay anyhow.
Andrew can now be found in downtown St. John’s, eagerly awaiting the revolution.

Painters’ Exhalations 420
—after Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park No. 54

The eyes nod an of course
answering
quotidian query of
distance drawing
conjured invitation.
Welcomed.

Horizon’s arms dangling
a crooked concept
call toward the multilayered                     dispensation
gathering
a tribute to desensitized Ra’s allegorical
worship.
This
Summer presentation conjures naked wants
half-clothed personas
leaving physical
effort
upon dissipation within the waves’
book closing motion

ankle’s deepened need
of sipping resolution.

Painters’ Exhalations 421
—after Laddie John Dill’s Untitled

We draw ourselves to contours,

(near similar to the child searching a mother’s esoteric touch)
smile
toward lover’s reputation of
embracing eyes of intertwining
species.
Follow shadows’ fortune       follow after hiding dislocates
the mind’s various interpretational misses.

The slope
occurs most
within
reliance, self and need of another’s hope

angling age frequency causational
freedom into life of the sliding
ways.

Painters’ Exhalations 422
—after Christopher Dodds’s Wester Virginia Vista

Night now bathed, scalp
bandaged.
Her
elongated, snail shell-curved
ebony
strands
lie limp atop shoulders of agitated
stone.  Grains of neighborhood
gallant neoteric glares
fashioned of
broken glass echoes from light
thrown into a distance of anonymous
absence.

Once, stars compared to flame, and now
a comparison added of
death
among the walking thin,
highlighting such a name of horizon
whose goals adhere to the finger pointing
watchers
well aware within scoped spectrum,
sedentary landscape.

Painters’ Exhalations 423
—after Stephen Duren’s Untitled

She is the grass of repetitious calling.  Shadow
home, infinite
bladed nest
for the swallowing winged most
elevated strolls.  Corners
bend into a brand of curve, of
the feminine shape coaxing
male inhibition  (s).  Regardless
of the swollen skull metaphors
hang gliding near the burgeoned
want for placid retribution,
death’s boomerang arrives
most willingly as escape exits
prior to the philosophy of time
moving within proper
jurisdiction.

Painters’ Exhalations 424
—after Frank Ettenberg’s Starters

The tumbling butterfly
tangled
side-to-side parallel with
prophesied approach
of magnified investigation.
Prior
pulling on mosaic wings, hand-wind
puppeteer of the partial
causation-link
murder of the frightened
flying physique.
As in the poetry of nonchalance,
the fashionable net
hangs
throwing pause toward any form of
natural inclination,
reading to the shadow’s anorexia
misery is the fulfilling prose
empty in the meaning of interrogated
sanity.

Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate
for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He
edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com,
an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press,
differentiapress.blogspot.com, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of
experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored ten collections of
poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008),
Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), and r
(please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical
studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation
for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website,
www.felinosoriano.com.

If you are a fiction writer, press one. If you are a non-fiction writer, press two.
If you write poems, press one. If you write prose, press two.
If you write short stories, press one. If you write longer works of fiction, press two. If you are a screenplay writer, press three.
If you are suffering from writer’s block, press one. If you are struggling to find the right word, press two. If you are suffering from the general ennui caused by your own fiction, press three.
Please hold while we transfer your call.

…

“Hello, how may I help you,” says the woman with the thick Hindi accent.
“Yes, I uh- I’m just calling about…well I’m having a writing crisis and I thought you could help,” I say.
“Of course we can sir, could you please tell me what is the problem?”
The woman’s voice is barely understandable. I contemplate hanging up, but the idea of being alone again fills me with despair. I clutch the receiver.
“Yes, well I haven’t written anything in three days.”
“Ah, so you have writer’s block then, let me transfer your call to the appropriate representative-”
“No, no, I don’t have writer’s block, it’s not that. I just can’t seem to put what I want to say down on paper.”
“I see. So you have the ideas in your head, you are just struggling to place them into a logical order.”
“Kind of. Yeah.”
“Have you tried brainstorming your ideas? Rewriting sentences over and over again until you feel they are perfect?”
“Well I just don’t have a lot of patience for that thing.”
“I suggest you find some patience then, sir.”
Though the woman called me sir, she begins to sound eerily like my own mother. I find myself flattening my hair and straightening my posture as the Hindi lady speaks. Lord knows my mother doesn’t like it when I slouch with a cowlick.
“Alright, I suppose I could try that.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with, sir?”
“Well, I guess I’m looking for a way to make my writing a bit more accessible. What I’m finding is that people aren’t really that jazzed about the depressing stuff.”
“Are you yourself depressed?” she asks.
“I…uh, I don’t know,” I say.
“Surely you know whether you are depressed or not, I mean are you suffering bouts of despair, lack of energy, a loss of motivation? Do you chronically masturbate or weep unexpectedly? Do you sit in silence for long moments recounting all of your regrets in life? Is there something you cannot get over?”
I feel as if I have been hit with a magazine of bullets. I touch my chest and though there is no blood, there is an intense pressure.
“I’m a little depressed,” I say.
“Maybe you should exercise?”
“Alright.”
“And I imagine you prescribe to a diet with a fair amount of grease, sir?”
“Yes.”
“I would discontinue with the grease. Buy some cucumbers. Do a few push-ups.”
“Alright.”
“Are you a heavy, medium or light drinker?” she asks.
“I suppose medium?”
“So six drinks a week?”
“Alright, heavy.”
“May I suggest trying to become a medium?”
“You may,” I say nodding.
“When is the last time you purchased a toy sir?”
“A toy?”
“Yes, a toy. Like a plastic gun or an action figure or a yo-yo?”
“Maybe thirty years ago,” I say.
“I recommend you go out and buy yourself a nice toy. Come home and play with it, you’ll feel very nice.”
“Okay.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with sir?” she asks.
“No…” I say and the million questions on my tongue resist a move.
“Thank you for calling the Writers In Crisis Hot-line, it was my pleasure to help you, have a nice day.”
“You-” the line clicks and goes dead, “too,” I say.

…

I decide to walk to the store. About halfway there a terrible rain falls and thousands of hail-stones fall on me. It is the coldest and worst rain I have ever felt. I enter the store and walk directly to the toy section. There are about half a dozen aisles loaded with hoola-hoops, plastic cars, board games and toy figurines. I wander through the sections over and over and find nothing interests me. On my fifth pass through the aisles, I realize there is one section I have been avoiding- the pink aisle. The girl aisle. I walk down it and immediately start inventing a story in my head about having a daughter who is sick, just in case anyone asks why a dirty, wet, unshaven and deoderantless man is perusing the Polly Pockets.

The Barbie dolls are all superficial. They come with cell phones and expensive purses and I imagine if I took them home I would just strip them naked and weep for an hour at their lack of nipples. The Bratz dolls have oversized heads and eerie cat-eyes that make them look demonic. I start to leave.

It is at the end of the aisle, just in the bottom corner that I find an upturned box. It isn’t pink or sparkled, it is black. I pick it up and I am confronted with a red-headed doll. She has green eyes and a small, sad little face. She is almost too skinny, but elegant in her own way. An unperturbed frown is etched onto her pale little face and she doesn’t look happy to be a doll at all. She looks as if she is trapped forever in a little helpless plastic posture. Her arms are half twisted and her left knee has a tiny red bruise on it. She is wearing a little black skirt, nothing fancy and the only accessory she comes with is a purple kite.

“I could never make this fly,” I say.

The doll’s name is Lili, and I take her and her box into my arms and head to the checkout.
“Do you like stories, Lili?”

STILL LIFE WITH FIREARMS

It would be peaceful here
if it weren’t for the crucified thieves
writhing in the background.
A waiter with the red face of a seraph
sidles up and offers to show me to a table.
I hurry away as if I had somewhere to go.
Others wait at home with their belongings.
The leaves stir, suddenly full of plans.
I walk until I’m lost. Later,
insects will fly gaily around the light
while I undress for bed in weary silence,
like an obscure municipal official
just returned from the famine zone.

THE MACHINERY OF FORGETTING FEARS

In the ghetto of my heart
birds fly backwards
an old rabbi claws at the knots
in his tangled beard and as in
a scratchy black-and-white filmstrip
the boy from the orphanage
seeks the shelter of his parents’ bed
and if you’re awake like him
you can hear the room
being lit by heat lightning
also the murderer half-hidden
behind the pitted stone pillar
swear to passers-by he isn’t there

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University
of New York at New Paltz, is the author of eight poetry
chapbooks. He has been nominated three times for a
Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of the Net
anthology. His first full-length book of poetry, Lovesick,
is forthcoming from The Poetry Press of Press Americana.

1. I am allergic to peanuts, cats, pollen, and ukuleles.
2. My right leg is slightly longer than the left and to compensate I hollow out one shoe.
3. As a child, I wandered off from my parents in a mall and was not found for three days and therefore still find it impossible to “Stick with the group.”
4. I am a born leader despite the fact that my sense of direction is faulty at best.
5. I’m given to singing jingles and repeating limericks at precious moments, such as during the reciting of grace or wedding vows.
6. There once was a sailor named Jane, who glued both her hands to a plane. (I like to be prepared.)
7. I think shillelagh is a Hawaiian delicacy and I order it in Persian bistros.
8. I interchange “Persian” and “Parisian,” just to keep you guessing.
9. My love of roller coasters is surpassed in magnitude only by my propensity to vomit when I but see one—even in my mind’s eye.
10. Children adore me so much they cannot withstand more than 30 seconds in my presence.
11. I am an avid organic gardener and find pest-controlling insects magically delicious.
12. I dream only in flavors.
13. A tennis injury I sustained in college left me with a hole in my stomach that allows me to consume insane quantities of food, which I digest, python-like, over several days.
14. I have caused the spontaneous evolution of three species—that I know of.
15. Until a reliable, safe, and affordable over-the-counter G-force motion-sickness prophylactic is available, I am a staunch opponent of intergalactic travel.
16. This probably goes without saying, but I can fly.
17. You can book me for weddings, birthdays, graduations, bar mitzvahs, and any occasion when a tampon alone isn’t quite right.
18. If you really want to hurt me, if you really want to make me cry, be prepared to pay the price.
19. I can dance, if I want to.
20. Technology does not scare me—per se—but it does unnerve the people who live in my iPod.
21. I’m a people-person, except with people I don’t know.
22. Clowns both scare and excite me, so I keep them around the house.
23. I reinvented the tricycle.
24. I am a squirrel whisperer, but sometimes I have to yell.
25. If you’d like to know more, I’ve published a tell-all book that gives the back-story to these and more of my amazing qualities. I hope you can, as I do, read the language of the beings of the Andromeda Galaxy.
26. I am so glad you’re finally here.

San Francisco literary artist judy b. is the author of the fiction collection Stories for Airports. She is also a jazz-trained vocalist and an excellent vegetarian cook. She tweets microfictions (@jbonze), writes flash fiction and short stories, and is finishing a novel and a screenplay. You can find her on the Web at OnzeProductions.com and on Facebook at http://facebook.com/judyb.11.